Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Barbora Vlachová

The Dysfunctional Family Model in Ian McEwan’s Novels

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

2015

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Barbora Vlachová

I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A., for her invaluable

advice, encouragement and kind guidance. I would also like to thank my family and my partner

for their support and patience during the writing of this thesis.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ........................................................................................5

2. Three Plots, One Model – Tracing the Family in McEwan’s Novels ….......11

2.1 The Cement Garden .................................................................11

2.2 On Chesil Beach ......................................................................26

2.3 Atonement ..............................................................................40

3. The Rough World of “Ian Macabre” .....................................................55

4. Present, yet Absent – Parental Incompleteness and its Substitutions …...62

5. Dysfunctional Family – Formative and Devastating ...............................69

6. Conclusion .........................................................................................86

Bibliography .............................................................................................91

English Resume ........................................................................................94

Czech Resume ..........................................................................................96

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1. Introduction

It is a common thing with many writers that their works, no matter

which period of their writing they come from, usually bear signs of more or less

similar attitudes, themes and ideas. Ian McEwan, winner and multiple nominee

of the Man Booker Prize, is of course no exception to that. While the primary

focus and plots of his literary works naturally change with time, one could, at the

same time, find some similar patterns that keep recurring in many of them. The

nature of these patterns is often a rather underlying one, insignificant at first, yet

tightly connected with the main plot, and in many cases even influencing and

forming it. Such a pattern is then, quite easily derivable already from the title of

this thesis, also the presence of a dysfunctional family background and its intense

and negative impact upon the mental and physical development of the

characters. Moreover, it is the main purpose of this thesis to show that Ian

McEwan uses the destructive and inescapable nature of this distorted family

background to indirectly and sometimes almost invisibly form the characters and

predestine them to end up in rather unsuccessful relationships, or even worse,

result in their personal failures.

Looking at Ian McEwan’s writing from a general perspective, one

simply has to notice that his novels are anything but optimistic and romantic. As

John Walsh in his review of McEwan’s novel Saturday says: “Happy endings have

never been Ian McEwan’s style” (Walsh). Indeed, Walsh’s further description of

McEwan as a “dealer in inventive cruelty and casual violence” (Walsh) does

suggest a little bit about the nature of McEwan’s novels and it is then not

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surprising at all that many of them end up tragically for the characters, leaving

them emotionally ruined and convulsing in misery, or even worse, dead without

the chance of resolving their personal issues. While one of the possible (and

frequently used) reasons for these personal tragedies is some sort of outer

influence beyond the character’s reach, mostly the well-known “wrong time –

wrong place” pattern, another cause could be found in the characters’ family

background, or rather its dysfunctionality and incompleteness. This issue may

not seem so obvious at first – with an exception being The Cement Garden, a

novel dealing basically with nothing else but dysfunctional family relationships –

yet after reading the novels closely, one can clearly feel its underlying presence

and, usually in the end, observe the cruel inevitability of its consequences. Roger

Boylan in his essay “Ian McEwan’s Family Values” suggests that: “To Ian McEwan,

only the universal values represented in the family unit – love, loyalty, trust

stability – stand between us and barbarism” (Boylan). It is then the aim of this

thesis, in connection to this statement, to show that in many of his works Ian

McEwan experiments with breaking these values, bringing a little bit of this

“barbarism” to the lives of his characters and thus challenging the borders of

morality and the thin line between good and evil, normal and abnormal.

To be a little bit more specific in forming this thesis’ main argument

– when we look closely at Ian McEwan’s characters, we can easily observe that

their life is often an unhappy, bleak and unsatisfying one. Families from which

these characters come are usually “physically complete,” with both parents

theoretically present. Yet not even this “physical completeness” can ensure a full

functionality, for what we can frequently witness is actually one of the parents,

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though being alive and physically close, practically appearing to be rather absent

from the family life. No matter if this absence is caused by work, illness or

emotional detachment, the truth is that it influences the family and mostly the

further development of the children. And it is no wonder, for mothers that spend

most of the time lying in bed with strong headaches or in a strongly submissive

position to their husband, or fathers who care about nothing but keeping their

garden neat and tidy or devote themselves to their work, do not form any good

preconditions for a healthy growth and emotional stability of their offspring – not

to speak about the possible father-daughter sexual abuse, as intimated in On

Chesil Beach. Quite inevitably then, their sons and daughters are stigmatized by

these distorted circumstances of their childhood and they carry on these

emotional marks further in their life. What is more, in Ian McEwan’s novels these

marks are so significant and determining, that they influence the children’s, and

later adults’, behaviour in their own relationships – unfortunately in a rather

negative and destructive way. Consequently, their sexuality is often significantly

distorted, their mental health unstable and their personal lives end up in ruins.

Such is the rough and surreal world of Ian McEwan’s fiction and the main theme

of this thesis.

Now, having articulated the main theme of this thesis, let us have

a look at the formal practical aspects. Putting aside the usual introductory and

concluding chapters, the core of the thesis is divided into four main sections. First

section provides a close reading of three selected novels that do not only work

with the topic of dysfunctional family background and its influence on the

characters, but also come from different periods of McEwan’s writing and thus

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offer a cross-section of his literary production, proving that the aforementioned

topic is present in more of his works and is not a mere limited attribute of one

short period. The names of these selected novels are The Cement Garden (1978),

The Atonement (2001) and On Chesil Beach (2007). To strengthen the

importance of these novels, not only in regard to this thesis, but also to Ian

McEwan’s writing in general, it should be noted that two of them even brought

him the Man Booker Prize nomination. These were namely the Atonement and

On Chesil Beach. Both these novels, together with The Cement Garden, will be

introduced in terms of their plots, characters and the overal narrative technique,

and then closely analyzed, with a focus on the family roles, relationships and their

further impact upon the characters’ mental and physical development. The

analysis will thus create a solid underlying foundation for the following three

chapters, the first of which focuses on the frequently occurring topics of sexuality,

rough realism and dreariness that gained Ian McEwan the well-known nickname

“Ian Macabre.” The chapter will look closely at the narrative techniques and

methods that Ian McEwan uses and the way he expresses the topics of sexuality

and builds up the generally bleak and pessimistic ambience. For this purpose not

only the novels themselves but also selected short stories will be analyzed, for

they too form an important part of McEwan’s writing and significantly contribute

to the birth of his nickname, as mentioned above. This chapter will be followed

by one that focuses mostly on the unusual, yet in McEwan’s work frequently

occurring lack of parental functions caused by a “mental absence” of one of the

parents. Though in his novels both the parents are usually alive and present (at

least at the beginning), one of them often does not perform the parental function

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as we would expect him to. And no matter if this absence is caused by work,

illness or some other reason, the children simply have to deal with a lack of an

authoritative person to show them the right direction and subsequently tend to

replace this gap with one of themselves. The way they choose to do so, together

with its serious consequences, then naturally will become the main focus of a

deep analysis and one of this thesis’ foundation stones. The aim of the third

chapter will then finally be to draw from and combine all the previous findings to

establish and demonstrate the general argument of this thesis, i.e., to prove the

determining and destructive nature of Ian McEwan’s characters’ family

background.

Apart from the works written by McEwan himself, many secondary

sources will be used as well – from scholarly studies, papers and essays to various

interviews and biographical materials. The most prominent and valuable of these

materials, both by its comprehensiveness and general views, is then David

Malcolm’s book Understanding Ian McEwan. As the title suggests, the book looks

profoundly at selected McEwan’s works – including The Cement Garden, The

Comfort of Strangers and some of the early short stories, all of them being

relevant to the topic of this thesis – and uses their analysis to provide a general

view of the ambience of McEwan’s prose. Apart from Malcolm, however, also

many other scholars and critics, e.g., Earl G. Ingersoll, James Wood or Richard

Robinson, will be quoted in terms of their views of McEwan’s work. The purpose

of all the critical sources is then to provide a wider background to McEwan’s

writing, ideas and personal life – all of which is important in our efforts to

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understand his work, the way it is created, its meaning and the message it is

supposed to pass over to the readers.

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2. Three Plots, One Model – Tracing the Family in McEwan’s Novels

Considering the fact that the overal number of Ian McEwan’s literary

works is rather high, it is for practical reasons that only three major ones were

selected to become the object of close reading and a subsequent deep analysis.

These are The Cement Garden, On Chesil Beach, and the Atonement – for

practical reasons, in the further parenthetical citations they will be referred to as

CG (The Cement Garden), CB (On Chesil Beach) and AT (Atonement). Like many

other of McEwan’s novels these three, too, feature the dysfunctional family

model, yet, as it is just to be proven in the following chapters, the consequences

and influences of this model upon the characters are so crucial and formative

here that they become the most valuable material for this thesis’ main argument

and could be thus considered its practical and evidential core.

2.1 The Cement Garden

Now, if there is to be one novel that is supposed to best embody

the topic of this thesis, as stated in the introductory chapter, it is without any

doubts The Cement Garden. Nothing screams “dysfunctional family” more than

children indifferent to the death of their father, hiding the death of their mother

and developing an incestuous relationship between themselves. As Cristina Ionica

in her paper called “An ethics of decomposition: Ian McEwan’s early prose”

states: “What most readers find horrifying in The Cement Garden is McEwan’s

merciless violation and mockery of their traditional conceptualization of the family

structure, ‘consecrated’ in psychoanalytic form by Freud” (Ionica 241). It is no

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wonder then that the tragical and bizarre story of the four siblings raised

emotions and discussions among the readers and together with The Comfort of

Strangers and some of his early short stories helped the creation of Ian McEwan’s

nickname “Ian Macabre.” And indeed, a novel featuring such twisted family

relationships, open sibling sexuality, raw images of (mostly teenage) humanity,

occasional child transsexuality and a significantly deformed attitude towards life,

death and gender boundaries, does deserve much attention and is thus a highly

valuable material for the purpose of this thesis.

Quite straightforwardly and without any introductory hesitation, the

novel starts with a death of a father of four children, Jack (14), Julie (17), Sue

(13) and Tom (6). While the death of a family’s head would normally have a

tragical tone, influencing the remaining members in a significant way, in The

Cement Garden there is no such excitement, nor great emotions. The death is

accepted rather calmly and unemotionally, possibly revealing the first signs of

unnatural and cold relationships amongst these particular family members. Jack,

being himself the narrator of the story, states at the very beginning:

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on

his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in

my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared

with what followed. My sisters and I talked about him the week

after he died, and Sue certainly cried when the ambulance men

tucked him up in a bright-red blanket and carried him away. He was

a frail, irascible, obsessive man with yellowish hands and face. I am

only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters

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and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.

(CG 9)

The way Jack speaks about his father’s death definitely does not seem to be the

way one would speak about the death of his loved one. In fact, the whole

monologue does not show any signs of emotions or feelings, sounding almost a

little bit robot-like. The expressions that Jack uses in connection to his father’s

decease, such as “insignificant” or “little story of his death,” then only support

this notion and strengthen the unconcerned overal tone. The unusual character

of the family’s relationships is thus quite clearly stated already on the first page

of the novel. And, as Jack himself suggests, much more is yet to come.

As it is obvious from the first paragraph, the whole novel is only

narrated by Jack, which is a factor that significantly contributes to the overal

tone of the novel. Christopher Williams in his paper “Ian McEwan’s The Cement

Garden and the Tradition of the Child/Adolescent as ‘I-NARRATOR’” raises a

relevant question, when he says that “a first-person narrative told by the child

or adolescent raises the problem of how to convey with maximum authenticity

the thoughts and sensations of a mind that has not yet achieved full maturity”

(Williams 216). In an answer we can certainly turn to the way Ian McEwan

deals with this issue, for he employs Jack’s uncertain and obscure adolescent

mind with all its sexual explorations and searching for his self in its realistic and

true form. And by doing so, he allows it to radically influence the narrative and

its strange tinge. Indeed, choosing as the narrator a figure of a 15-year old

baffled boy who refuses to attend to his personal hygiene and spends his days

mostly by mooching around and masturbating, seems to be a clear purpose of

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the author to strengthen the dense and bizarre atmosphere of the novel. Jack’s

narrative is a rather direct and factual one, it generally goes on smoothly and

without any great passions – but, at the same time, there are some places

where it may almost seem distant and quite unreliable. Occasionaly it becomes

somehow blurred, with Jack himself admitting some serious gaps in his

memory. David Malcolm in his book Understanding Ian McEwan also speaks

about the recurring themes of memory and forgetting, and connects it to the

overall unreliability of Jack’s narrative, stating that it is “all serving to reinforce a

distrust of Jack as a narrator” (Malcolm 48). Still though, despite its obvious

lack of credibility, the monotony and apathy of Jack’s narrative works well in

supporting and highlighting the weirdness and obscureness of what is actually

going on in the family and the novel, as also remarked by Malcolm: “The

narrator's emotional reserve contributes to the reader's sense of the utterly

desolate and dead world which the characters inhabit, a world represented,

among much else, by the father's plan to concrete over the garden around the

house” (Malcom 50). The dreariness of this “world” is quite well emphasized by

McEwan’s narrative choice, for thanks to all the above mentioned aspects of

Jack’s story-telling the whole plot is narrated in its raw non-justifying state.

And, of course, no exceptions are given even in the most disgusting details –

for instance in the moments when Jack notices the hair in his mother’s nose or

contemplates about the position of his father’s dead body in the freshly laid

concrete.

Jack’s passionless narrative, or, as Merritt Moseley in his

biographical essay on McEwan calls it, a “sensational account--rendered in

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unnaturally unsensational prose” (Moseley), also perfectly fits with the character

of his father. He is a strange, pedantic man, indifferent to the feelings of people

around him, even though they are his own family. His obsession with a neat

garden with narrow pavements, precise mathematic layout and smooth concrete

surface almost surprisingly corresponds to the general ambience of the whole

neighbourhood – empty houses and factories, a dreary concrete jungle. No

wonder that the father’s emotional coldness evokes the same in his son. Jack’s

feelings towards his father and the way he openly admits and describes them is

sometimes almost strikingly cruel. As an example, the scene in which he helps

his father with the garden paths’ concreting could be used, for it best shows his

apathy to his father’s health: “Now Tom stood back from the doorway watching

us drag each sack between us across the floor, arranging them in two neat lines

along the wall. Because of his heart attack my father was forbidden this sort of

work, but I made sure he took as much weight as I did” (CG 13). Though being

aware of his father’s weak heart and the subsequent physical limitations Jack

does not help him at all. Right on the contrary, he even makes sure that his father

would not have any less weight to carry than Jack himself does and that the work

would be distributed equally between them, no matter what their individual

capabilities or health dispositions. One would probably expect a father-son love

to look a little bit different, yet Ian McEwan definitely does not meet the reader’s

expectations in this case (and neither does he in most of the other ones, as it is

about to be demonstrated further in this thesis).

While Jack’s emotional coldness towards his father surely cannot be

excused by his teenage self-centeredness and ignorance, the relation to his

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mother, on the contrary, can. As we can observe in many places of the novel,

Jack surely does have some warm feelings towards his mother, and even though

he is not sure how to express them and thus chooses to rather hide them, he is

obviously aware of them. How else could we explain his behaviour for instance

in the scene where Jack acts rudely in the morning, refuses the breakfast that

his mother made, and leaves the house only so that he can later come back and,

driven by apparent remorse, secretly watch his mother through the window:

I walked round the side of the house to the back garden and

watched my mother through one of the kitchen windows. She sat

at the table with the mess of our breakfast and four empty chairs

in front of her . . . As she was moving an empty milk bottle, she

turned suddenly towards the window. I stepped back quickly. As I

ran down the side path I heard her open the back door and call my

name. I caught a glimpse of her as she stepped round the corner

of the house. She called after me again as i set off down the street.

