Ian McEwan’s Re-turn to Ethics in Atonement

This article attempts to map out the extent, the fruitfulness and the limitations of McEwan’s specific engagement with ethics in Atonement when compared with the turn to ethics taking place in such early works as The Child in Time (1987), The Innocent (1990) or Black Dogs (1992), while reinscribing it against the background of an emerging ethics of care in cultural and philosophical discourses. If at the beginning of his career Ian McEwan’s grim depiction of a dehumanised world peopled with morally dubious narrators and sexually perverse characters earned him the nickname of Ian Macabre, Atonement seemed for its part to introduce variations in the turn to ethics which the writer’s later œuvre took, by raising the issue of writing as a form of moral responsibility and a possibility to rehumanise, if not reenchant a deeply flawed world. The metafictional coda to the novel is a case in point, which highlights Briony Tallis’s belief in the persistence of values hinging around the power of the written word, the connection between truth and writing, and the possibility of an ethics of historical fiction. However, Ian McEwan’s distanciation from his female narrator-author warns the reader against any hasty identification and prompts her into tracing her own ethical trajectory through the text. Thus, the reader may refuse hermeneutic closure and follow the text’s own tendency to proliferate, as suggested by Briony’s last intimation that the lovers might meet again in an alternative ending to the novel. The coda’s positioning of the reader at interpretive crossroads where crucial reading decisions have to be taken raises issues as to McEwan’s own wish to reintroduce the question of an ethics of writing and of reading in what might be perceived alternatively as the posthumanist landscape of British fiction today