Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001)

Abstract

Ian McEwan’s early fiction was almost totally absorbed with the tortuous workings of the inner self and showed virtually no interest in the world beyond. In his first novel, The Cement Garden (1978) the only reference to public affairs at the time comes in a casual reference to some overflowing dustbins (caused by the dustmen’s strike of 1975): “We thought there might have been a strike but we had heard nothing” (135). Otherwise the novel confines itself to an isolated house and garden and to the equally enclosed minds of the children living there after their parents’ deaths. The same concentration on the inner self is true of his first two collections of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets, and Other Stories (1978) and of his second novel, The Comfort of Strangers (1981). All four books gave clinically detached descriptions of the sexual and social aberrations of adolescent characters whose voices offered him at the time “a certain kind of rhetorical freedom” (Adolescence and After 526). Compare this early fiction to McEwan’s first two novels of the twenty first century. Atonement (2001) focuses on a crucial period of English history between 1935 and 1940 and ranges from an upper class household in prewar southern England to the retreat of the British army to Dunkirk and to a wartime London hospital, ending with a coda in 1999.