I ran all the way, imagining her voice above the row of my feet on

the pavement. (CG 25-26)

As we can clearly observe here, Jack’s overal emotional coldness and strong

teenage self-centeredness seem to outweigh whatever feelings he might have

towards his mother. As a result, as Williams aptly refers to the future things to

come in the novel, we can witness that: “Not even his mother’s death manages

to break down his wall of egocentricity” (Williams 221).

Apart from the twists inside his adolescent mind, one of the other

reasons for Jack’s struggle with the feelings toward his mother could also be her

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old-fashioned opinions regarding self sexuality (and most likely sexuality in

general). In one moment, shortly after the father’s death, she enters Jack’s room

and tries to involve him in a conversation about his current physical and psychical

state. In reference to his frequent masturbating, she warns him about the

possible negative consequences by literally saying: “Every time … you do that, it

takes two pints of blood to replace it” (CG 29). Of course, Jack is well aware of

the outdatedness and inaccuracy of this statement: “I knew from school she had

got it wrong” (CG 32). And the fact that his mother still believes in it not only

makes him feel uncomfortable every time he tries to please himself again,

“…every time I set to now, once or twice a day, there passed through my mind

the image of two pint milk bottles filled with blood and capped with silver foil,”

(CG 32) but it also somehow lowers the picture of his mother in his eyes. Thanks

to her lack of knowledge and old fashioned opinions about sexuality her credibility

and authority is significantly weakened. Together with her poor physical state,

caused by an unspecified illness, her whole presence becomes rather ghost like

and faint, i.e., she is constantly present, yet absent from the family life. She is

described to spend much time in bed and though she excuses herself by saying

that she is just tired, it is mutually understood by all the family members that she

is ill. And as her illness gets worse and worse every day, it then seems inevitable

for her death to come soon - which is also what happens and consequently

triggers off the most peculiar chain of events.

After the mother’s inevitable decease, the decision-making and

“family governing” becomes the privilege of the family’s currently oldest member,

Julie, who “begins to dominate” (Moseley). As she has practically been

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performing this function already during the advanced stage of her mother’s

illness, nothing changes much, only her self-established authority increases

slightly. She appears to be manipulative, selfish and authoritative. Her brisk and

energic nature expresses itself in the way she takes over the household and the

family finances. Her appearance changes, making her look more adult-like, which

is partly caused also by her new love relationship with Derek. Jack naturally

observes these changes too, and makes some comments on them: “She took

long baths which filled the house with a sweet smell, stronger than the smell

from the kitchen. Se spent a long time washing and brushing her hair and doing

things to her eyes. She wore clothes I had never seen before, a silk blouse and

a brown velvet skirt” (CG 84-85). The presence of Derek, nevertheless, does not

only influence Julie’s appearance and behaviour, but it also prompts an inevitable

beginning of an end. As he himself visits the house where Julie and her siblings

live and spends some time with them, he slowly starts to grow suspicious. The

unexplained death of both parents, together with Tom’s and Jack’s weird acting

and, last but not least, the particularly strange smell coming from the cellar, this

all raises his mistrust and inquiring. The children’s lack of prudence surely also

acts in favor of his suspicion – Tom is freely talking about his dead mother when

playing with his friends outside, sometimes even being supported by Jack’s

confirmation, and the cellar with the decaying body of their buried mother is left

basically unattended. The final chain of events thus seems to be unavoidable –

after being told a fake story about the cellar, including a non-existing dead body

of a dog, Derek becomes impatient and one day, in the final climax, enters a

room where Julie and Jack are in the middle of a sexual intercourse.

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Subsequently, realizing the whole horrifying truth, he rushes himself to the cellar,

frantically smashes the concrete apart and brings the police to the house – all of

that indirectly and calmly observed by the siblings grouped in an intimate

reunion:

It was the sound of two or three cars pulling up outside, the slam

of doors and the hurried footsteps of several people coming up our

front path that woke Tom. Through a chink in the curtain a revolving

blue light made a spinning pattern on the wall. Tom sat up and

stared at it, blinking. We crowded round the cot and Julie bent down

and kissed him. ‘There!’ she said, ‘wasn’t that a lovely sleep.’ (CG,

138)

“In the ‘new,’ isolated family, each child has an independent

direction of development, and it is hard to decide exactly where to draw the line

between dangerously deviant behaviour and liberated selfgrowth” (Ionica 242),

states Ionica in her paper – and now that we have drawn the family history a

little bit, we shall have a close look at how precisely are the children and their

further psychical development influenced by this history and the parents’

absence. Though the incestuous relationship between Jack and Julie does seem

significant (and it surely is), the character whose psychical development is most

influenced is, not surprisingly, Tom. In the very first part of the novel it is already

prompted that there might be some struggle going on between the youngest

child and his father to gain the mother’s attention: “Julie had told me recently

that now Father was a semi-invalid he would have to compete with Tom for

Mother’s attention . . . And he was strict with Tom, always going on at him in a

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needling sort of way” (CG 13). A thing that may seem insignificant at first, but

appears to have some serious aftermath later in the novel. Soon we find out that

Tom could be characterized by a rather unhealthy and strong desire for attention,

a feature that could be without any hesitation ascribed to the aforementioned

struggle. What is more, this attention-seeking appears to gain more urgency and

results in moments of almost hysterical scenes with Tom trying to enforce his will

no matter what. And as Tom’s father seemed to be the only one able to resist

this insistence, it of course gets much worse after his death. The weakness of

Tom’s mother and her love for him prevent her from showing any strict parental

skills and she usually just gives way to his will. Later on, when the upbringing is

carried out by his siblings, the situation does not change for the better – quite

the contrary. Instead of using a firm hand in raising their little brother, his non-

adult siblings seem to support his attention-seeking and growing inclinations to

transsexuality. Not realizing that it may have severe effects on his psychical

development, his sisters start to dress him up as a girl and consider it a “funny

thing to do,” as it could be seen at some places of Jack’s narrative:

Just as I was moving to see better a little girl stepped in front of

Julie and went to stand by Sue’s elbow. Julie turned also and stood

behind the girl, one hand resting on her shoulder. In her other hand

she held a hairbrush. They remained grouped like this for a while

without talking. When Sue turned a little I saw she was cutting blue

cloth. The little girl leaned backwards against Julie who clasped her

hands under the girl’s chin and tapped her gently on the chest with

the brush. Of course, as soon as the girl spoke I knew it was Tom

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. . . Tom was wearing an orange-coloured dress that looked familiar

and from somewhere they had found him a wig. His hair was fair

and thick with curls. (CG 77)

And what is even more strange than the girls’ reckless acting, is the fact that

Tom truly enjoys being dressed like a girl. Apart from his obvious desire for

attention, which seems to be fully satisfied now, another possible reason for this

behaviour may be of course seen in his belief that girls have easier life and do

not get beaten by boys, as he himself did. After being bullied at school by some

other boy, Tom confesses to Sue that he would like to be a girl, which she

immediately shares with her two older siblings:

“He came into my room and said , ‘What’s it like to be a girl?‘ and I

said ‚It’s nice, why?’ And he said he was tired of being a boy and

he wanted to be a girl now. And I said, ‘But you can’t be a girl if

you’re a boy,’ and he said, ‘Yes I can. If I want to, I can.’ So then I

said, ‘Why do you want to be a girl?‘ And he said, ‚Because you

don’t get hit when you’re a girl.‘ And I told him you do sometimes,

but he said, ‚No you don’t, no you don’t.‘ So then I said, ‚How can

you be a girl when everyone knows you’re a boy?’ and he said, ‘ I’ll

wear a dress and make my hair like yours and go in the girl’s

entrance.’ So I said he couldn’t do that, and he said yes he could,

and then he said he wanted to anyway, he wants ...’” (CG 46-47)

Though his wish is directly expressed here and welcomed with much joy and

excitement by his sisters, still some time passes before it is actually carried out.

It is the very moment of his “first cross-dressing” as quoted above, that

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undoubtedly performs the role of a trigger, for since then Tom frequently

“engages in and derives enjoyment” from “cross-dressing” and later even

“infanilization” (Ionica 241). What is more, not only does he start wearing Sue’s

skirts when playing with other children outside the house, but is also spotted

while holding hands with one of his male friends, thus “taking up of a different

gender and sexual object choice” (Ionica 241). Later on Tom’s crossdressing

gradually escalates into a strange need of “baby care.” As slightly prompted

already at the very beginning of the novel, where Tom asks curiously about a

baby cot standing in the cellar, he later truly starts leaning towards the role of a

baby. He lets himself be undressed and put into the baby cot, physically and

intelectually returning to the innocent state of an infant. Moreover, being treated

this way by his siblings, who again simply let him have his way without thinking

of the rightness and appropriateness of such a decision, he significantly calms

down and seems to be satisfied after all.

Tom’s sexuality and his emotional degradation into babyhood is

surely not the only serious issue going on with the children. Another one could

be the strange incestuous relationship between Julie and Jack. The presence of

this relationship is hinted of already in the first part of the novel, when both the

parents are still alive, and in this “early” phase it also partially includes Sue. The

three children are described as enjoying themselves playing “doctor games” that

include physical examinations of one of their bodies – usually Sue’s:

Sue lay on the bed giggling with her knuckles in her mouth while

Julie pushed a chair against the door. Together we rapidly stripped

Sue of her clothes and when we were pulling down her pants our

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hands touched. Sue was rather thin. Her skin clung tightly to her

rib cage and the hard muscular ridge of her buttocks strangely

resembled her shoulder blades. Faint gingerish down grew between

her legs. The game was that Julie and I were scientists examining

a specimen from outer space . . . We stroked her back and thighs

with our fingernails. We looked into her mouth and between he legs

with a torch and found the little flower made of flesh. (CG 11-12).

This game, as described by Jack, strongly resembles the innocent children’s

“doctor games” that much younger children play, usually with their parents’

uneasy feelings and further bans. Yet the one we witness here apparently lacks

the innocence and, on the contrary, bears signs of sexual undertone – which is

something that later on Sue probably realizes and becomes “reluctant.” An

important question raised by this game now would be – how and why would the

parents let their children do such things? It is hinted in Jack’s narrative that the

game actually used to take place quite often, which makes the possible answer

– that maybe the parents simply did not notice anything – quite hard to

understand. At the same time it somehow confirms the theory that the

functionality of the whole family is rather distorted, for one of the basic parental

functions, that is, to take care of the children’s physical and mental development,

simply does not work here as it should, leaving the children to their strange sexual

occupations that are to significantly influence their fate later in the novel.

Despite the fact that the game actually stops at one point in the

novel, Jack’s emotional and sexual attachement to his older sister continues in

an unchanged form. What is more, it takes the shape of a common jealousy,

24

especially when Julie starts dating Derek: “Julie was racing Tom across the

garden and we both watched through the window. She looked so beautiful as

she turned to encourage Tom that it irritated me to share the sight of her with

Derek” (CG 127). Derek’s presence and the fact that Julie is spending time with

him obviously makes Jack quite resentful. His behaviour is almost typical of

people who are jealous of their partners and somewhere deep inside their soul

they are aware of their own lower qualities, compared to the ones of the rival.

This antipathy of Jack is then only provoked by Derek’s suspicious and inquiring

behaviour. After all, having a suspicious intruder in the house, when one hides

one’s dead mother concreted in the cellar, does of course cause much nervosity

and irritation. And quite predictably for the reader, in the case of The Cement

Garden, this nervosity surely does have its justification. Though Julie acts like

being in love with Derek and having no intense feelings towards her brother, the

final part of the plot, when everything is uncovered, actually reveals her true self.

And so, as foreseen already from the very start of the novel, the direction of the

children’s development, no matter how visible or invisible it appeared at first,

truly leads them all to an escalated and peculiar ending. An inevitable

controversial fate, rooted in and predestined by the dysfunctional nature of the

family unit, thus evolves into a portrayal of a household in which the absolute

absence of parents escalates into a chaotic decadent disorder. And as Malcolm

writes: “The novel’s climax comes when Julie’s boyfriend, Derek, smashes open

the trunk while Julie and Jack have sexual intercourse upstairs next to the

sleeping Tom” (Malcolm 46). By its peculiarity such a climax could be, without

exaggeration, placed among the most bizarre literary endings. And, as it is about

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to be demonstrated in the following chapters, for Ian McEwan, such endings are

the daily bread.

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2.2 On Chesil Beach

Unlike The Cement Garden, which basically starts with an account

of death and continues in the bleak tendency until the very end, On Chesil Beach

opens in a rather optimistic, if not even naive, tone. Right at the start we learn

that we are supposed to witness the first night of a newly married couple –

Florence and Edward. Unfortunately, as the reader soon finds out, this light-

hearted pace is marked by some serious flaws, flaws that direct the young

couple’s promising faith to a rather disasterous conclusion. And so, what at first

looks like a humorous chain of little misunderstandings, mistakes and clumsy

accidents, gradually turns into a complex problem with intimacy and sexuality,

which Claire Kahane in her paper “Bad Timing: The Problematics of Intimacy In

On Chesil Beach” describes as evoking “apprehensions that neither can

acknowledge to the other” (Kahane), and which leads Florence and Edward to

their tragical personal failure. What is more, this problem consists mostly in the

lovers’ psychological barriers and unconfessed incapability of honest

communication, all deeply rooted in their dysfunctional family background.

As it was mentioned, the very first pages of the novel introduce the

reader into a calm evening where he is about to observe a newly married couple,

having their first official night together. The general description of their wedding

and all other moments preceeding the very evening is a rather positive one,

providing us with plain statements, such as “Their wedding, at St. Mary’s, Oxford,

had gone well; the service was decorous, the reception jolly, the send-off from

school and college friends raucous and uplifting” (CB 3). A presumably fine

27

wedding, indicating an auspicious new start for two young and optimistic people.

Their hopes and plans are spreading out in the light evening breeze, the future

is at their doorstep: “And they had so many plans, giddy plans, heaped up before

them in the misty future, as richly tangled as the summer flora of the Dorset

coast, and as beautiful” (CB 6-7). Quite obvisously, trough such descriptions

McEwan is trying to evoke the feelings of joy and promises, i.e., feelings generaly

expected on the wedding night of two people who just swore infinite love to each

other. Nevertheless, as an observant reader may quickly notice, this cheerful and

carefree tone does not really raise much trust and seems to operate on a

superficial, pretentious level. Moreover, simultaneously with the jolly account of

the successful wedding we can observe yet another tone – a rather doubtful and

fearful one. And one does not have to go much further to find evidence for its

existence, for soon in the novel the first hints of insecurity and concerns appear.

