Ian McEwan's slender last novel, Amsterdam, won the Booker Prize in 1998, an award which many felt did little credit either to the prize or to McEwan.

Brevity and an extreme formal patness conspired to give the book a flimsy feel.

Three years on, however, McEwan has produced a novel which, in its richness of detail, its gravitas and its length, is mahogany to the balsa wood of Amsterdam. Among the many implications of Atonement's fertile title is that it makes up for the insubstantialities of its predecessor.

The novel is divided into three parts. The first section, which spans only twenty-four hours of narrative time, takes place during the torpid summer of 1935. The central section cuts between France and London during the days of the Dunkirk retreat in 1940, and includes some superb re-creations of wartime, both on the strafed roads around Dunkirk and in the wards of St Thomas's Hospital, where a flock of novice nurses has to treat the incoming wounded. Latter-day London is the setting for the short final section, in which McEwan pulls a trick on the reader of such magnitude that one is almost obliged to read the book again in the light of it.

Of love, war and guilt

Atonement, the big-screen version of Ian McEwan’s wartime epic, is being hailed as the best British film for years

Background

• Where truth and fiction meet

• Atonement by Ian McEwan

• The TLS on Atonement

• Atonement by Ian McEwan

• Ken Russell on the adaptation trap

Related Internet Links

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The novel opens on the hottest day of 1935, in the Surrey country house of the Tallises, an upper-middle-class Home Counties family. Supine in the master bedroom is Mrs Tallis, a neurasthenic matriarch disabled by migraine. Mr Tallis, a civil servant who has taken to staying on suspiciously late at the office, is absent. Cecilia, the eldest daughter, who has just returned from Cambridge with a third-class degree, is mooning about the hot house and pondering her future. Her thirteen-year-old sister, Briony, is hard at work writing a play with which to welcome back her elder brother, Leon, due to arrive at the house that evening. Full of belief in her own talent as a writer, but unsure of how others regard her, Briony is dangerously obsessed with becoming both a novelist and an adult. Into this strangely unsupervised world come Leon Tallis and his friend Paul, a chocolate mogul, as well as two nine-year-old twins and their elder sister, temporary refugees from a divorce.

Finally, there is Robbie, a friend of the family and Cecilia's peer, who is also just back from Cambridge, having taken the finest first of his year.

McEwan has often been praised for the menace of his writing; for his ability to instil an unease in the reader which is simultaneously discomfiting and mesmeric. This has partly to do with the reputation for the gruesome which he cultivated during the 1970s, and which has lingered about him ever since. One opened McEwan's early books safe in the knowledge that something atrocious would occur.

While the explicit morbidity of, say, In Between the Sheets (1977) or The Cement Garden (1978), has receded in his more recent work, the air of imminent calamity remains. This is powerfully the case in the opening part of Atonement. The claustrophobic solstice heat, and the brittle interactions of the characters, are eloquent of disaster. Even the landscape seems to register threat: the grass in the garden is "already stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer". And yet for nearly 150 brooding pages, nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes.

McEwan continues to describe, with characteristic limpidity, the house and the dynamics of its inhabitants. His patience is doubly effective, for it generates not only an authentic environment in which the tragedy can eventually unfurl, but also an ever-burgeoning sense of menace.

It would devastate the novel's effect to reveal what does in fact occur. It is, however, permiss-ible to say that a single event triggers a disastrous chain reaction, and that the chief cause of that disaster is Briony. "Briony's crime", as it becomes known, consists of an error of judgment. In the garden of the house, at night, she witnesses an event which is itself awful. Convinced that she has understood what occurred and that she has identified those involved, she acts on that conviction with appalling consequences.

McEwan has long been interested in mapping the shadowy cusp between childhood and adulthood, and he has written several dark variants on the Bildungsroman, including The Child in Time (1987), which dealt with the recession of an adult back into infancy - the loss of experience instead of innocence. This same question of "growing up" preoccupies him here, and the focus for his examination is Briony. Why does she make her mistake, and why does she stick by her story?

It is partly, McEwan implies, because she has the quasi-sadistic desire of any child to attain agency in the adult world: she yearns "to dispel her insignificance". But the more specific cause of her error is her belief that the plots of the human relationships she witnesses ought to correspond to the plots of the childish stories which she reads and writes - that life ought to imitate art. In particular, Briony believes that she, like the heroines of her plays and stories, ought to have not a gradated growing up, but a single turning point of immense significance: an epiphany which vaults her automatically into the adult world.

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