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Any first book is always in the nature of a tardy settle- ment of an account with the past.
Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool
Even a reader who misses the epigraph from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey should realize by the end of the first chap- ter-the first sentence, even-that Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) is at least in part about the literary imagination, about writers and writing. The novel opens with a description of our protagonist (who, we only later discover, grows up to become the implied author of the text we've been reading) at work: "The play-for which Briony had 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 crêpe paper-was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch."1 Within the early chapters, we learn that Briony Tallis has already, by age thirteen, experimented with several literary genres: fairy tale, short story, melodrama naïvely harking back to eighteenth-century accounts of "virtue in distress," and finally the nascent form of the "impartial psy- chological realism" that would become the hallmark of her adult work (38).2 These same chapters introduce us to Briony's older sister, Cecilia, and Tallis family charity case, Robbie Turner, who just so happens to have earned a first-class degree in English at Cambridge, where he was, at least briefly, one of F. R. Leavis's disciples. Cecilia, not incidentally, is making her way through Richardson's Clarissa, though she'd "rather read Fielding any day"; Robbie offers qualified sympathy, pointing out that "there's more life in Fielding, but he can be psychologically crude compared to Richardson" (24). So it begins. The first hundred pages not only reference the "rise" of the genre within which McEwan himself is working but also make mention of Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and Keats, in addition to a multitude of moderns, from Eliot and Owen to Conrad and Lawrence. Given all of this-the host of allusions, the urbane conversation about literary craft (how many thirteen-year-olds do you know who can pronounce the French word "genre" [42]?), the narrative self-consciousness, the deliberate echoing of novels from Mansfield Park to Mrs. Dalloway-it is by no means a...