Watching' in Ian McEwan's atonement and Michael Frayn's spies

If I may begin this article with a misquotation from one of Lavinia Greenlaw’s short stories, I will say that in quite a large number of ‘project’- and ‘project-related’ novels we, as well as the characters, ‘are watching something terrible happening’. This surely does not mean that the novels are terrible. Rather, what makes almost any novel fascinating is the way in which the writer shows us what the characters see or sometimes ‘missee’ and /zowthey do that.

In the present article I will focus on Ian MacEwan’s A tenement and Michael Frayn’s Spies. These two novels, not to mention their authors, are probably not the first choice when we want to compare two literature pieces. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the experiences of an upper-class teenage girl whose false testimony ruins several lives a can resemble those of a lower-middle class boy living in a quiet cul-de-sac somewhere in the English countryside during the Blitz. Still, they can be both viewed as coming-of-age novels or novels about personal memories and to what extent can one rely on them. However, in this article I would like to focus on a range on episodes in which the narrating persona is watching the actions of other characters where from the plots of the novels unfold.

In case of both Spies and Atonement we have a very peculiar type of narrator whom I, following J.A. Cuddon, will describe as ‘self-conscious’. The subtle transition from reality to fiction and back, as it might be suggested by choosing such a character (Cuddon 1999), of course, is achieved in each novel with the help of quite different means: in Atonement it is a metanarrative or even metanerratives of Briony Tallis, who being at the point of writing ‘ВТ, London 1999’ is seventy seven and suffering from a medical condition one of the effects of which is memory loss, whereas in Spies we have what one might call a frame structure in which chapters 1 and 11, representing the so-called reality of the ‘here and now’ of the main character in a sense ‘frame’ the main war-time narrative.

In my view, however, it is not the meta-narrative that makes these two novels peculiar. Rather it is the way how both narrators, Briony Tallis and Stephen see the world around, read and misread it and in the end challenge themselves, or rather their memories. In case of McEwan’s Atonement we might talk also of challenging the people surrounding the main character.

If we, following John Mullan’s vision of how the plot of Atonement is constructed, will begin ‘reading’ McEwan’s from the end, i.e. from London 1999 part we will see, that Briony Tallis of the ‘here and now’ is aware of being a literary unreliable narrator:

The little failures of memory that dog us all beyond a certain point will become more noticeable, more debilitating, until the time will come when I won’t notice them because I will have lost the ability to comprehend anything at all. The days of the week, the events of the morning, or even ten minutes ago, will be beyond my reach. <...> In two, three or four years’ time, I will not recognize my remaining oldest friends, and when I wake in the morning, I will not recognize that I am in my own room.

If we look at Stephen from Frayn’s Spies we will see the problem of a similar nature, though in Frayn’s text we have the suggestion about the feeble state of memory not from the narrator himself but rather from the characters of the ‘here and now’ who do not follow the narrator into the narrative:

I tell my children I’m going to London for a few days.

Do we have a contact for you there?’ asks my well-organised daughter-in-law.

Memory Lane, perhaps’ suggests my son dryly. We are all evidently speaking English together. He can sense my restlessness.

Exactly’, I reply. ‘The last house before you go round the bend and it turns into Amnesia Avenue.’

These seemingly unimportant references seem to contradict the extremely accurate observations from the past, i.e. the events of the summer 1935 in A tenement and of the Blitz in Spies.

Both Briony and Stephen seem to have a very sharp eye for small detail and thus miss or misread the greater context in which the events unfold. If we take Atonement as an example of this we will see that in the first so-called ‘Briony chapters’, i.e. the chapters which give us the point of view of 13-year old Briony, we see that is she focused only on her play, thus misreading the distress and reluctance of the participants to act as well as the subtler hints at the future events. A good example is Briony’s witnessing Danny Hardman, whom she did see but to whose presence she did not pay any special attention:

Briony suspected that behind her older cousin’s perfect manners was a destructive intent. Perhaps Lola was relying on the twins to wreck the play innocently, and needed only to stand back and observe.

These unprovable suspicions, Jackson’s detainment in the laundry, Pierrot’s wretched delivery and the morning’s colossal heat were oppressive to Briony. It bothered her too when she noticed Danny Hardman watching from the doorway. He had to be asked to leave. She could not penetrate Lola’s detachment or coax from Pierrot the common inflections of everyday speech. What a relief, then, suddenly to find herself alone in the nursery. Lola had said she needed to reconsider her hair, and her brother had wandered off down the corridor, to the lavatory, or beyond.

