Department of English and American Studies the Dysfunctional Family

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

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

5 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,

6 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

7 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

8 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

9 understand his work, the way it is created, its meaning and the message it is supposed to pass over to the readers.

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

11 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

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

13 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

14 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

15 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

16 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

17 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.

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

19 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

. . . 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

21 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

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,

23 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

24 to be demonstrated in the following chapters, for Ian McEwan, such endings are the daily bread.

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

26 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

27 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

28 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

29 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)

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

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

32 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

33 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,

34 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

35 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.

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

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

38 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.

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

40 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.

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

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

43 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

44 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

45 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

46 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

47 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

48 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

49 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

50 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

51 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

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

53 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).

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

55 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 –

56 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,

57 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

58 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

59 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

60 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.

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

62 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

63 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

64 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

65 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”

(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.

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.

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

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

70 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:

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

72 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

73 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-

74 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

75 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

76 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

77 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

78 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

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

80 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

81 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

82 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

83 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

84 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.

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

86 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

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

88 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

89 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.

Bibliography

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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.

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

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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

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Payandeh, Hossein. “Normal Abnormalities: Depiction of Sado-Masochistic

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Robinson, Richard. “The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Modern Fiction

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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 94 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.

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 96 výše zmíněné teorie o vlivu narušeného rodinného zázemí na negativní vývoj postav.