alone before it won the National Books Critics Circle Award in 2003. twenty years ago, with a quarter million copies going into print in the U.S.

Atonement became one of the first additions to the 21st-century canon after its publication in the U.K. It’s a feat of pastiche that transcends pastiche: It preserves the intoxication of narrative fiction while admitting that it’s farce.Ĭritics and book buyers agreed it was a masterpiece. In between is a plot borne of Austen and Richardson that sweeps through the long 19th century of realist sagas, wiggles into Modernism, and ends on a postmodern questioning of the worth of the novel itself. It’s a book about misinterpretations that McEwan expects to be misinterpreted until its very last pages, when we find out that the entire book we’ve just read is the sixth draft of a novel by a much-older, quite successful Briony, making her both the unreliable narrator and the unreliable author. But Atonement has the power to send you scurrying back to its first pages once you finish, ready to play whack-a-mole with its wiggly circularity. It’s easy to forget the beginning of a novel that became famous, in part, for its tablecloth-pulling ending. She’s also “designed the posters, programs, and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper.” Every aspect of production of the seven-page drama, “written by her in a two-day tempest of composition,” fiercely belongs to her, and McEwan hovers over her labors like God dictating the Genesis story. Briony Tallis, 13 years old and enthralled by the power of storytelling (“you had only to write it down and you could have the world”) has written a little play for her family. Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement opens with a description of what it’s like to invent a world. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture Photo by Penguin RandomHouse Ian McEwan on the cover of his 2001 book.

2001 ian mcewan novel