An obvious nervosity floats above Florence’s and Edward’s heads

and as we soon learn, its roots could be found in the prospect of their first sexual

intercourse: “From these new heights they could see clearly, but they could not

describe to each other certain contradictory feelings: they separatedly worried

about the moment, some time soon after dinner, when their new maturity would

be tested, when they would lie down together on the fourposter bed and reveal

themselves fully to one another” (CB 6). Now, considering the year into which

the plot is set, these worries could be simply ascribed to the fact that both the

lovers are sexually inexperienced and are thus entering an unknown world of

marital sexuality. Such a thing may, of course, seem only natural – if it had not

been for the fact that in this particular case the fears are of much deeper

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significance and about to have much more severe consequences. While Edward’s

fear is mostly the one of coming too soon – a thing not unusual for young men

starting their sexual life and thus frequently feared, the problem of Florence

seems to be of much bigger magnitude: “Where he merely suffered conventional

first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable

as seasickness” (CB 7). To put it simply, when it comes to the topic of their first

sexual intercourse, Florence suffers from a severe anxiety, which obviously goes

far beyond the commonly expected insecurities. On the next couple of pages this

anxiety is vividly described by McEwan, mostly in terms of its imminence and

paralyzing nature. Everything connected to sexuality, even the slightest innocent

hints of intimacy, scares Florence to death and the idea of Edward “penetrating

her” makes here literally nauseous: “Her problem, she thought, was greater,

deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt

against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential

happiness were about to be violated. She simply did not want to be ‘entered’ or

‘penetrated.’ Sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy, but was

the price she must pay for it” (CB 9). Not even the “marriage guide” for young

brides that Florence decides to read helps to make her more comfortable – as

noted by Earl G. Ingersoll in his paper “The Moment of History and the History of

the Moment: Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach” : “Florence, on the other hand, is

the victim of the too-easy confidence dispensed by modern marriage manuals.

Her ‘how-to’ book has cheerily led her to believe that ‘anybody can do it’ and that

successful performance as a lover is a matter of following the steps in a process

as logical as assembling a bicycle” (Ingersoll 135). Unfortunately, relying on book

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advices in such a delicate thing, especially when considering Florence’s horrors

in connection to the topic, seems to be a rather unhappy decision – as we are

about to learn soon. Consequently, in her further efforts not to let Edward down,

apart from reading useless manuals, Florence also decides not to speak about

her feelings at all – a thing she herself later considers a mistake. The lack of

honesty and inability to communicate indeed is a serious issue that significantly,

if not even tragically, marks their whole relationship and the short marriage.

After the initial chapter of the novel, which takes us through half of

the evening and ends in the very last moments before the dreaded act is to be

committed, comes the retrospective part that not only recounts the story of the

lovers’ engagement, but goes even more backwards, to their very childhood and

family background. In this part of the novel we are to learn about the distinctive

conditions of their growing up, their family relationships and the emotional

background that influenced their childhood and early adolescence. Quite

predictably, Florence’s home is described in terms of a certain emotional

coldness, boredom and stiffness. Her mother does not support Florence’s love for

classical music and, to Florence’s frustration, has a totally different view on the

ongoing political situation: “Back from college, transformed from a schoolgirl,

mature in ways that no one in the household appeared to notice, Florence was

beginning to realise that her parents had rather objectionable political opinions”

(CB 52). Through the political dispute, with Florence being rather in favour of the

Soviet Union politics and her mother on the contrary claiming that it “must be

opposed, just as Hitler had been” (CB 53), her already cold relationship towards

her mother gradually reaches some sort of final freezing-point. And it is not any

30

better with Florence’s father either. She herself admits that she finds him

“physically repelent” and feels like she could “hardly bear the sight of him” at

times (CB 49). Consequently her presence at home makes her unapproachable,

unhappy and hiding her true feelings – and though she “constantly reminded

herself how much she loved her family” (CB 51), the household still feels like a

quiet prison to her, making her eager to escape and finally gain her freedom

through the means of marriage.

Taking into consideration his “countryside”origin, Edward’s family

background, on one hand, seems to be way more relaxed and less hidebound

than the one of Florence. The family lives in a house, far away from civilization,

in an almost idyllic place described as “less than a hamlet, more a thin scattering

of cottages around the woods and common land on a broad ridge above Turville

village” (CB 61-62). The household, being taken care of mostly by the father, a

school headmaster, is slightly chaotic and even a little bit provisory-like:

Only the exposed parts of the floors not covered in junks were ever

swept, and only items needed for the next day – mostly clothes and

books – were tidied. The beds were never made, the sheets rarely

changed, the hand basin in the cramped, icy bathroom was never

cleaned – it was possible to carve your name in the hard grey scum

with a fingernail. It was difficult enough to keep up with the

immediate needs – the coal to be brought in for the kitchen stove,

the sitting-room fire to keep going in winter, semiclean school

clothes to be found for the children. (CB 63-64)

31

Unfortunately, as notices by Kahane: “Although the narrator assures us that

Edward's sexual difficulties are not as serious as Florence's, McEwan gives him

also a psychogenic history that belies such assurance” (Kahane). And as it soon

truly reveals, the reason for the household’s informality and chaos lies in an

uneasy condition of the family, that is, the mental absence of the mother who

suffers from a serious brain-damage. Even though she is physically active and

seemingly capable of performing the role of a regular family member, both the

children and the reader can sense that it is not at all that clear and easy. As

Edward finds out in his puberty years, the mental remoteness, chaotic behaviour

and ghost-like presence of his mother have their cause in a serious brain injury

that she went through when Edward was just a little boy. Since the accident she

“was a ghostly figure, a gaunt and gentle sprite with tousled brown hair, who

drifted about the house as she drifted through their childhoods, sometimes

communicative and even affectionate, at others remote, absorbed in her hobbies

and projects” (CB 65). Of course, living in a household with a mother that is

physically present, yet mentally incapable of taking care of her children, would

influence the mind of every child. That is probably also why Edward’s father, in

an effort to provide his children with a happy home and save them from finding

the truth about their mother’s real state of mind and the following incapabilities,

factually decides to bear the weight himself. When still young, the children do

not fully realize, or simply do not want to acknowledge that there is something

wrong with their family: “Naturally, they took their circumstances for granted,

even though they saw often enough the homes of their friends – those kindly,

aproned mothers in their fiercely ordered domains. It was never obvious to

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Edward, Anne and Harriet that they were less fortunate than any of their friends.

It was Lionel alone who bore the weight” (CB 65). Unfortunately, despite the fact

that his behaviour is a brave and praiseworthy thing to do, keeping his children

in this sort of naive vacuum and not admiting aloud what is really going on may

also have a serious impact on their ability of honest communication. For emotions

and feelings are not easily expressed in his family, with all its members basically

deluding themselves that everything is alright and living in a mutually agreed

pretense, Edward’s ability of expressing his true inner self, together with his

desires, wishes and expectations, in his future relationship, is seriously

weakened.

With both of their families providing rather an uneasy and disturbed

background it is no wonder that Florence and Eward eagerly look forward to free

themselves from them. And the best opportunity for leaving their homes then

naturally seems to be marriage – which they both cling to as soon as they get

engaged. The proposal itself could be considered rather impulsive and rushed

into, as it, instead of being carefully planned, simply “happens” one day, when a

moment of light intimacy is escalated by Edward’s sexual tension and who, in a

rush of excitement, asks “the question” and Florence, taken aback and paralyzed

by the very sexual undertone, agrees. Since that moment, the marriage itself

becomes some sort of a lighthouse for them – a bright spot of the future that,

nevertheless, does not mean the same thing to both of them. And so, while to

Florence marriage represents a liberation from her family and confirmation of her

warm feelings toward Edward, for him it also constitutes a fulfilment of his sexual

desires – unfortunately a thing so dreaded by his fiancée. A clear, yet unspoken

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discrepancy that fully reveals itself at their very wedding night – i.e., too late to

be solved without any serious harm to their love.

Now, having learnt about the social and family circumstances of

both Edward’s and Florence’s childhood, as well as their further adolescence and

the engagement, we get to the very “great night”– the moment that is about to

change their lives forever. After the dinner both the lovers are getting close to

consummating their marriage at last, yet the course of the evening is already set

in an unfortunate direction. And so, “when they finally move to the bedroom, the

comic irony of their misrecognitions expands almost painfully” (Kahane).

Edward’s sexual attempts make Florence nervous and with suddenly mixed

feelings she is trapped between the initial terror and a freshly discovered

pleasure. After some moments of clumsiness and awkwardness they rush into

the final act and before even reaching it, they are very soon halted by Edward’s

premature ejaculation. In a second, Florence’s revulsion is back in its full strength

and in her sudden horror she leaves her humiliated husband and runs to the

beach. The last moments are then powerfully devastating – an argument on the

beach proves their inability of communication, with poorly chosen words they

“trade swipes of ther razor-sharp accusations” (Ingersoll 141-42) and thus

unwittingly hurt each other’s feelings. A deep chasm quickly spreads between

them. Edward’s selfish and insulted mind is not capable of accepting Florence’s

impetuous and inaccurately expressed feelings, her proposal of happy marriage

without sex even offends him. He considers her disinterest in bodily pleasures as

a mere rigidity, an insult and a proof that she does not love him – that she could

not love him as men and women are expected to love each other: “He should

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accept the fact, she did not like kissing and touching, she did not like their bodies

to be close, she had no interest in him. She was unsensual, utterly without desire.

She could never feel what he felt” (CB 135). As a result, “Edward is so

overwhelmed by anger” and “allows Florence to literally walk out of his life”

(Ingersoll 142) without any effort of stopping her – in the following weeks they

divorce and never see each other again. The whole novel then ends with a short

retrospective part, dealing mostly with Edward’s point of view – after many years

he still thinks of Florence and realizes with painful remorse that he made a

mistake. A mistake which seriously changed both their lives and left them

emotionally scarred.

As Kahane states: “Given the nature of their histories and their

individual anxieties, both Florence and Edward are clearly set up for the failure

of intimacy” (Kahane). And indeed, the failure does take place, causing the short

marriage to end up in the most unfortunate way. A fact contributing to the

problematic nature of their love is then also the time period in which it takes

place. As McEwan himself writes already on the first page of the novel and keeps

mentioning on a number of occasions throughout the rest of it: “They lived in a

time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible” (CB 3).

Indeed, the time of their relationship and the engagement truly seems

unfortunate, for it partly belongs to the new fresh era of sexual liberation and

openness, yet it still does not fully take hold of these freedoms. It is a period on

the edge when a contraception pill is already existing, but is still only “a rumour

in the newspapers, a ridiculous promise, another of those tall tales about

America” (CB 39), when sex is being talked about, but always in a quiet voice,

35

when pictures of “men and women in tight black jeans and black polo-neck

sweaters” having “constant easy sex, without having to meet each other’s

parents” (CB 40) are floating in the air, yet still not possible to be physically

grasped and thus remaining in the form of a mere fantasy. Both Florence and

Edward do feel the restless and revolutionary ambience of the time and they take

notice of the double social consciousness that it arouses. Unfortunately, they are

so tightly trapped by it, that it seems impossible for them to escape it – instead,

they are convulsing between the two worlds, a promising, liberating one ahead

and an illiberal, confining present one. As a result of this inner bewilderment they

do not completely belong to either of them and despite their notion of change,

they are still not capable of being a part of it, i.e., the sexual liberty and free

conversation about their intimate difficulties remains rather unachievable to

them. This “wrong time – wrong place” issue is then naturally noticed and

stressed by many critics and, after all, admitted by McEwan himself.

However, as a perceptive reader may suspect, there is more than

just one cause of Edward’s and Florence’s marriage failure, most of them

appearing to be way beyond their control. And apart from the “wrong time –

wrong place” issue as discussed above, we can see one that goes even deeper,

one especially crucial, having a great forming power and tightly connecting

everything in their lives – that is, the deficient family background. Both Edward

and Florence come from families that could be considered rather dysfunctional.

Despite the fact that their families are “physically complete,” with a living mother,

father, and even some siblings present, the conventionally expected family

functions are not fulfilled. To start with, let us have a look at Edward first, whose

36

childhood is significantly marked by the absence of a true motherly figure. Only

a couple of years after Edward’s birth Marjorie, his mother, sustains a severe

head injury which leaves her in a brain-damaged state for the rest of her life. The

household care is then practically taken over by Edward’s father, Lionel, who, “by

default silently has acted out a maternal nurturant role” (Kahane) and in order

not to bother his children with the facts of their mother’s real health condition,

decides to keep these facts for himself and tries to cover and smooth them with

his own family commitment. The whole family then long operates in some sort

of haze mode with everyone knowing that there is something unusual about the

mother yet no one able to concretize it or to fully and loudly admit its presence:

“When Marjorie announced that she was making a shopping list for Watlington

market, or that she had more sheets to iron than she could begin to count, a

parallel world of bright normality appeared within the reach of the whole family.

But the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed. They grew up

inside it, neutrally inhabiting its absurdities because they were never defined”

(CB 68). And it is exactly this inability to define or phrase one’s inner voice that

also puts down its roots in Edward’s mentality and remains there until his very

adulthood. In his relationship to Florence he is not capable of speaking about his

worries – especially about the fear of sexual failure – and thereby makes himself

even more vulnerable to the potential confrontation of these fears. Finally, when

the moment of this confrontation actually comes he grows so sensitive and

insecure that it is not possible for him anymore to step back and avoid the

inevitable negative climax.

37

Moving to the family background of Florence, we do not only

witness an obviously cold and hidebound mother, whose distant motherly attitude

and opposing views of the world make Florence so eager to leave the household.

Hiding beneath is also a way deeper, darker and more painful issue – one whose

presence is not clearly demonstrable, yet still conspicuous enough to not be

overlooked by the readers and critics – that is, the allusion to Florence being

sexually abused by her father. The hints of this feature are scattered in a few

places of the novel – we can, for instance, find a strange notion of some

unspecified yacht trips that Florence’s father made with her a couple of times:

“He used to take her out with him, and several times, when she was twelve and

thirteen, they crossed all the way to Carteret, near Cherbourg. They never talked

about those trips. He had never asked her again, and she was glad” (CB 50).

Furthermore, the mention of these trips also comes to Florence’s mind on her

very wedding night – when she, at the beginning of her sexual intercourse with

Edward experiences something similar to seasickness:

Here came the past anyway, the indistinct past. It was the smell of

the sea that summoned it. She was twelve years old, lying still like

this, waiting, shivering in the narrow bunk with polished mahogany

sides. Her mind was a blank, she felt she was in disgrace. After a

two-day crossing, they were once more in the calm of Carteret

harbour, south of Cherbourg. It was late in the evening, and her

father was moving about the dim cramped cabin, undressing, like

Edward now. She remembered the rustle of clothes, the clink of a

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belt unfastened or of keys or loose change. Her only task was to

keep her eyes closed and to think of a tune she liked. (CB 99)

The link between these two moments is at least striking and provides the reader

with a suggestive feeling of a possible child abuse that might have happened

between Florence and her father. How else could one explain the disguist and

dread that Florence experiences with every hint of sexuality as well as with the

look at her father’s physical appearance? And so, as Ingersoll aptly confirms:

“The novel does, however, drop maddeninly vague but irresistible hints that the

source of Florence’s repugnance toward sexuality may be her father” (Ingersoll,

136). Unfortunately then, the fact that Florence’s mind hides these memories, for

she may simply “find such experiences too painful to remember” (Ingersoll 137),

and in a sense of self-defence does not allow herself to fully realize the truth,

makes it impossible for her to speak out and explain the true cause of her fears

to her lover, making him naively believe that they are rather an evidence of her

mere rigidity. And that is also what he crudely tells her in their last argument on

the Chesil beach: “You tricked me. Actually, you’re a fraud. And I know exactly

what else you are. Do you know what you are? You’re frigid, that’s what.

