Writer Ian McEwan tackles ideas of truth in Atonement

The mechanics of repentance are more nuanced than might appear on the surface. How can it be carried out? Only by confessing and asking forgiveness? Or can an obvious shift in priorities or character signify repentance in and of itself? These are the questions Ian McEwan's characters tackle in Atonement, a war-time British novel that has rapidly become a national bestseller.

The book begins with an introduction to the Tallis family, specifically the young Briony. A precocious young girl, in the first pages of the novel Briony awakens to her ability to spin the events and characters around her into stories of her own hyper-imaginative creation. These stories protect her from the banality of country summer life, but ultimately lead her to misconstrue a set of events so drastically that her false accusations ruin the life of a close family friend, Robbie. Robbie is sent to prison and later to war, and most significantly kept from marrying Briony's older sister Cecilia. The consequences for Briony turn out to be equally traumatic. Having realized years later the awful mistake she made as an excitable girl, unversed in the ways of the world, she becomes a nurse in order to save the lives of hundreds of soldiers -- hoping to see Robbie in every one of them.

McEwan's characters develop naturally over several decades, their lives closely intertwined with British history from the 1930s onward. McEwan based the historical aspects of the novel on letters he found in the British War Museum, which explains not only his factual accuracy but also his sensitivity to language and citizens' attitudes toward the war.

His diction is impeccable; never have I read a novel in which I routinely understood the author's precise nuances. I was particularly impressed with this attention to detail when described Briony's peculiar way of thinking as a "natural-born writer." McEwan brought us into the mind of the writer and then wrote about it -- and I bought into it entirely.

I also appreciated his perceptive descriptions of women's emotions in the novel as being more than their concerns for the objects of their affection. Though each female character was clearly concerned with what happened to Robbie, the author addresses each character from the point of view of a person with life-long ambitions and combines this with her motives for helping Robbie with them. The result is a web of haunting realism -- three distinct people with three distinct ways of seeing the same situation, all coming gradually to view each other truthfully but never, human as they are, coming to see "the truth". Truth only exists, as McEwan makes us understand, in the eyes of the creator. Another will exist in the eyes of the beholder.

But as tantalizing as this realization is, and as profound a writer as McEwan is--I felt toward the closing chapters that I was still waiting to really get to know the characters. He seems fascinated, as I was, by how different human points of view overlap and cause misunderstandings that never get resolved. But a story is, after all, is just that: a story. I wanted to be rewarded with something larger for following each character through the dense jungles of his own psyche; I wanted to see, at the very least, the larger view of what I had been climbing through all this time. But perhaps that is his overarching point -- the truth is never a single larger picture, but the culmination of whatever pieces you are fortunate enough to pick up along the way.