They become aware, on this sultry day, of some kind of current - animosity? irreconcilable attraction? - passing between them. The requisite propulsion is provided by the unexpected intrusion, as it were, of two other novelists from the interwar years.Ĭecilia, the eldest daughter of the family in whose house we are imaginatively lodged, was at Cambridge with Robbie, the son of the Tallises' cleaning lady, whose education was funded by Cecilia's father. The book later contains a critique of its own early pages - or at least of the draft from which they derive - in the guise of a letter from Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon, who advises that 'such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement'. The technique is not stream of consciousness so much as 'a slow drift of association', 'the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen'. Various characters come and go but the novel, at this point, seems populated mainly by its literary influences.

The language used to distil the scene - a gathering of the Tallis family at their country house on a sweltering day in 1935 - serves also as a wash that partially obscures it. Even so, the pallid qualifiers and disposable adverbs (a 'gently rocking' sheet of water, the 'coyly drooping' head of a nettle) come as a surprise.

Unlike Martin Amis, say, or Salman Rushdie, McEwan is an invisible rather than a flamboyant stylist. One longs for a cinematic clarity and concentration of dialogue and action, but such interludes dissolve before our - and the participants' - eyes. Instead of the expected sharpness of focus, the first 70 or so pages are a lengthy summary of shifting impressions. The opening is almost perversely ungripping. McEwan is, in other words, a thoroughly traditional original.Ītonement does not feel, at first, like a book by McEwan. This is why the themes of the novels (with the exception of the enjoyably forgettable Amsterdam ) linger and resonate beyond the impeccable neatness of their arrangement. Moral ambiguity and doubt are thereby enhanced - rather than resolved - by clarity of presentation. Needless to say, the more disturbing or skewed that reality (in the early stories and novels, most obviously), the more finely McEwan attunes his readers to it. The novels' psychological acuity derives, always, from their fidelity to a precisely delineated reality.

2001 ian mcewan novel