Completely frigid. But you thought you needed a husband, and I was the first

bloody idiot who came along” (CB 156). Despite the fact that Edward’s last words

do not at all cover the true state of things, for Florence’s love to him is an

undeniable fact and she is anything but an intended fraud, their meaning hit

Florence deeply in her heart, making her actually believe that they are true.

Nevertheless, while the cruelty of these last words seems to be

mostly the fault of Edward’s young harsh imprudence, the blame for the

39

unfortunate fate of their short marriage and the whole relationship could be

without hesitation equaly split between both of them. Thanks to their distorted

family backgrounds and the consequent presence of their inner insecurities,

Edward’s blind misconceiving and Florence’s long silence inevitably drive them

both into the unhappy climax of the novel. As Ian McEwan himself admits in an

interview by Ryan Roberts: “On Chesil Beach, I suppose, was a small-scale

investigation of some of those elements, particularly the misunderstandings that

arise when people not only are unable to describe their feelings to each other,

but can’t even describe them to themselves” (McEwan). And so, what McEwan

so masterfully conveys within the pages of his novel, is a young couple, at the

start of their hopeful and promising future, looking forward to leaving behind

their past and through their mutual sincere love build a life of their own. And

though the desired marriage truly does set them free from their families and their

outer stifling grip, it unfortunately does not at all liberate them from the inner

traces that these families left deep inside their minds.

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2.3 The Atonement

While both The Cement Garden and On Chesil Beach deal mostly

with small-scale intimate tragedies that appear to happen in only a tiny

microcosm of their own, the Atonement, in contrast, works with much higher

ambitions for it places a tragical relationship of two young people to the forefront

of a global conflict – a thing not very common in McEwan’s earlier works. As Brian

Finney in his paper “Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian

McEwan’s Atonement” aptly summarizes: “Instead of the closed claustrophobic

inner world of his early protagonists, Atonement ranges from an upper-class

household in pre-War southern England, to the retreat of the British army to

Dunkirk, to a wartime London hospital, ending wih a coda in 1999” (Finney 68).

And it is perhaps mostly for the novel’s wide scope and its portrayal of an unhappy

love in the globally shared painful history that the story, and its 2007 movie

adaptation, seems to be so appealing to the readers and audiences. However,

despite the novel’s obvious magnitude, the central motif still remains in the

sphere of private human failures, originating in a small close society, and, apart

from the outer circumstances and unfortunate time, caused also by this society’s

dysfunctionality and wrongdoings.

As intimated by Brian Finney before, the first setting of the novel is

“an upper-class household in pre-War southern England,” where we encounter

the Tallis family. The main narrative voice of this chapter is given to Briony, a 13-

year-old girl with great imagination, which she employs in composing her own

literary works and which later also becomes the cause of the novel’s tragical

41

ending. Though trying to appear as an adult, in her acting we can still clearly see

a child’s naivity, stubbornness and attention-seeking – things that she herself

does not really admit and that are distinctly present in her strong emotional

attachement to her older siblings, Cecilia and Leon. This attachement is then only

stronger if we take into consideration the certain “absence” of Briony’s mother

and father. While the father is said to be always at work and it is even suggested

that he may have an affair, the mother spends most of the time hiding in her

room, suffering from serious headaches. It is then only natural that a small girl,

in a large empty house sourrounded by everything but the so much needed

physical presence of her parents, finds the substitution of parental care and love

in her older sister, Cecilia: “When she was small and prone to nightmares – those

terrible screams in the night – Cecilia used to go to her room and wake her. Come

back, she used to whisper. It’s only a dream. Come back. And then she would

carry her into her own bed” (AT 44). Though one would primarily expect the

mother to perform this comforting and soothing role, here she is obviously

substituted by the second oldest female member of the family, that is Cecilia.

Apart from Briony and her siblings we then also encounter Robbie – a son of the

family housekeeper who basically grew up with the three siblings and becomes

the object of a goodwill of their father, Mr. Tallis, who promises to take care of

the financial side of Robbie’s university education. Last, but not least, this small

social circle is complemented by Leon’s friend Paul Marshall and Briony’s cousins,

Lola and twins Jackson and Pierrot, who come to spend the summer with the

Tallis’ family because of their own parents’ separation.

42

It is then this very setting which serves as a background for the

most crucial point of the whole novel. After not seeing Cecilia for some time,

Robbie suddenly realizes that he is strongly attracted to her. Briony becomes a

witness of their first moment of erotic tension when, following a short quarrel

and breaking a vase in a fountain, Cecilia takes off most of her clothes and dives

into the water to fetch it, letting Robbie watch her nearly naked body. Her young

sister, being still a mere child, unfortunately misconceives the whole situation

and starts thinking that Robbie is intimidating Cecilia after an unsuccessful

marriage proposal: “At his insistence she was removing her clothes, and at such

speed. She was out of her blouse, now she had let her skirt drop to the ground

and was stepping out of it, while he looked on impatiently, hands on hips. What

strange power did he have over her. Blackmail? Threats?” (AT 38). Her wrong

immature belief then sets off a chain of misconceptions and incorrect

presumptions that let her wrongly construe things that she does not yet fully

understand. Following their little “fontain moment” Robbie decides to write a

letter to Cecilia, expressing his newly discovered love feelings towards her. He

then gives the letter to Briony, asking her to deliver it to Cecilia, and only later

he realizes that the gave her a wrong version – a rather vulgar draft, involving

the word “cunt,” that he wanted to discard. Being a curious young girl, Briony,

however, secretly reads the letter, starting to think that Robbie’s intentions are

rather perverse and violent. After telling Lola about it, she even adopts the word

“maniac” for Robbie:

A maniac. The word had refinement, and the weight of medical

diagnosis. All these years she had known him and that was what he

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had been. When she was little he used to carry her on his back and

pretend to be a beast. She had been alone with him many times at

the swimming hole where he taught her one summer how to tread

water and do the breast stroke. Now his condition was named she

felt a certain consolation, though the mystery of the fountain

episode deepened. (AT 119).

Supported by Lola and suddenly recalling all the moments in the past where the

symptoms of his “condition” incidentally emerged, Briony gradually dives

deeper and deeper in her horror hypothesis. And it is then only confirmed when

she accidentally witnesses her sister and Robbie having sex in the library, which

she considers a violent attack: “Though they were immobile, her immediate

understanding was that she had interrupted an attack, a hand-to-hand fight.

The scene was so entirely a realisation of her worst fears that she sensed that

her over-anxious imagination had projected the figures onto the packed spine

of books . . . His left hand was behind her neck, gripping her hair, and with his

right he held her forearm which was raised in protest, or self-defence” (AT

123). In his paper “The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement” Richard

Robinson makes an interesting remark about the aspect of sexuality as

interrupted by Briony: “In Atonement the virgin adult lovers are the innocents

whose sexuality is perverted—made criminal—by the child” (Robinson 486).

Indeed, by letting a young inexperienced child witness a sexual intercourse that

it can not yet fully comprehend, McEwan adds a sense of some sort of

delinquency to the act that is otherwise absolutely normal and natural among

44

adult people. What is more, this allegedly criminal aspect is about to become

even more significant in the moments to come.

The already tense atmosphere of a family dinner, following Briony’s

discovery of Cecilia and Robbie’s making love, is then only intensified by the news

that the twins have run away. The company divides into several groups and starts

searching for Pierrot and Jackson on the adjacent premises in the evening

darkness. Apart from providing the twins with a good background for their

escape, the night also serves as a cover for an unknown person who rapes Lola.

Briony, who immediately discovers Lola and sees nothing but a shadow of the

disappearing rapist, is convinced that the assailant is Robbie, drawing upon her

previous imaginary evidence of his sexual deviation. And as Lola herself does not

seem to be capable or willing to identify anyone, Briony herself takes the initiative

in accusing the alleged villain, Robbie, claiming that she has seen his face. With

all her literary ambitions she finally has the story to come out with – a story

where every piece fits just perfectly and, at least to Briony’s immature mind,

everything could be described in the simple terms of black and white. As Robinson

aptly notices: “Faking testimony is like writing fiction” (Robinson 486). And so,

despite the fact that Robbie, later in the night, appears with both the twins

rescued and in good condition, he is immediately charged with the crime and

taken away by the police – with the only ones believing in his innocence being

his mother and Cecilia. Though at first she is convinced of the justness of her

doing, when the whole investigating machinery gets into motion, Briony slowly

starts doubting her own words. Simultaneously, she feels that it is already too

late for admitting her doubts and gets herself into a position of which there is

45

no harmless way out. Her mother, until now a rather passive figure, also plays

her role in that – in her dislike of Robbie, she silently supports her young

daughter’s accusations and thus keeps her trapped in the network of her

falsehood. Subsequently then, being still just a weak little girl, Briony succumbs

to the general pressure and decides to stick to her initial version - a thing she

later so regrets and wants to make her atonement for.

In the second part of the novel we can encounter Robbie who, after

some years in prison, fights in the war in France – a condition under which he

gets released from jail and which provides him with a slight chance of ever

reuniting with Cecilia again. In the meantime, Cecilia decides to break all bonds

with her family and leaves for a nurse training. After being in contact through

letters they only meet once – shortly before Robbie’s leaving for France they

share an hour during Cecilia’s lunch break in London. The story then goes on with

depicting Robbie’s misery in the army’s retreat to Dunkirk. His head is full of

memories of the love moment with Cecilia and of a hope of seeing her again –

her last words, spoken to him when he was taken away by the police, keep

recurring in his mind: “And there was hope. I’ll wait for you. Come back. There

was a chance, just a chance of getting back” (AT 204-205). Moreover, this chance

of getting back and proving his innocence starts appearing more real once he

learns that Briony is willing to tell the truth and officially admit her false testimony

in Robbie’s case: “He would be cleared. From the way it looked here, where you

could hardly be bothered to lift your feet to step over a dead women’s arm, he

did not think he would be needing apologies or tributes. To be cleared would be

a pure state. He dreamed of it like a lover, with a simple longing” (AT 228). After

46

finally reaching Dunkirk and getting painfully close to fulfilling his dream the

chapter ends with Robbie, seriously injured and absolutely exhausted, falling

asleep one day before the troop evacuation. And as we are about to find out

soon, this indeterminate open end scene works for McEwan as a sort of facilitator

for two different further developments, one real and one fictional, yet bot of them

being directly or indirectly narrated by Briony.

The first of these two possible futures,i.e., the more optimistic one,

is then developed in the third chapter of the novel. It focuses mostly on Briony,

who, now a young woman, works as a trainee nurse in a wartime London hospital

and finally fully perceives the horrors of her childish actions and their fatal

consequences: “Whatever skivvying or humble nursing she did, and however well

or hard she did it, whatever illumination in tutorial she had relinquished, or

lifetime moment on a college lawn, she would never undo the damage. She was

unforgivable” (AT 285). In her sorrowful frame of mind, she decides to visit

Cecilia, ask for her forgiveness and offer to make everything right. For she is now

quite sure that the mysterious rapist who took advantage of Lola back then in

the summer evening is actually her brother’s friend, Paul Marshall, she is

determined to publicly admit that she was wrong and that she accused an

innocent man. Unfortunately, as she learns – Paul Marshall is getting married to

Lola, which makes the whole process of justice harder as there is no way she can

legally blame the victim’s husband. Knowing that, she, on her way to visit her

sister during a day off, stops by the church in which the very wedding of Paul

and Lola is taking place. Still, she only stays for a short while, hiding herself in

47

the shadow and not saying a word to anyone – even when she has a change to

stop the ceremony by speaking out:

Now was her chance to proclaim in public all the private anguish

and purge herself of all that she had done wrong. Before the altar

of this most rational of churches. But the scratches and bruises were

long healed, and all her own statements at the time were to the

contrary . . . That Paul Marshall, Lola Quincey and she, Brionny

Tallis, had conspired with silence and falsehoods to send an

innocent man to jail? But the words that had convicted him had

been her very own, read out loud on her behalf in the Assize Court.

The sentence had already been served. The debt was paid. The

verdict stood. She remained in her seat with her accelerating heart

and sweating palms and humbly inclined her head. (AT 325)

And so we see that, yet again, there are two people whose faith lies in the hands

of Briony and is determined by her insecure and immature mind. As she does not

intervene in the wedding in any way, she practically lets Lola marry her rapist –

a thing that would not be considered a good start for a marriage by any

psychologist. After visiting the wedding, Briony continues on her way to Cecilia,

where she is not only accepted in a rather cold and distant manner, but also

unexpectedly meets Robbie, who has some time off from the army and spends it

with Cecilia. Both Cecilia and Robbie act angrily and are not willing to provide

Briony with the so desired forgiveness – even though in the end they show a bit

of excitement when finding out about her determination to set things right. They

harshly provide her with precise instructions on what her next steps should be in

48

the cause – leaving the chapter with an auspicious tone. At last, it seems, Briony

has the chance of gaining her atonement.

Unfortunately, the hopeful tone of Briony’s departure from Cecilia’s

flat, quickly dissolves on the last couple of pages. These take place in 1999 and

are narrated by Briony, now an aged writer. We learn that the previous chapters

are actually written by her, as a part of her latest work. She reveals that the last

scenes, with her visiting Cecilia and Robbie, are purely fictional and that, apart

from their very short meeting, Robbie and Cecilia actually never met again in

their lives. Robbie is said to have died during his last night in Dunkirk and Cecilia

is said to have been killed by a bomb a few months later. Briony admits making

up the story of their reunion, as a sort of her private atonement – a chance for

their love to survive, at least on the pages of a book: “Having mistakenly cast

them in a story that totally misrepresented them, Briony seeks to retell their story

with the compassion and understanding that she lacked as a thirteen-year-old

girl” (Finney 80-81). The information about Lola’s and Paul Marshal’s marriage is,

however, true and it also becomes an obstacle in Briony’s attempt to publish her

novel, because she can not legally do so as long as the characters, i.e., Paul and

Lola, are still alive. The novel is concluded with the information that, since she

herself suffers from vascular dementia and is slowly dying, it is very likely that

they will both outlive her and she may thus never actually live to see her novel’s

publication.

Now, as it is already quite visible from the novel’s brief outline,

unlike in The Cement Garden or On Chesil Beach, which both deal with only one

or two main dysfunctional family structures as the background for the main

49

heroes’ development, the Atonement works with the feature of distorted families

on more than just one level and it concerns more than just the main protagonists.

We can see the Tallis family, dysfunctional in a way, with the father practically

missing due to his work and a possible mistress and the mother present only in

the rare moments when not suffering from serious headaches – all of this leading

to an environment in which the youngest child, Briony, seeks for a motherly figure

and somehow finds it in her older sister, creating strong bonds to her, as well as

to the older brother. Next, there is the family of Robbie Turner which consists

only of him and his mother, who is, as Ian Fraser in his paper “Class Experience

in McEwan’s Atonement” summs it up, “employed as a cleaner after Robbie’s

father left when he was six” (Fraser 470). By growing up in the Tallis household,

Robbie considers the Tallis children to be almost like his siblings – a thing that

may seem strange, considering the fact that later Robbie develops a love/sexual

feeling towards one of them, i.e., Cecilia. His position in the family is then

strengthened by the generosity of Mr. Tallis, who pays for Robbie’s education

and thus constitutes the common material security providing function of a father

– as commented on by Fraser: “Robbie, on the other hand, through his contact

with the Tallis family as a child, becomes absorbed into the bourgeois mores of

upper-middle-class life, and with the patronage of the father Jack Tallis, he goes

to grammar school and then on to Cambridge” (Fraser 466). Moving slightly

further from the Tallis household, we get to the family background of Briony’s,

Cecilia’s and Leon’s cousins, Lola, Jackson and Pierrot. These three children are

said to be coming from a completely broken family, a “bitter domestic civil war”

(AT 8), that is actually so bad that they are expected to stay in the Tallis house

50

for a longer period. Last, but not least, if we consider the later Lola’s and Paul’s

marriage as a rudiment of a new family of their own, this one could be considered

to have some seriously distorted attributes as well – for marrying one’s rapist

surely does not constitute a healthy root of a functional family unit.

