THE LIES OF NOVELISTS.

Atonement
Ian McEwan
Doubleday, $26, 351 pp.

English writer Ian McEwan has built his house of fiction in traditional patterns, seemingly avoiding forms of postmodern construction. In his novels, stories, and plays, McEwan has distinguished himself with ease of style, acute rendering of character, and remarkable images. His unnerving fictional worlds indulge in fatal masochistic tastes: a corpse in concrete in the cellar, a spectral hound baying evil beyond the garden, or the ghost of a lost child calling out for return. His latest novel, Atonement, is no exception. A challenging and brilliant work, it rewards careful attention to the writer's art.

Atonement presents itself as realistic fiction, yet begins with an epigraph from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey warning us that the young heroine is intent on misperception. Wealthy, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis is blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a vivid imagination, seeing gothic horrors in apparent commonplaces. The novel takes up the nocturnal crime she commits in the garden of her English country home after the hottest day in the summer of 1935.

How a trivial dinner party spikes to crisis is the tease. In her attempts to put on a play she has written, Briony casts an innocent family friend as child rapist. This, McEwan is at pains to elaborate, is initially done without malice; but increasingly and self-consciously, it becomes an enveloping fabrication that must be maintained for consistency's sake.

McEwan narrates from a variety of perspectives and points in time. The reader is told there is a crime to be committed, and that in the future characters will look back on the occasion as the most significant in their lives. The act, the accusation, and the police procedural all happen off stage. The narrative offers us retrospection and introspection, a looking-back on what Briony has done. Seen in the book's concluding third part as an elderly, successful novelist, Briony has a sense of audience that forces her to consider her reader's expectation--be it novel or statement sworn in evidence to the police. If she is to atone, it will be through her writing. The second of the novel's three parts, meanwhile, offers fictional rebuttal of the false accusation, as the victim of Briony's crime goes on to distinguish himself in the British Expeditionary Force's retreat to Dunkirk. As impressive an evocation of World War II as one would wish to read, this section adds a remarkable new dimension to McEwan's range.

Atonement repeatedly emphasizes the adolescent protagonist's will to control her life. In McEwan's hands, the intention and the act of the crime come from an imaginative impulse inextricably linked with the novelist's art. For Briony this is both a projection of what she wishes to be in the future (as a child when she composes her future self) and an atonement for what she did in the past. What is realistic about the novel is constantly undercut by our sense of a "made" fictional world elaborately constructed by the protagonist/narrator Briony. As a result, we enter McEwan's house of fiction very much on the author's terms. As host, McEwan presents himself as guilty of the crime committed by his character, conflating fact and fiction, pushing us to consider the relationship between artistic imagination and truth of life. The careful structuring of the work calls attention to its artifice and reminds us of two alternate assertions about what art does: Keats's Romantic assurance that artistic beauty is truth and Auden's disclaimer that poetry makes nothing happen. This novel shows how such seemingly contradictory statements can both be true at once. Atonement is a most impressive book, one that may indeed be McEwan's finest achievement.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.