Joe Wright, 2007
“Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.”
~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957
Writing is indeed a strange way to occupy one’s time. It often requires a point, some raison d’etre to retreat to when the going gets ruff (sing it!). In Atonement - an enormously moving and surprisingly esoteric rumination on, ultimately, the nature of meaning - the process of dramatisation and illumination isn’t so much brought into question as asked: ”Where to from there?”. Beginning as an impressionistic and elliptical portrait of such English-isms as class, family life on the manor, and WWII, its wonderfully drawn dynamics and machinations soon recede into the western front, initiating, with Romola Garai’s maturation into our authorial perspective, a fascinating query into the subsequent representation (hers, specifically) of said events.
Literature is filled with – one could even suggest it is entirely about - authors grappling with their characters’ impending fates, and with the centrality of characterisation in cinema it goes two-fold. “Why?” is the poetic imperitive for an author, and although the subsequent “How?” is indeed the art, it is entirely subject to all that came before it, lest it be merely the minutiae of happenstance.
For the record: the “How?”, here, is via a young girl’s interpretation of a perceived assault and its decades-long repercussions. If it were merely a portrait of the incident’s ripples it would be, though straightforward, a nonetheless interesting examination of a rather linear cause and effect, but Christopher Hampton’s amazing treatment† of this pulls back, reframes in its scope the whole galaxy of effect (and indeed affect), of the entirety of the proceedings; his “Why?” of both the most painful and unrelenting reality and the most achingly humane and generous origins.
†Of course I haven’t read McEwan’s novel.