With so many flaws and aberrations it is then of course natural that

the characters in McEwan's Atonement are influenced by their unusual family

background and that it more or less significantly shapes their thoughts, decisions

and actions. What is more, the shaping power goes far beyond just one character,

as it often also influences the lives of the figures around him or her. Just let us

have a look at Briony, who could be without hesitation described as a rather

spoiled bored child. Her childhood takes place in a big and rich, yet empty house,

and she is used to getting everything she wants. Her mother spends much time

in her bedroom, suffering from headaches, and her father is always at work - as

mentioned also in Cecilia's account of the household: “But her father remained

in town, and her mother, when she wasn’t nurturing her migraines, seemed

distant, even unfriendly” (AT 20). Though the absence of her parents is well

offset by a material richness and a certain “grown-up freedom” - both of which,

unfortunately, helps Briony develop an attention-seeking attitude, stubbornness

and a false notion of adult responsibilities. How seriously she takes these

responsibilities we can then observe in her strenuous image of herself as being

her sister's guardian and protecting her from the deviant hands of Robbie. Her

imaginary precociousness, withouth knowing anything about adult relationships

and emotions, then drives her into her wrongheaded pressumptions about the

thing that is going on between Robbie and her sister. Richard Robinson also

51

notices this fact and accurately writes about Briony that: “She is complicit with

the adult codes of her social class but does not possess an instinctive knowledge

of what is really happening: a deadly combination” (Robinson 486).

Consequently, with this “deadly combination” supported by her excessive

imagination and literary aspirations, Briony misjudges the whole situation and

considers Robbie a pervert who takes advantage of her sister, as well as poor

Lola. And so, as Finney in his paper also highlights, Briony’s “equally over-active

imagination leads her to tell the crucial lie” (Finney 70).

Coming from exactly the same family circumstances as her young

sister, Cecilia also feels a little bit uneasy in her home. She is bored even more

than Briony is, and after finishing her studies, spends most of the summer

smoking cigarettes and reading in her bedroom. Her future plans are uncertain,

for she finds herself at a crossroad – she is restless at home, yet sensing that

something is pulling her back. And what she herself realizes, slightly at first, yet

intensively in the end, is that this “pulling” element actually might be Robbie, her

childhood friend, to whom she feels more than just pure friendship. And it is of

course only natural for two close friends to gradually fall in love with each other,

taking into consideration their shared history and mutual fondness. At the same

time, unfortunately, their different social origin may, in such a close relationship,

show some negative symptoms. Considering the fact that Robbie is still nothing

but a mere housekeeper’s son and comes from a lower social class than Cecilia,

it is inevitable for these disparities to appear sooner or later. In this case, they

are even unintentionally nurtured by Mr. Tallis’ fondness of Robbie and his

generosity in the matter of his education. Though paying for Robbie’s education

52

may be an evidence of Mr. Tallis’ noble character and a certain effort to

compensate for his missing father, it also causes some displeasure of his wife,

Mrs. Tallis, and some ackward feelings of his older daughter. Finney notices that

“The difference in social class accounts for the early misunderstanding between

Robbie and Cecilia” (Finney 76) and as an example quotes a scene, where Cecilia

“mistakes his removing his boots and socks before entering her house for an act

of exaggerated deference, ‘playacting the cleaning lady's son come to the big

house on an errand’” (Finney 76). Nevertheless, while Cecilia mostly keeps these

feelings to herself, allowing them only sometimes to come to the surface and

otherwise rather restraining them by her love affection, her mother’s resentment

causes her to willingly support Briony’s version and thus helps Robbie’s

inprisonment – a consequence of high magnitude not only in Robbie’s, but also

Cecilia’s future life, leading to their tragical end.

As it was already suggested, though being the main characters and

thus in the primary focus of the readers and the following analyses, Briony, Cecilia

and Robbie are not the only ones who come from a distorted family background.

Another such character is of course Lola, and her twin brothers, Pierrot and

Jackson. At the very beginning of the book, they arrive at the Tallis household,

to find a shelter during their parent’s disputes. And the influence of their

dysfunctional family background could be observed right away – the twins are so

sad and distracted in their new environment that they run away from the Tallis

house soon after their arrival, setting off the circumstances for their sister’s

violent experience. Furthermore, as Paul Marshal, the true culprit of Lola’s rape,

is actually never accused, with the alleged and unfairly condemned rapist being

53

Robbie, he is even allowed to marry Lola a couple of years later. Though at first

it is not directly said whether Lola knows the true rapist’s identity, later during

the wedding it is suggested by Briony that she does. The whole account of the

wedding thus bears signs of a bitter secrecy that they will all carry on with them,

to the very end of their lives:

Poor vain and vulnerable Lola with the pearl-studded choker and

the rose-water scent, who longed to throw off the last restraints of

childhood, who saved herself from humiliation by falling in love, or

persuading herself she had, and who could not believe her luck

when Briony insisted on doing the talking and blaming. And what

luck that was for Lola – barely more than a child, prised open and

taken – to marry her rapist . . . By any estimate, it was a very long

time until judgment day, and until then the truth that only Marshall

and his bride knew at first hand, was steadily being walled up within

the mausoleum of their marriage. There it would lie secure in the

darkness, long after anyone who cared was dead. Every word in the

ceremony was another brick in place. (AT 324-325)

Furthermore, the act of marriage between Paul and Lola not only constitutes an

odd and bitter feature of their shared future but also prevents Briony from legally

setting things right, or at least from gaining a public atonement through the

pages of her book. As it is explained in the last part of Atonement, it is not

possible for Briony to publish her book with the characters of Paul and Lola while

they are still alive. And since Briony herself is slowly dying, with not much time

left, McEwan then concludes his novel with at least letting Briony have her own

54

private atonement – reached through the pages of her book: “I like to think that

it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion

and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them

happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not

yet” (AT 372).

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3. The Rough World of “Ian Macabre”

In the preface to his interview with Ian McEwan, Adam Begley

says that: “Ian McEwan’s early success came hand in hand with a lurid

reputation: his books were said to be twisted and dark. And in fact, his earliest

work—two collections of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In

Between the Sheets (1978), and two slim novels, The Cement Garden (1978)

and The Comfort of Strangers (1981)—contain many painfully vivid, highly

disturbing scenes, quite a few involving children. These books earned him a

nickname in the British press—Ian McAbre” (Begley). Nevertheless, despite the

fact that McEwan gained his nickname “Ian McAbre,” or more frequently “Ian

Macabre,” after publishing his early short stories and novels, we can observe

the features for which he was named so also in many of his other works –

creating some sort of a “McEwan signature style.” The most significant

attributes ot this style then could be considered the absence of happy endings,

employing undisguised sexuality and raw pictures of what really hides inside the

human mind. In his review, John Walsh appositely calls McEwan to be an

“anatomist of humanity’s chilly soul” (Walsh) – and there are no doubts that

McEwan truly conveys this chilliness and anatomical insights into the general

atmosphere of his works. And no matter if he does it merely with an aim “to

shock and disgust his readers” (Payandeh 146), as Hossein Payandeh proposes

in his paper “Normal Abnormalities: Depiction of Sado-Masochistic Violence in

Ian Mcewan’s The Comfort of Strangers,” or out of some sincere interest in the

hidden dark side of humanity, with all his unsavory topics and realistic

56

depictions, the “Macabre” nickname seems to accurately cover his literary

direction.

In her book, simply called Ian McEwan, Lynn Wells states that:

“McEwan was strongly influenced by the postmodernist techniques of

contemporary novelists such as Iris Murdoch and John Fowles in England”

(Wells 16). Though often with a certain cautiousness, postmodernism truly is a

word sometimes used by critics when assessing McEwan’s works. Jack in The

Cement Garden represents a typically postmodern unreliable narrator, Briony’s

alleged authorship in Atonement’s ending constitutes an aspect of metafiction

and On Chesil Beach approaches the issue of fictional characters facing the

unease of a real historical period – all these novels udoubtedly bear signs of the

postmodernist approach to literature. It is, however, not only the presence of

intertextuality, metafiction and various textual/narrative experimenting that

connect McEwan’s works to those of Iris Murdoch or John Fowles, as well as

many other postmodern writers, but also his novels’ topics and themes

themselves. By choosing to write about all aspects of humanity, including the

hidden, unpleasant or taboo ones, McEwan’s prose conforms to John Lye’s

approach to post-modernist literature as “the challenging of borders and limits,

including those of decency” and “the exploration of the marginalized aspects of

life and marginalized elements of society” (Lye). Consequently, all of McEwan’s

topics share a certain degree of bizarreness, showing the characters in

situations and actions that are either balancing on or falling way behind the

border of social acceptability. At the same time, however, they constitute an

unseparable part of the human nature. Incest, rape, violence, murders –

57

though in a conventional society these themes would be accepted with a

reserve or even with a certain degree of disguist – in McEwan’s works they are

simply stirring.

Even if we were to build up merely on the previous analytical

chapters, whose purpose was to introduce three major (though not the only)

novels written by McEwan, we would be already able to observe that the

themes he uses are disquieting and unsavoury on one hand, yet captivating and

nearly realistic on the other. In The Cement Garden we have an incestuous

relationship between brother and sister, some serious developmental disorder of

their little brother and, last but not least, a body of their dead mother decaying

in a concrete grave in their cellar. On Chesil Beach then provides us with a

father who sexually abuses his daughter and subsequently a couple of lovers

who are absolutely unable of making love on their very wedding night, while in

Atonement we encounter a case of child rape, followed by the victim actually

marrying the rapist. And these are just a handful of selected examples – much

more is, of course, to be discovered in McEwan’s other works. Take, for

instance, his novel The Comfort of Strangers, which, besides from featuring

“harrowing scenes of body violence” (Payandeh 146), ends up with the two

main protagonists being approached and captured by an Italian couple that, in

a strange violent-sexual deviation, sadistically kills one of them, merely for

pleasure. Or some of McEwan’s short stories – “Solid Geometry” dealing with a

husband who mysteriously disposes of his irritating wife; “Butterflies” narrated

from the view of an odd man who sexually exploits and murders a little girl; or

“Homemade,” telling the story of a teenager who, desiring to lose his virginity,

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actually makes love to his little sister. All these instances demonstrate the

obviously peculiar nature of McEwan’s themes – as it is also nicely summed up

by Malcolm: “Critics have always been fond of noticing incidences in his novels

of incest, child abuse, fetishism, bondage, macabre combinations of sex and

murder, infantile regression, and corpse dismemberment, at the serious end of

the scale, and casual transvestism, obsessive masturbation, public nose picking,

and a fascination with body fluids and odors, at the less serious end” (Malcolm

15).

Nevertheless, though they are themselves interesting enough, it is

not only the topics and themes that make McEwan's stories and novels so

appealing, read and discussed - it is also the way he works with these subjects,

approaching them with a certain chilliness and an almost children's openness.

He does not try to cover them in any way, but speaks in simple and clear terms,

providing the reader with the pure reality of their existence – such an attitude

could be observed for instance in On Chesil Beach, where Florence thinks about

a modern handbook for young brides introducing the “unknown world of

mature sexuality” with pseudo-cheerful descriptions: “Other phrases offended

her intelligence, particularly those concerning entrances: Not long before he

enters her ... or, now at last he enters her, and, happily, soon after he has

entered her ... Was she obliged on the night to transform herself for Edward

into a kind of portal or drawing room through which he might process? Almost

as frequent was a word that suggested to her nothing but pain, flesh parted

before a knife: penetration” (CB 8). Similarly, in The Cement Garden, McEwan

keeps, through Jack’s eyes, vividly describing various repulsive details of

59

everything around him – from hair growing inside his mother’s nose to the

liquid outcome of his frequent masturbation: “Against the downy hairs, lying

across the edge of a grey concrete stain, glistened a little patch of liquid, not

milky as I had thought, but colourless. I dabbed at it with my tongue and it

tasted of nothing. I stared at it a long time, up close to look for little things with

long flickering tails. As I watched, it dried to a barely visible shiny crust which

cracked when I flexed my wrist” (CG 18). Equally, the Atonement, dealing in

some of its sections with the horrors of war and the environments of war

hospitals, features vivid realistic descriptions of pain and wounded human

bodies: “The side of Luc’s head was missing. The hair was shaved well back

from the missing portion of skull. Below the jagged line of bone was a spongy

crimson mess of brain, several inches across, reaching from the crown almost

to the tip of his ear” (AT 308). With their almost animal intensity and vividness,

all these examples actually embody what makes McEwan’s works so distinctive

and appealing – they show something that we may read as bizarre, yet this

bizarreness also bears features of realism. Despite the initial shock or disguist,

one soon has to admit that these things really exist, that they are a part of our

lives – a part of our humanity. And it is exactly this paradox that scares us and

at the same time makes us so eager to read on.

Apart from McEwan’s vivid descriptions and the themes themselves,

another thing that helps create the dense and cheerless atmosphere in his novels

is the fact that some of them take place in an unspecified abstract environment,

i.e., the location is not clearly specified. This feature can be observed for instance

in The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers or in his early short stories, for

60

none of these works actually have a particular location specified in the plot. In

The Comfort of Strangers we can only presume that the characters are moving

around the streets of Venice, taking into consideration the references to Italy and

water canals that spread occasionaly throughout the narrative. The Cement

Garden is even more tricky for, unlike the prior one, this novel does not feature

any specific references or hints at all, enhancing thus the notion of “timelessness

and of mystery” (Williams 219). The whole plot is set into a vague picture of a

city, or perhaps its suburbs - yet only a handful of tiny details does allow us to

make such assumptions. There are said to be some old and abandoned houses

and prefabs, described mostly in terms of their emptiness, bleakness and

desolate state, and creating a picture of “utter decay and disorder” (Malcolm 55).

The idea of plain shady concrete somehow flits above the plot and not only thanks

to the novel's title. As noticed by Williams: “The greyness of the prose, its almost

total lack of imagery, and the absence of cultural and historical reference points

all serve to heighten our perception of the drabness and emptiness of an

existence seemingly outside time and society” (Williams 220). And indeed,

watching the lovers in the Comfort of Strangers wandering throughout the hazy

shapes of an unknown city or Jack in The Cement Garden roaming around the

ruined houses of an empty concrete neighbourhood, does significantly raise the

general feelings of void, bleakness and desolation – the very same feelings that

the characters themselves experience at times.