A similar thing we observe in Spies where Stephen, upon hearing Keith’s news of his mother being a German spy, recollects quite a lot of small details about the area they live in and openly suspicious actions of other people, like his own father speaking German, which are not deemed by Keith as important.

This sort of ‘wrong seeing’ becomes more and more intense as both novels progress. As for example when Briony watches Robbie and Cecilia by the fountain or when Keith and Stephen overhear Keith’s mother talking on the phone. In both cases we have the characters who, at a certain stage in the narrative, find it more and more difficult to differentiate description and evaluation:

...'Phones. Asks for 8087 Mr Hucknall. 3 mutton chops. Not too much fat. By noon.' We flee into the playroom as she comes upstairs ... halt our investigations and think about something else while she's in the lavatory ... emerge and follow her downstairs to the kitchen ... out into the garden to watch her from behind the shed as she takes the familiar steaming, sour-smelling enamel bowl into the chicken run. She does far more different things in the course of the morning, now we're taking note of them, than I'd ever realised, with not a single pause to rest or write letters. It's easy to miss how active she is because she does it all in such a smooth, unhurried way - because she does it all so ... inconspicuously.

Yes, there's .a sinister unnoticeability about the whole performance, now that we know the truth behind it. There's something clearly wrong about her, if you really look at her and listen to her as we now are...

Here we can see how Frayn very delicately not just blurs the border between what the characters see and how they evaluate what they have seen, he makes observation and evaluation change places. So that the proof of Keith’s mother being a spy is, ironically, not being or acting like one. An important element here is the so called ‘LOGBOOK -SECRIT’. It can be argued that this observation log acts as kind of barrier, a mental looking glass which magnifies the events the character watches, but at the same time narrows his field of vision. This logbook takes the events out of the context, hyperbolizes them and thus leads to a false evaluation. If we place this episode side by side with the one in which Briony is watching Robbie and Cecilia we will see a number of striking similarities as well as quite a number of noteworthy differences which, I assume, makes these watches quite different. The first thing that might suggest the preset evaluation frame is the position of the observer, i.e. Briony.

She had arrived at one of the nursery’s wide-open windows and must have seen what lay before her some seconds before she registered it. It was a scene that could easily have accommodated, in the distance at least, a medieval castle.

Here the window frame acts as an instrument which, unlike the logbook, physically narrows the characters vision. However, the choice of a physical limitation instead of a metaphorical one is complemented by the image which Briony places into the window frame instead of a glass - a medieval castle. This seemingly unimportant element marks Briony’s transition from the ‘here and now’ into the world here stories. If I allow myself to oversimplify the workings of Briony’s mind she, upon imagining the castle and seeing Robbie and Cecilia by the fountain, limited her interpretation of the situation to a rather streamlined version of a gothic romance and thus had, very much like Stephen and Keith, to follow the conventions of the genre:

What was less comprehensible, however, was how Robbie imperiously raised his hand now, as though issuing a command which Cecilia dared not disobey. It was extraordinary that she was unable to resist him. 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?

As we can see we here Briony, misunderstand the iconology of the situation but, very much unlike the boys in

Spies, allows the situation to be puzzling for her. As we see later in the chapter Briony sees this scene as an example of something real, something belonging to the here and now.

The most striking ‘vision’ episodes of both novels are arguably the rape scene in Atonement and Stephen’s encounter with Uncle Peter who deserted his regiment. In both episodes we see how the characters have to undergo a kind of test. In both novels the person to be observed is hardly seen. In Atonement it is a shadowy figure very much like a tree, whereas in Spies Stephen hears a voice of a man without actually seeing him. So, both Briony and Stephen are in practically the same situation, they can no longer rely on their physical ability to observe. However, this state of being deprived of vision does not stop Briony from ‘seeing’ Robbie as she had talked herself into that. The question of who actually was there with Lola in summer 1935 remains partially answered and will probably perish in the troubled mind of seventy seven year old Briony, suffering from vascular dementia, whereas for Stephen the question of identifying the person seen has a slightly different shade. He is struggling with an issue which, ironically, is the complete opposite of Briony’s: he cannot allow himself to ‘know’ that the ‘German’ is Uncle Tom before the actual moment of seeing the man. And this is where the striking difference between Stephen and Briony lies. Stephen finds it hard ‘to sort of know’, he is aware of uncertainty and tries to eliminate it, very much like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen. Briony, who, unlike Stephen, is almost physically alienated from her memory, creates an alternative and more merciful, though, beautifully untrue vision of the past which Stephen would so much like to evade.