The Imagination of Disaster (Page 3)

But the pièce de résistance of clashing perceptions in McEwan is Atonement, a tale about a vain little girl named Briony with an ambitious imagination, who sends the wrong man to jail based on her stubborn, frightened, indignant misperception of who did what to whom. In the novel's final pages, the narrator discloses that she is that same little girl, now an elderly professional writer. Yet the wonder of Atonement is that it is not self-referential; it is not "literary" in the slightest way. Briony's retelling of the events she caused does not amount to the postmodern argument of an "unreliable narrator" (a k a "invitation to a nap"). It is an instance of a woman deceiving other people because she is still selfishly deceiving herself.

Briony wrote her story as an "atonement" for the pain she caused, but her novel is really the same assertion of ego that caused all the pain in the first place. The only fact that she changed in her tale, she tells us, is the fate of its two lovers, her older sister and the man the young Briony wrongly accused of raping their cousin. The narrator reunites them at the end of Atonement when, in actuality, they died young, before they could marry and make a life together. You believe the older Briony because she has no reason to lie, now that she is nearing the end of her life. Yet her fabrication of a happy ending is also a sort of trick. By admitting that she lied about the couple's fate at the end, she is implying that in life, and in honest art, there are no happy endings--serious, honest novels aren't written as therapeutic "atonements" to clear the conscience of their authors. This is true, but if human existence affords no happy endings, then the tragedy Briony created is less her fault than an inevitable outcome. Her revelation that the couple died young turns her "atonement" into self-exculpation.

But Briony has still produced a moral achievement. She has sympathetically inhabited the lives of other people. Describing her aspiring young literary self, the older narrator has the girl overheatedly anticipate that as a novelist she will enjoy "the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains.... It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you."

Briony is right; life is too confusing, too compounded by misunderstanding to be a simple matter of Good vs. Bad. But it is self-serving for Briony, who once caused tragic confusion--who once did something clearly wrong--to embrace moral ambiguity. The book is at once an act of redemption--Briony has opened herself up to the lives of other people--and a disingenuous alibi, since she produces more confusion by telling another lie. In its restrained portrayal of truth, goodness and love as relative and illusory, yet also thickly, concretely, consequentially real--two simultaneously defining qualities--Atonement crystallizes McEwan's themes.

The semisubjective mist of a world half-created by projecting egos; the haze of illusions so necessary that they become stubborn realities, only to vanish suddenly; the fact of impermanence as a permanent condition, which is an enlightening truth revealed only in moments of sheer terror--this is McEwan's primal matter. Perhaps this is why, more and more, he brings a scientific perspective into his books. Science seems to offer him an Archimedean point from which to view, with varying degrees of irony, the helter-skelter human sagas created by the phantasms of mind and emotion. In fact, McEwan is the only serious novelist today who can convincingly integrate science into his work. But science, for all its hard objectivity, only brings the mystery of subjectivity into sharper view. As Henry muses to himself:

Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, the brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

Saturday is a commentary on how politics gets invented from the stuff of emotion the way mind is created out of the brain. Read (and written) in the light of events following the Iraq invasion, this carefully ambiguous tale about the "brightly wrought illusion" of unstable selves amounts to a cool, temperate, humane protest against belligerent certainty. Indeed, ambiguity is inscribed in the novel's very title. Saturday is the holiest day of the week for some people and just an ordinary day for others, a crucial discrepancy in a book haunted by religious conflict.

Henry's consciousness is haunted by his awareness of the mind's inherent instability, its mutability and fragility. His mother has Alzheimer's and her identity has disintegrated. Reading a biography of Darwin that his daughter Daisy gave him as a gift, Henry is unsettled by the fact of mortality; he is struck "by how easily an existence, its ambitions, networks of family and friends, all its cherished stuff, solidly possessed, could so entirely vanish." Recalling the day they cleared out his mother's house after taking her to a nursing home, he remembers thinking at the time that "her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked." You could say that this is a state of mind imported into our lives by the attacks on 9/11. But in the context of McEwan's world, Henry's obsessions are also the universal mental soil--the comfortable and technologically protected yet, for that very reason, open and vulnerable Western mind--that has allowed 9/11 to provide moral, political and intellectual pretexts out of all proportion to the events of that day.

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