Putting now together the certain controversy of his themes, the

undisguised way of handling them and the overall dismal ambience, we get a

complex world of McEwan’s prose. And while his literary preoccupations with

61

relationships are a generally accepted fact and a known feature of his works, it

is mostly the way he works with them, creates them and portrays them that

makes the readers either turn away in disgust or eagerly read on. His choice of

unconventional, yet almost formidably realistic motives, and the openness of their

depiction then smoothly corresponds with the peculiarity of his characters, and

the ackward tragical relationships or situations that they are helplessly writhing

within. No matter if we look at Robbie and Cecilia, Florence and Edward or Jack

and his siblings, all these figures eventually end up either dead, in despair or

beyond the very line of social understanding. As Malcolm notices: “A summary of

the stories of McEwan's novels will show that he is very concerned with the role

of the irrational in his characters' lives. From the early short stories the reader

sees characters driven by desires and emotions that they cannot control or really

analyze them” (Malcolm 14). Accordingly then, letting these characters arise

from rather distorted circumstances and dysfunctional family backgrounds thus

seems almost inevitable and natural.

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4. Present, yet absent – parental incompleteness and its substitutions

It has been generally accepted by society that in a functional family

unit a child should have two parents. Of course in the modern world, with all its

liberations and developments, this consensus is going through many challenges

and changes in thinking and new adjusted views are being pushed through. The

model of a mother and father is often replaced by either single parenting or

homosexual couples, yet even though these structures are common, even normal

to say, they are still perceived as rather incomplete. And incomplete, though in a

little bit different way, are also the families in Ian McEwan’s novels. Their

incompleteness then becomes either practical, in the way that one of the parents

is dead or otherwise absent from the household, or functional, meaning that the

mother or father is mentally unable of performing the parenting role to his/her

children. And while some of these children simply put up with the condition on

their own and immerse themselves into some fulfilling activity or eagerly wait for

a chance of leaving the family, others are trying to find a suitable substitution,

which they often do in their siblings. Nevertheless, no matter how piteously or

calmly they accept the circumstances, in the end they are always emotionally

marked by them, in a more or less significant way.

Of all the examples that have been provided here so far, the most

obvious absence of parents is of course featured in The Cement Garden. This

novel introduces four siblings who, after the death of their father, watch their

mother gradually fade away and eventually die – which they try to conceal and

live on their own for some time. Subsequently then, as Williams in his paper

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notes: “Free of any kind of control, the children are incapable of giving any proper

structure to their existence” (Williams 218). And indeed, after burying their

mother, the children, suddenly parentless, find themselves in some sort of a

social and time vacuum, with no structue to hold on to. What at first seemed

like a welcomed freedom quickly turns into a disorder with no rules and no

boundaries. Though the kitchen needs to be cleaned, some meal needs to be

made, the youngest child has to be taken care of – no one actually seems to care

and “the house is allowed to degenerate into a disorder of decayed food and dirt,

while the children spend their days to no traditionally approved of purpose”

(Malcolm 63). In a chaos like that, the provisionary helm is taken by the oldest

family member, that is, the brisk and manipulative Julie. In her last weeks of

life, their mother’s illness makes her stay in the house, later in her room and

finally in her bed only – thus being incapable of performing the motherly role

properly. After her death the whole situation then does not seem to change much

as “the mother remains in death what she had been in life: an absent presence

that helped the children survive emotionally and stay together, but had not truly

given them the protection and support they needed” (Ionica 242). For Julie takes

over some of the parental duties already while the mother is still alive – she gives

orders to her siblings, takes care of the shopping and other – after the mother’s

inevitable death she then simply continues to be in charge, much to Jack’s

resentment. Unfortunately, being still a child herself, she does not perform a very

sufficient substitution of a paternal element and makes some very bad decisions

– most of them influencing her siblings’ further development in a rather negative

way. She supports her youngest brother in dressing as a girl and, despite his

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school age, lets him sleep in a baby cot. She teases and humiliates her brother

Jack for his appearance and teenage insecurities, yet she later engages in a

sexual relationship with him. And finally, she absolutely recklessly invites her

boyfriend, Derek, into their house and basically gives way for his exposing the

truth. All these steps are a mere evidence of her immaturity and a consequent

incompetence of substituting the role of the mother, in which she expectedly

fails.

The feature of family incompleteness can be also observed in the

Atonement. Though compared to The Cement Garden, in which the parents are

simply dead, the Tallis children in the Atonement have both parents alive and

physically-well, their absence from the family life is still striking. Mr Tallis spends

much time at work and is usually referred to only idirectly, mostly as speaking on

the phone or in connection with Robbie’s education. His wife, Emily Tallis, is given

much more space on the pages of the novel, for a whole chapter is devoted to

her voice. Yet, the purpose of this chapter actually only strengthens the overal

picture of her as not engaging much in her children’s lifes – though in her inner

thoughts she does think about them, as well as about her husband and the whole

household: “She could not not afford to let Hermione into her thoughts. Instead,

Emily, breathing quietly in the darkness, gauged the state of the household by

straining to listen. In her condition, this was the only contribution she could

make” (AT 65). Being a mere observer and listener, she herself is well aware of

her incapability of being there for her children: “But though she sometimes

longed to rise up and intervene, especially if she thought Briony was in need of

her, the fear of pain kept her in place” (AT 67). By doing so, she then leaves

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space for Cecilia, who, at least in Briony’s point of view, partly replaces her.

Subsequently, when we look at the Atonement movie version, we can see that

the filmmakers go even further than McEwan, for they only feature the mother

and father shortly in the initial part. Though in the novel Emily is given one whole

chapter, in the movie she and her husband are provided with only a little space

on the screen. Such a thing may not seem unusal in the field of books turned

into movies, for the practical and technical limitations of a movie generally do not

allow filmmakers to feature all elements that are present in the literary source.

Naturally then a choice has to be made of what is neccessary and unneccessary

for the movie and its targeted audience. By focusing mostly on the love

relationship between Cecilia and Robbie, its desctruction from the hands of

Briony, and the tragical (yet audience-attractive) war setting and rather avoiding

the background family elements they thus create a powerful piece of

cinematography, yet simultaneously fail in providing their main characters with

some deeper motivations. And so – despite their different goals and audience –

while the presence of the parents is irrelevant for the filmmakers, their absence

is relevant to McEwan.

This is relevant not only in the case of the Tallis family, but also in

the lives of their niece and nephews, as well as in the life of Robbie. The former

significantly suffer from their parent’s disputes and are even fully separated from

them, finding shelter in the Tallis house. The latter, Robbie, is then said to have

lived only with his mother since childhood (his father allegedly left him alone with

his mother), which results in his tight, yet dangerous, bonds to the Tallis family

members – Mr. Tallis provides money for his education, Mrs. Tallis is rather

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distant and not fond of her husband’s decision, Cecilia falls in love with him and

Briony, through her childish impetuousness and imagination, basically destroys

his life. And so, what on the surface looks like a decent family setting, reveals as

a complex chain of communication flaws, strange relationships and contradictory

feelings, all leading to an unfortunate tangle of actions, with the already known

tragical consequences.

Similarly to Atonement, On Chesil Beach also features families that

both seem to be complete – at least at first. Furthermore, unlike the previously

discussed two novels, On Chesil Beach does not prompt the readers to think

about the characters’ family background up until the novel’s middle part. From

the start the novel provides a simple, almost comical at times, story of a newly

married couple who are struggling with their first intimate moments together.

What at first seems as an awkward chain of little fears and misunderstandings

then only reveals in its full potential, uncovering the true cause of mostly

Florence’s difficulties. And, as expected, these are tightly connected to her family

background and its dark secret. As featured already in the chapter analyzing

solely the novel, Florence’s mother seems to be distant, self-centered and non-

supportive – in the final scene on the beach, Florence leans against a branch and

expresses her possible lack of love and comfort that a child should find in its

mother’s arms: “She was wedged comfortably in the angle of a branch, feeling

in the small of her back, through the massive girth of the trunk, the residual

warmth of the day. This was how an infant might be, securely nestling in the

crook of its mother’s arm, though Florence did not believe she could ever have

nestled against Violet, whose arms were thin and tense from writing and thinking”

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(CB 141). Much worse things are yet embodied in the figure of her father. Though

not said so literally, “the text provocatively hints that Florence and her father

were somehow involved in a sexual transgression on one of the many trips they

took together” (Kahane) – indeed, a cause serious enough to significantly mark

one’s attitude towards sexuality. The “family dysfunctionality” thus takes yet

another shape here, featuring an educated upper-middle-class family, whose

member in a twisted and horrid way misuses his parental authority and leaves

his daughter emotionally marked forever – in a way, the term “parental absence”

is reversed here into a “stifling hidden presence”.

Though, as Natasha Walter in her On Chesil Beach review states,

“while Edward's secret may seem at the outset the more difficult to cope with”

he eventually “seems to have freed himself pretty successfully from the dragging

encumbrance of that embarrassment” (Walter). Still, despite not being affected

by his family background as seriously as Florence, even the strenuous effort to

free himself from it speaks clearly of this background’s dysfunctionality.

Moreover, as intimated also in the previous chapters of this thesis – growing up

in a family which, despite the mother being brain-damaged, is not capable of

admitting loudly the true state of things and, as Walter states, “chooses not to

refer to her disability, but to keep up a façade of normality” (Walter), surely does

not contribute positively to the children’s ability to express themselves and to

communicate honestly about their feelings. Combined then with Florence’s deep

intimate unease, Edward’s communicative restraints and sexual expectations

constitute the unfortunate climax of their relationship and the whole novel.

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To conclude this issue – the picture that arises from the presented

McEwan’s novels is one of families that are deceptively complete (with an

exception being The Cement Garden of course), yet after looking under the

surface one easily reveals their true blemished face. What is more, while the most

affected by these disturbances are of course the children, it is also these very

children that often accept their conditions with either a certain degree of

aloofness or even with a slight joy of the “freedom” to come. They simply learn

how to put up with the circumstances, finding either an emotional substitution in

their older siblings (Briony in the Atonement), looking forward to leaving the

family (Edward in the On Chesil Beach) or even enjoying the loosening of morals

and rules (Jack in The Cement Garden). The true menace of these circumstances

then lies in the fact that at first they are unknown to them and only reveal their

full impact later during their adulthood, i.e., for some of them already too late to

be fought against.

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5. Dysfunctional family – formative and devastating

It is not at all an uncommon thing for writers who in their books

engage themselves in the topics of human relationships to also try to provide

these relationships with a formative background. Naturally then, the more

troubles the relationships get into, the more personal/emotional doubts the

characters have to solve, the bigger is the need to look for the origin of these

issues, starting of course in their very family background. And, as it was already

proven before in this thesis, for Ian McEwan is definitely not a writer interested

in successful romancies and happy endings, his characters usually find

themselves struggling in life, dealing with a number of personal failures and

misfortunes. Consequently then, McEwan provides these characters with rather

distorted and troubled family background, i.e., circumstances to blame for the

protagonists’ distress. Furthemore, either by stealthy hints or absolutely nakedly

and expressively, he ascribes to these family relationships a certain forming

power which, destructive in a way, determines the characters’ further emotional

development and their behaviour in the relationships which they are about to

form on their own.

Sticking for the start with the novels that were introduced here so

far, that is, The Cement Garden, On Chesil Beach and Atonement, one can clearly

trace the presence of some similar patterns in all three of them. Firstly, the

characters all deal with serious personal issues, fears and insecurities, some of

them constituting even a sort of “ghosts of the past”. Florence and Edward in the

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On Chesil Beach find themselves in a marriage, whose start is significantly marked

by Florence’s intimate anxiety and Edward’s communication inability. Briony in

the Atonement feels alone becuase of her father’s absence and her mother’s

incapability of performing her maternal role, her cousins emotionally suffer from

their parent’s divorce and Robbie, due to not having a father of his own, finds

himself in a difficult social situation, growing up with the Tallis children and to

their mother’s resentment having a nice relationship with their father. And last,

but not least, the children in The Cement Garden are seriously marked by the

death of their parents and, using the words of James Wood’s paper about the

manipulations of Ian McEwan, “set about creating their own, corrupted version

of childhood” (Wood). Secondly, as we sooner or later find out in the novels, all

these characters’s difficulties and failures are rooted more or less strongly in the

circumstances of their childhood and the role their parents played in it. Moreover,

in most of the cases the portrayal of these circumstances shows them to be rather

distorted, sometimes even fully dysfunctional. Obviously, the protagonists’

personal issues and the family background from which they rise up are tightly

connected. Subsequently, an influence can be observed here from the thinking

of R. D. Laing, a famous Scottish psychiatrist who, together with Aaron Esterson,

published a book named Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) – described by

the Encyclopædia Britannica as “a group of studies of people whose mental

illnesses he viewed as being induced by their relationships with other family

members” (“R.D. Laing”). Laing’s views of mental illnesses, especially

schizophrenia, as being rooted in the patients’ family relations became famous,

influential and controversial at the same time. As Wikipedia says, he “stressed

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the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of madness”

(“R.D. Laing”) – an approach familiar to the one of McEwan’s in creating the

characters of his novels. Though not going that far as to deal with madness or

serious mental illnesses, by employing the model of a dysfunctional family

background which negatively influences further mental development of the family

members, McEwan surely shows some signs of Laing’s influence.

Let us now recapitulate the way this thesis’ main topic is featured

in The Cement Garden. The main focus of the novel is of course aimed at the

four orphaned children, primarily the two oldest ones, Jack and Julie. Their

shared childhood is not only striken by the death of their father and the later

death of their mother, but some influence could be traced already in the earlier

period when the parents are still alive. The father of the family is a detached

strange man who dominates over his wife and holds a firm rule over the children.

Even in the short account of him we can see his impact upon the family life – he

is a creator of various jokes about each of the household members, mocking their

specific weaknesses, yet strictly forbiding any jokes about himself: “Jokes were

not made about Father because they were not funny” (CB 16). Even the way he

is referred to in the novel – using a capital “F” in the “Father” word is a sign of a

strange relationship between him and the narrator, it even indicates some sort

of distance and impersonal attitude which the chidren feel towards their father.

One of the features for such coldness may be found also in his strong need to

control things – he is trying to make his garden almost geometrically precise and

tidy, building narrow pavements and choosing only particularly shaped flowers:

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The paths were so narrow it was possible to lose your balance and

fall into the flower beds. He chose flowers for their neatness and

symmetry. He liked tulips best of all and planted them well apart.

He did not like bushes or ivy or roses. He would have nothing that

tangled. On either side of us the houses had been cleared and in

summer the vacant sites grew lush with weeds and their flowers.

Before his first heart attact he had intended to build a high wall

round his special world. (CB 15)

The need of control is then reflected not only in his gardening goals, but also in

running the whole family. Furthermore, he not only intended to build a wall to

surround his house but already succeeded in building an imaginary wall around

his own family. At the instigation of the father big parties and celebrations do not

take place in the house, no wider family exists, no friends are ever invited: “There

was never a birthday party during which he did not lose his temper with someone.

At Sue’s eight birthday party he tried to send her to bed for fooling around.

Mother intervened, and that was the last of the parties. Tom had never had one”

(CG 35). And the father’s relationship to Tom, his youngest child, is a particularly

noteworthy one, for it is intimated in the novel that there is an invisible struggle

going on between them, to gain the mother’s attention. Indeed the father acts

rather unfriendly towards Tom, who then secretly seeks shelter in the embrace

of his mother. The mother, though appearing in the novel for a longer period

than the father, does not seem to be such a strong personality. She is rather

quiet, submissive and, most of all, suffering from a serious illness. By that she is

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gradually more and more absent from the family life, slowly preparing her

children for their final solitude.

