OF A GOLDEN AGE

I had a great analogy in mind to open my review of Ian McEwan’s demi-epic Atonement, but it was late last night right before bed and I’ve forgotten. I’m sure it was about a time someone misunderstood or made a halting error, because that’s the primary thread running through the book: How the appearance of an event or an action can sometimes, especially when taken out of context, contradict its true significance. A stolen moment glanced from the wrong angle can look violent instead of loving, just as the wrong few seconds of an impassioned description of your day can lead a passerby to believe you’re unhappy with your life.

This review is going to contain some spoilers, both of the book and the movie, which it turns out are thankfully similar.

McEwan opens with the mind of Briony Tallis, an annoying, self-involved girl whose powerful mind submerses her into her imagined life as a writer. It’s clear that she has thoughts she believes are deep, and as she moves through her life and has thought processes about her family and those around her, it’s also clear she has deep misunderstandings about how the world works. How could she not? Her two siblings are grown and her parents are mentally or physically absent. Briony decides to be important:

This was the challenge shew as putting to existence — she would not stir, not for dinner, not even for her mother calling her in. She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.

Briony looks at everyone in her life critically as she misinterprets events, and she creates terrible consequences for her sister Cecilia and their family friend Robbie. At some point, Briony reflects to herself that she may now be hated by an adult instead of by other children. She remarks that a child’s hatred is constant, ever-changing, and meaningless, and she has in fact acted on her own caprices and ruined someone’s life.

McEwan reflects on changing feelings, of how we each carry all of our previous selves with us and must explain them to people. Cecilia and Robbie hesitate to be in love because each remembers the other from childhood, each knows the other’s circumstances for better or worse. Adult Briony must reconcile the devastation she created as an adolescent, when she had just enough skills to know how to make herself a believable witness and spin a convincing story, to connive in order to harm another person even if she felt it was the morally just action.

I loved this book, even though I had the major plot points in mind from having seen the movie. McEwan is a beautiful writer with a particular knack, in this book at least, for capturing how contradictory it feels to be inside a young adult’s brain: To feel something and know it is unreasonable and feel it all the more; to see what happens and convince yourself it is all about you no matter what, because self-consciousness can become a sickness under the wrong circumstances.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

no responses