With the “verbal and emotional abuse that the father exerts on the

family and the physical frailty and psychological passivity of the mother” (Ionica

241), it is no wonder that the children often escape from the parents to their own

private games. In her review of the novel, Anne Tyler notes that: “For Jack, his

two sisters and his little brother, the only pleasures are those that erupt beneath

a rigid surface: some rather joyless sexual games and a few stolen moments of

willfull disobedience” (Tyler). Indeed, the nature of the siblings’ games is explicit

in its sexual undertone and even though they are cut off for some time because

of Sue’s shame, this undertone is further maintained by Jack’s secret desire of

Julie. His frequent notions of his sister’s physical appearance and thoughts of her

even while masturbating manifestly prove his sexual attraction towards her. And

later on, after the mother’s death, in their new world withouth restrictions and

barriers this desire is finally fullfiled as in the end Julie and Jack eventually end

up having sex together. Tom’s development after both the parents are dead also

continues in an unusual, yet expected way. Through his crossdressing as a girl

he gradually degenerates into a character of a mere infant and lets himself be

comforted by Julie just as little babies are. In the end he even persuades his

siblings to let him sleep in an old baby cot. All this seems to be a clear

consequence of his prior escapes into his mother’s arms that protected him from

the resentment of his father. And so even after the mother’s death he continues

in these escapes, having Julie as a substitution and later even mentally returning

to the state of an innocent carefree baby. Considering now also the social

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seclusion created partly by their father some time ago, together with the lack of

any relatives or family friends, the children’s unfortunate development, rooted in

the distorted family circumstances, can go on smootly for some time. For there

is no one to ask questions (apart from Dereck), no one to care, the children

undisturbedly reach the point where, as Petr Chalupský in his paper “Atonement

– Continuity and Changes in Ian McEwan’s works” states: “The taboos are

broken, sexuality is released from its restrictive bonds, and true identities are

discovered” (Chalupský 3). And all this then inevitably escalate into the final

climax of the novel – being fully discovered by Dereck and subsequently by the

police and other authorities, destroying the little corrupted world that the chidren

themselves created.

Though not in such an open and straightforward way, On Chesil

Beach also works with a theme of distorted sexuality, possibly caused by the

family circumstances. Both the newly wed Florence and Edward have some

serious intimate issues to solve – Edward has too high sexual expectations, yet

is unable to speak about the topic, and Florence suffers from a severe sexual

anxiety, or, as Ingersoll in his paper calls it “repugnance toward sexuality, or

perhaps more particularly toward the male body and its functions” (Ingersoll

135). Despite the fact that at the beginning this may seem rather ridiculous and

one could simply ascribe it to their inexperience, youth and the time they live in,

soon we are about to find out that the cause lies much deeper and is of much

higher significance. First of all, even the marriage itself seems to be rather rushed

into and not thought through. A reason for this can be found in both the lovers’

eagerness to leave their unsatisfactory homes with their “mothers--one brain-

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damaged, the other coldly intellectual--who disappoint” (Kahane). Florence truly

lives in a household with a slightly egocentric mother who does not much support

Florence’s musical career and has some radically different political views of the

world, and a father who appears as a strange figure, repulsive at times, yet

appearing to have a close relationship with his daughter. As it is then intimated

in the novel he even may have sexually abused his daughter while sailing together

on his boat. Living in such a household, Florence is eagerly looking forward to

getting away and, considering her warm love feelings towards Edward, marriage

seems the best form of such an escape. Edward’s family background also makes

him impatient to get out. He too grows up in a household with both parents alive,

yet his mother suffers from a permanent brain-damage and is most of the time

mentally absent from the family life. She keeps drifting through the house like a

ghost, a mere fragile shell unable of performing the role of a mother and wife.

Moreover, while everyone in the household knows (or at least senses) that there

is something wrong with their mother, a safe consensus is maintained that

nothing is to be admitted aloud in the house. Though the family is basically run

by Edward’s father, the imaginary credits are officialy attributed to his mentally

distant wife – everyone simply plays his role and puts up with the circumstances.

Though Edward does not admit any feelings of shame for the state of his mother,

the overal atmosphere of the household does not constitute a functional

environment for a young man’s development – the lack of a true maternal care,

together with the father’s hard self-sacrifice and the artificially maintained illusion

of normality, all this naturally makes Edward restless and looking forward to

leaving the house for good. And despite the fact that, unlike for women, it is not

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so unthinkable for men to live on their own and Edward is thus not so bound by

the prospect of a marriage, his longing for creating a life of his own surely also

adds to the (mostly sexual) reasons for his hasty marriage proposal.

After finally reaching the so desired (and partly feared) marriage,

both Florence and Edward however find themselves on a crossroad of their

different expectations. Florence, fearing everything sexual and simply looking

for a calm happy life at Edward’s side is ultimately confronted with his long

repressed physical needs. And it is right here, on their very wedding night that

the influences of their families and emotional background catch up with them and

make it impossible for them to save their love. The cause of Florence’s intimate

fears is finally revealed in part – the memories of her father strike her so hard

that it becomes clear to the readers that there is no way for her to overcome

them just on her own. Though not yet ready to admit the reason for her

difficulties, she makes a step forward and tries to explain her condition to Edward,

offering with all her heart a sort of an open marriage. Unfortunately Edward feels

rather insulted by that and rudely rejects the whole idea – creating one of the

most powerful and forming points of the novel’s narrative, as noted also by

Ingersoll: “If we have been looking for one clear moment whose history has been

the burden of this narrative, one moment in which the future of Florence and

Edward is forever determined, it is here in his ‘sin of omission,’ his inability to run

after her and, as they say, give love a chance” (Ingersoll 142). Apart from his

anger and a possibly offended self-conceit Edward’s behaviour may also be a

result of some inner fear that there would be yet another abnormality among his

loved ones – having grown up with his brain-damaged mother he is simply afraid

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of any possible “deviations” that may occur again in his family life. What is more,

perhaps because of his own family’s inability of naming the mother’s condition

he now too cruelly and abruptly tries to find a proper word, medical term for the

condition of Florence. By calling her “frigid” and a “fraud” he hurts her feelings

for good and they both reach the point from which there is no way back, no

chance of a happy ending. Broken by the ghosts of their past and betrayed by

the dysfunctionality of their family background, they alienate and metaphorically

say farewell to their short marriage and the love they both so hoped to find

comfort in.

Similarly to the On Chesil Beach, in the Atonement McEwan too

does not put the disrupted family features on display as openly and expressively

as he does in The Cement Garden. The novel, considered by many critics and

readers to be McEwan’s masterpiece, opens with a calm description of an upper-

middle class household in a hot summer break. The narrative shifts to various

figures – Briony, her sister Cecilia, Mrs. Tallis and Robbie – providing their

individual accounts of the sunny day, with the difference of their accounts being

so crucial in considering the plot development and the unfortunate

misunderstandings and misjudgements from which it derives. The motionlessness

and heaviness of the hot day reflects itself also in the narrative – everything goes

on lazily, evoking a certain degree of stiffness and almost a menacing feeling of

something to come and break the suffocating silence. However, apart from the

well-known “crime” soon to be committed by Briony, one more thing also impairs

the pseudo idealistic picture of the family – it is the reader’s revelation of the

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hidden dysfunctionality. Petr Chalupský in his paper promptly summarizes this

dysfunctionality in the following way:

The Tallis family from Atonement also represents a variant of a

seemingly smoothly functioning traditional male-dominated

patriarchal middle-class household, but as soon as the reader takes

a closer look, he or she recognizes that underneath the polished

surface there is sufficient amount of tension to cause an explosion.

All the members of the family are far from the happy ideal – the

absent and unfaithful father, his submissive wife, Cecilia who,

despite her university education and free spirit, is expected to take

up her mother’s role in a conventional marriage, and Leon, a hollow

man without independent judgement, whose ‘agreeable nullity’

reminds Cecilia of ‘a polished artefact’[9] (Chalupský 5)

Despite using exaggeratedly the word “tension,” for the family members seem to

be placatingly putting up with the not ideal circumstances rather than feeling

some deep suspense, Chalupský makes an accurate point which confirms the

hidden dysfunctionality of the Tallis family. And looking from a distance at the

events to come later on that hot summer day, we can clearly observe that the

dysfunctionality (not only of the Tallis family) has its place among the causes of

the unfortunate plot development.

As discussed thoroughly in the previous chapter, dealing with the

issue of parental incompleteness, Briony, the narrator and an alleged author of

the novel is a young girl, living in a world of her own fantasies and literary

preoccupations. One of the reasons for her obsession with writing is of course

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the practical absence of her mother and father. Though being the head of the

family, Mr. Tallis spends his days at work, not dedicating much time to his

children. His wife, Mrs. Tallis, is said to suffer from severe headaches and thus

frequently retires to her bedroom. Growing up without the care of her parents,

Briony not only develops and extensive imagination, but also a certain attention-

seeking attitude – both of which she then unfortunately employs in her account

of the relationship between Cecilia and Robbie, as well as of Lola’s rape. As a

substitution for her mother she partly comes to Cecilia, in whose arms she finds

some comfort, yet Cecilia’s own insecurities and discontents (together with the

time that she herself spends away at school) do not make her able to perform a

sufficient substitution. Taking into consideration her family background, it is no

wonder that in the most crucial moment Briony’s mind and feelings betray her,

allowing her to create a false picture of Robbie as a villain and to determinedly

assert its veracity. Her mother also plays a part in this, for in her aversion to

Robbie and guilt feeling for not being a good mother, she supports her daughter’s

version and, despite his innocence, helps send Robbie to prison.

Apart from the Tallis family, the power of a disruptive family

background could be also traced in the other characters’s lives. The quarreling

parents of Lola, Pierott and Jackson make their children go away and seek shelter

in the Tallis household – where the unhappy twins by their escape attempt

basically pave the way for their sister’s rape. Further, Robbie’s childhood without

a father makes him stick close to the Tallis children, establish a relationship to

Mr. Tallis himself and get himself into a position which Fraser describes as “class

and social dislocation” (Fraser 466). Despite his lower social class, Robbie, using

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Fraser’s words, “through his contact with the Tallis family as a child, becomes

absorbed into the bourgeois mores of upper-middle-class life, and with the

patronage of the father Jack Tallis, he goes to grammar school and then on to

Cambridge” (Fraser 466). All this, unfortunately, causes Mrs. Tallis’ resentment,

which tragically results in supporting her younger daughter’s false accusations,

thus practically helping send the innocent Robbie to prison and undirectly

sentencing him and Cecilia to unhappiness and later tragical death. All these

instances of disrupted family backgrounds then have similar, if not the same,

consequences – that is, the members (especially the chidren members) of these

families are often inevitably marked by the dysfunctionalities, either internally or

from the outside, leading them to some unfortunate situations, wrong decisions

and personal failures. The forming power of the distorted family background is

thus quite obvious, and so is its destructive impact upon the characters.

The topic of family dysfunctionality, its forming power and

consequences, is of course not restricted only to the three novels that were

presented here – though their analysis does serve as the cornerstone for tracing

this topic and demonstrating its presence – many of McEwan’s other works could

be also read as dealing with the same patterns. One of these is, for example,

also the novel Comfort of Strangers. In spite of the novel’s unexpected violent

climax, for our analysis we shall focus on the short episodes featured inside of

the novel and recounting a childhood experience that later proves to be so crucial

for the development of one of the characters. In these snippets we can witness

the character of Robert, one of the novel’s main protagonists, who lives with his

mother, sisters and Italian father, who works as a diplomat, in a rather strict and

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hostile household in London. His father is portrayed as very severe and

authoritative, in contrast with the submissive and opressed mother. As Bert

Cardullo in his review of the novel’s movie adaptation also notices: “From earliest

childhood, the world Robert saw was made by his imperious father, of whom

everyone was afraid” (Cardullo 373). Moreover, for being the father’s favorite

and the alleged future head of the family, Robert experiences some serious

hatred of his older sisters. He is, for instance, forced to witness how both the

girls are beaten with the father’s leather belt for secretly wearing their mother’s

makeup. Consequently then, as noticed by Hossein: “Robert’s sadism, his

insatiable desire to manipulate others, to stalk and even go as far as murdering

his victims, is the consequence of the misogynist behaviour to which he was

exposed and which he was encouraged to emulate” (Payandeh 152). It is then,

however, not only Robert’s sadistic tendencies that have their cause in the family

circumstances of his childhood, but also the role he plays in relationships – for

his own relationship with his wife Caroline strongly resembles the dominant-

submissive one of his parents. He masters over Caroline who willingly yields to

his power and sadomasochistic dominance. What is more, together with the

violent nature of their sexuality, the relationship of Caroline and Robert far

exceeds this resemblance and results in Robert seriously breaking Caroline’s back

during their sexual intercourse, leaving her forever disabled. This moment,

prompting them to think about the idea of actual death for the sake of one’s

sexual pleasure then inevitably leads them to committing their final crime – they

choose a random couple of attractive strangers and, after gradually getting to

know each other, imprison them in their own house and let the woman watch

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while they kill her partner. The link between Robert’s childhood and upbringing

from the hands of his dominating father and his own inclination towards

mastering over women and carrying out sadomasochistic sex with them is more

than obvious here. Once again, a character of McEwan’s novel is so distinctively

marked by his distorted family background that it influences his further

development and the way he behaves in his own future relationships – as also

noticed by Moseley: “A longer view might recognize him as another of McEwan's

characters spoiled or ruined by a deforming childhood environment” (Moseley).

To not restrict the analysis only to novels, another example of

dysfunctional family relationships, though not in connection with children and

their further development, could be seen also in McEwan’s short stories – for

instance, the one called “Solid Geometry,” “a peculiar account of a preoccupied

man” (Moseley) and his non-functional marriage in which he not only behaves

rather impassionately and coldly towards his wife, but seems to be almost

irritated by her mere presence, despite her obvious love to him. After spending

some time reading his grandfather’s diaries the man delves himself into stories

about a physical abnormality which, by folding an object according to a precise

procedure, allows this object to actually disappear. At this point, the reader

already starts to feel the strange end to come – by arranging a pleasant evening

the husband tricks his wife into thinking that they are about to make love, which

quickly turns into him folding his wife’s body and finally confirming the mysterious

story’s validity – in the end he really manages “to ‘disappear’ her by turning her

in on herself like a Möbius strip” (Moseley). Despite the fact that the short story’s

biggest attraction lies in its occupation with mysteries and the overal dense and

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dark atmosphere which supports them, an interesting noteworthy element is the

strange relationship of the married couple. The husband’s aversion towards his

wife is strikingly crude and intense though not having any particular reasoning

which the husband is himself aware of. His coldness ever grows after his wife

smashes apart a glass container with a conserved penis of some historical figure,

together with the diaries – an inheritance after his grandfather. An obvious

symbolism arises here – may the wife destroying a historical penis, her husband’s

valuable possesion, be an allusion to her also somehow destroying her husband’s

manhood? As the story does not provide us with any wider background of their

marriage and only focuses on its peculiar ending, it is not possible to explain their

origins, yet one thing is indisputable – the obvious distortion of the whole

relationship and its fatal consequence.

James Wood in his paper claims that “most of Ian McEwan’s novels

and stories are about trauma and contingency” (Wood), and while contingency

truly does appear in McEwan’s plots and their developments, the emotions,

feelings and behaviour of his characters are, right on the contrary, almost

predestined. On Chesil Beach, for instance, features two lovers, whose marriage

is, as stressed many times throughout the novel, taking place in a wrong time

period: “They were adults at last, on holiday, free to do as they choose. In just

a few years’ time, that would be the kind of thing quite ordinary young people

would do. But for now, the times held them” (CB 18). Indeed we may take this

as an act of contingency, a mischance of dealing with sexual difficulties in a time

when a discussion about them still appears rather impossible: “How could he

have begun to broach the matter of his own particular deformity, what could

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have been his opening words? They did not exist. Such a language had yet to be

invented” (CB 141). Yet at the same time, the family circumstances of both the

lovers seem to make them almost predestined to deal with the misfortunes of

the time the way they do. With all their personal fears, pains and family

background they are simply unable of getting rid of them without any big harm

to their souls. Another example that could be used to not completely disprove,

but to restrict Wood’s idea of contingency is the Atonement novel. Looking at the

first part of the novel, all the little misunderstandings, secrets and Briony’s

revelations truly do depend on a chance and are a result of a momentary frame

of circumstances. Robbie handing in the wrong love letter, Briony witnessing

Robbie’s and Cecilia’s pool meeting or their making love in the library – all these

occasions are unfortunate little moments whose form depends on a mere chance,

they are a matter of minutes and seconds. Yet, at the same time, the ways the

characters act in these moments are a result of their own psychical developments

and inner motives that are formed, among other things, by their family

background. Briony, for instance, is in her decisions strongly influenced by her

excessive imagination and attention-seeking nature, both deriving from the

absence of parental care and her unguarded loneliness in the house. Helping in

her following actions and accusations is also the backing and assistance of her

mother, who, partly because of disliking Robbie and partly because of the

unspoken guilt she feels for not attending to her daughter enough, supports

Briony’s version of Lola’s rape and Robbie’s label as the supposed rapist, despite

the obvious lack of direct evidence. Of course, with all Briony’s feelings and

children insecurities she succumbs to her mother’s interest and lets herself be

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driven by it. Consequently then, while Wood in his paper correctly calls McEwan

“the great contemporary stager of traumatic contingency as it strikes ordinary

lives” (Wood), his claims definitely can not be applied to all elements of McEwan’s

work – for his characters often find themselves in uncomfortable situations that

arise from an unfortunate coincidence, but the way they feel or act in these

situations is still strongly influenced by their family circumstances and rooted in

their rather distorted family background.

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6. Conclusion

To conclude – it was the main aim of this thesis to present the works

of Ian McEwan and the way he, in these works, employs the topic of family

dysfunctionality and its influence on the family members’ further development.

Through the means of a close reading and thorough analysis of the three selected

novels, i.e., The Cement Garden, the Atonement and On Chesil Beach, the ground

was set for a following critical discussion, including also some of McEwan’s other

prose. The purpose of these steps was not only to trace the topic of family

dysfunctionality in a number of McEwan’s works, but also to prove the

significance of this issue in connection to the development of his characters, and

show how it constitutes a characteristic feature of his writing – a feature present

not just in the three presented novels, but rather continuously moving through a

major part of his writing.

The characters that McEwan creates in his novels (and stories) are

no superheroes, but rather ordinary people from middle and upper-middle class

society. However, thanks to McEwan’s preoccupations with the most peculiar and

tempting sides of our humanity and his masterful craft of building up the dense

atmosphere around these sides, his characters are everything but boring.

McEwan is no kind father to them, he is more a curious surgeon, dissecting their

minds, souls and feelings in bizarre situations that he himself places them into.

At first these characters seem to be just ordinary people from relatively safe and

featureless environments, living in “an atmosphere of still stiffness, a paralyzed

sterility, disguised as seeming peacefulness which evokes an evil foreboding in

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the reader that something terrible is about to happen that will ruin or completely

change the characters’ lives, probably for the worse” (Chalupský 2). And indeed,

McEwan’s characters sooner or later suddenly find themselves in some

extraordinary and unpleasant situations. Consequently then, it is the very way

they get into these situations and even more so the way they feel and act in

them, together with the inevitable negative changes they have to undergo, that

make McEwan’s novels so tempting and unsavory at the same time. As McEwan

is well known for his interest in the hidden parts of human desires, fears and

sexuality, he often lets these aspects of the soul come to the surface right in

these very critical moments, letting his characters reveal their true self and, in a

way, thus partly admitting our general human self. In an interview following the

September 11 attacks, his interest in human psyche shows off while he speaks

about the concept of evil:

I don’t really believe in evil at all . . . I think there are only people

behaving, and sometimes behaving monstrously. Sometimes their

monstrous behaviour is so beyond our abilities to explain it, we have

to reach for this numinous notion of evil. But I think it’s often better

to try and understand it in real terms, in ... either political or

psychological terms . . . But it’s quite clear, as a species ... in our

nature, we are capable of acts of extraordinary love and kindness,

inventiveness and mutual aid. On the other side, we are capable of

acts of extraordinary destruction. I think it’s inherent. I think one of

the great tasks of art is really to explore that. ... I personally think

the novel, above all forms in literature, is able to investigate human

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nature and try and understand those two sides, all those many,

many sides of human nature. (McEwan)

There is no point in arguing with this McEwan’s concept of the purpose of

literature, for, at least in his own works, he sticks to this purpose almost perfectly.

Being an “investigator” of humanity and at the same time a certain defender of

its most hidden dark sides, his novels provide unembellished insights into the

most peculiar corners of human experience with sexuality, trauma and emotions.

It is then mostly for this certain “universality of perverse desires in all humans”

(Payandeh 156) skillfully transmitted into the generally gloomy and dreary

atmosphere of his novels that gained him the nickname Ian MaCabre.

Subsequently, for McEwan is not only interested in describing and

portraying, but also in searching and explaining, he tries to provide his characters,

peculiar as they are, with a certain background, a setting to ascribe their mental

development to. Naturally then, this background is often the one of their families

and childhood. And, unsurprisingly, even this family background is mostly

described in terms of its dysfunctionality, distortion or incompleteness, as well as

its forming power and the inevitable consequences. The children in The Cement

Garden grow up under the guidance of a despotic father, and a passive mother

– afther their death they build up a corrupted perverse version of their own world,

with inclinations towards distorted sexuality and incest. On Chesil Beach features

a newly married couple who, on their wedding night, are forced to face the

dangerous discrepancy of their feelings and expectations. With the wife suffering

from a sexual anxiety, resulting probably from being sexually abused by her own

father, and the husband, thanks to his overt sexual excitement and a childhood

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spent with a distant, brain-damaged mother, responding impatiently and

indignantly, the disastrous ending is almost inevitable and the couple thus “do

not survive the trauma of their honeymoon night” (Wood). The Atonement,

dealing also with an unhappy love relationship and providing it with an even more

tragical ending, then presents an upper-middle class household which, with the

absent parents and all its flaws and disruptions, constitutes a setting for a young

girl’s fatal misconception.

In his article about McEwan’s family values, Roger Boylan states

that: “To Ian McEwan, only the universal values represented in the family

unit—love, loyalty, trust, stability—stand between us and barbarism”

(Boylan). Subsequently, in his novels McEwan often challenges these values

and, interested in the possible developments, provides his readers with a

certain “release” of this restricted barbarism, caused by the family ’s various

disruptions. And so, what all the novels and stories, as presented here so far,

have in common is a certain model of family dysfunctionality which, no matter

how overtly or invisibly admitted, usually stands at the core of McEwan’s

characters’ personal failures, difficulties in relationships and sometimes even

deviations. None of the characters that McEwan creates in his novels come from

a complete and fully functional family background – whenever we look we see

families that are distorted, broken, not working properly. These distortion are of

various kinds – they take the shape of an exaggerated patriarchy and

authoritative despotic fathers, weak submissive (and often ill or somehow invalid)

mothers, sexual abuse or an absence of proper parental care. Yet, despite their

different shape, their forming power prevails – making the characters forever

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marked with serious fears, insecurities and disorders. The protagonists, either

children or adults, are influenced by the distorted circumstances of their

childhood and growing up and carry on these distortions with them, into their

future lives and further relationships. Naturally then, with their emotional

development being so seriously scarred, they are unable to deal with their

circumstances successfully and usually do not find a way of escaping the family

background for good. Subsequently, they end up emotionally ruined, socially

misunderstood or with unfulfilled love relationships. McEwan then skillfully works

with the inevitability of the influence his characters’ family background have

upon them and uses it as the primary forming element of their development and

fate. Unfortunately, in most cases, this element is not only forming, but almost

devastating.

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Bibliography

Primary sources

Malcolm, David. Understanding Ian McEwan. South Carolina: University of South

Carolina Press, 2000. Print.

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Vintage, 2007. Print.

---. On Chesil Beach. London: Vintage, 2008. Print.

---. První láska, poslední pomazání. Praha: Volvox Globator, 2004. Print.

---. The Cement Garden. London: Vintage, 1997. Print.

---. The Comfort of Strangers. London: Vintage, 1997. Print.

Secondary sources

Atonement. Dir. Joe Wright. Screenplay by Christopher Hampton. Perf. James

McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Romola Garai. Focus Features, 2007.

DVD.

Begley, Adam. “Ian McEwan, The Art of Fiction No. 173.” The Paris Review 162

(2002). The Paris Review. Web. 6 Sept. 2015.

Boylan, Roger. “Ian McEwan’s Family Values.” Boston Review. 9 Jan. 2006. Web.

3 Sept. 2015.

Cardullo, Bert. “The Comfort of Strangers.” The Hudson Review 46.2 (1993): 372-

380. JSTOR. Web. 5 July 2015.

Finney, Bryan. “Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian

McEwan’s Atonement.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004):

68-82. JSTOR. Web. 14 July 2015.

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Fraser, Ian. “Class Experience in McEwan’s Atonement.” Critique 54.4 (2013):

465-477. EBSCO. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.

Chalupský, Petr. “Atonement – Continuity and Change in Ian McEwan’s Works.”

Continuity and Change in Culture and Literature. Pardubice:

Univerzita Pardubice, 2006. Print.

Ingersoll, Earl G. “The Moment of History and the History of the Moment: Ian

McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.” Midwest Quarterly 52.2 (2011): 131-

147. Literature Online. Web. 8 April 2015.

Ionica, Cristina. “An ethics of decomposition: Ian McEwan’s early prose.” Horror

Studies 2.2 (2011): 227-245. Film & Television Literature Index with

Full Text. Web. 1 Sep. 2015.

Kahane, Claire. “Bad Timing: The Problematics of Intimacy In On Chesil Beach.”

Psyart (2011): 9. Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Nov. 2015.

Lye, John. “Some Attributes of Post-Modernist Literature.” Department of English

Languages and Literature. Brock University, 30 Apr. 2008. Web. 10

Oct. 2015.

McEwan, Ian. “‘A Thing One Does’: A Conversation with Ian McEwan.” Interview

by Ryan Roberts. Conversations with Ian McEwan. Ed. Ryan

Roberts. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010: 188-94.

JSTOR. Web. 15 Aug. 2015.

Moseley, Merritt. “Ian Russell McEwan.” British Novelists Since 1960: Second

Series. Ed. Merritt Moseley. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Dictionary of

Literary Biography Vol. 194. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21

Sept. 2015.

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Payandeh, Hossein. “Normal Abnormalities: Depiction of Sado-Masochistic

Violence in Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers.” Journal of Art

and Sciences 6 (2006): 145-156. EBSCO. Web. 1 Oct. 2015.

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Robinson, Richard. “The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Modern Fiction

Studies 56.3 (2010): 473-495. Literature Online. Web. 15 Aug.

2015.

Tyler, Anne. “Damaged People.” Rev. of The Cement Garden. The New York

Times 26 Nov. 1978. The New York Times. Web. 20 Aug. 2015.

Walsh, John. “Ian McEwan: Here’s The Twist.” The Independent. 22 Sept. 2011.

Web. 21 Aug. 2015.

Walter, Natasha. “Young Love, Old Angst.” Rev. of On Chesil Beach. The

Guardian. 31 Mar. 2007. Web. 2 Aug. 2015.

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English Resume

The primary aim of this thesis is to analyze the prose of Ian McEwan

in order to show how he, in his novels and short stories, employs a certain model

of family dysfunctionality which not only forms the characters’ further mental

development, but also negatively, sometimes even tragically, influences their

future relationships.

The themes that McEwan employs in his literary works and that

gained him the „Macabre“ nickname are in many cases rather disquieting,

unsavoury or even disguisting – dealing with various forms of violence and

sexuality, both of children and adults. Consequently, the faith of his characters is

often rather unfortunate, ending with love and personal failures or death. It is

then the main purpose of this thesis to show that many of these failures are

actually rooted in the characters’ family circumstances that are usually distorted

and dysfunctional, with the parents being either absent or not able of performing

their parental role properly. As an inevitable consequence, the characters are

often seriously stigmatized and they develop various personal fears and blocks,

both making them unable to create successful or happy relationships in their

further lives.

The analytical part of this thesis consists of three sections, each

dealing with a particular McEwan’s novel, namely, The Cement Garden, the

Atonement and On Chesil Beach. The close reading and deep analysis of these

novels focuses mainly on the characters’ family background and its impact upon

their further psychological development and their behaviour in relationships. This

practical part is then followed by critical discussions, employing various secondary

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sources, scholarly articles and also some of McEwan’s other novels and short

stories, whose purpose is to demonstrate the validity of the aforementioned

theory, that is, the negative influence of dysfunctional family background on the

characters.

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Czech Resume

Primárním cílem této diplomové práce je analýza díla Iana McEwana

s cílem ukázat, jak ve svých románech a povídkách využívá určitý model rodinné

disfunkčnosti. Tento model má pak vliv nejen na duševní vývoj postav, ale také

na jejich budoucí mezilidské vztahy, a to spíše v negativním, ne-li přímo

tragickém směru.

Témata, se kterými McEwan we svých dílech pracuje a která mu

také zajistila přezdívku „děsivý“, jsou v mnoha případech značně znepokojivá,

nepříjemná či přímo nechutná – často jde o různé formy násilí a sexuality, dospělé

i dětské. Stejně tak osud jeho postav je povětšinou spíše nešťastný, končící buď

nezdarem v milostných a jiných vztazích či dokonce smrtí. Hlavní snahou této

práce je pak dokázat, že mnoho těchto nezdarů je zapříčiněno nefunkčním a

narušeným rodinným zázemím většiny postav, vyznačujícím se buď fyzickou či

mentální absencí rodičů a jejich neschopností plnit svou rodičovskou roli. Ve

výsledku jsou pak tyto postavy často psychicky poznamenány a trpí nejrůznějšími

obavami a duševními bloky, které mají za následech jejich neschopnost vytvářet

si v budoucnosti spokojené a šťastné vztahy.

Analytická část této práce sestává ze tří sekcí, z nichž každá zkoumá

jeden konrétní román z pera Iana McEwana – konkrétně jde o romány The

Cement Garden, The Atonement a On Chesil Beach. Zevrubná analýza těchto knih

se zaměřuje především na rodinné zázemí jednotlivých postav a jeho vliv na jejich

další psychický vývoj a chování v mezilidských vztazích. Na tuto praktickou část

pak navazuje část kritická, která, za použití nejrůznějších zdrojů, odborných

materiálů a dalších novel či povídek Iana McEwana, má za úkol dokázat platnost

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výše zmíněné teorie o vlivu narušeného rodinného zázemí na negativní vývoj

postav.