Ian McEwan Book va Film Atonement, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Ian McEwan Book va Film Atonement e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! ENGLISH IAN MCEWAN Key differences between the film and the book: • The book has a certain wry sense of humor that the film almost completely lacks. The whole business about Briony executing her cousins and then going on to become an Olympic nettle-slasher, while presented in an elaborately dry literary tone, is pleasantly goofy. The film, on the other hand, rarely cracks a smile. • McEwan closely tracks the changes in people from moment to moment, particularly with Briony, who is developing as a person in virtually every second of the book, though generally considerably less than she thinks she's developing. The film adopts a slower, broader pace, following events rather than micro-changes in personalities, and in the process, it misses a lot of the symbolism and important moments that McEwan focuses on. Or maybe all this makes her less sympathetic. Certainly in the book, she's a far more nuanced character, but maybe understanding her will just make readers hate her more. Anyone can get something wrong; it takes a particularly complicated, self-important, and childish mind to get things this wrong in this particular way for these particular reasons. • In addition to scenes written from the points of view of Briony, Cecelia, and Robbie, the book contains chapters written from the perspective of Briony and Cecelia's mother Emily. That makes her far more of a character, though she still doesn't serve a particularly strong narrative purpose. Mostly, her thoughts clarify some of the strains going on in the household, providing another perspective on her daughters, and another reason to believe that no one in this book really understands anyone else. • In another typical bit, Cecelia spends a great deal of time deciding what dress to wear to the dinner party where she's going to confront Robbie, after receiving his note. She tries on a whole sequence of dresses, dismissing each in turn as looking the wrong way, saying the wrong thing about her age or her sophistication. It says a great deal about her anxiety, her inexperience, and the attraction to Robbie that she refuses to admit to herself. Whereas in the film, she just shows up in the doorway to greet Robbie, perfectly dressed and looking, as she thinks in the book, "sleekly impregnable, slippery and secure." • Robbie's wartime adventures in France are far more detailed in the book. As with the film, they begin with him wounded, separated from his company, and traveling with two other people, but the book spells out his relationship to them more clearly—they both outrank him, but neither can read a map, so they're dependent on him, which makes them churlish and contemptuous; they refer to him as "her" and regularly humiliate him. He tries at intervals to lose them as they all trek toward the coast together, encountering locals and other soldiers in a long series of dispiriting anecdotes and devastating attacks. The whole sequence has a noticeably blunter, more direct tone than all the sequences in the first half of the book, which take place in Briony's head; presumably McEwan is consciously drawing a dividing line between Robbie's real life and Briony's self-absorbed fantasies. By contrast, in the film, it seems like the men he's traveling with are his inferiors, given that he speaks French and they don't, he has an elegant accent by contrast with their rough, lower-class ones, and they're childish where he's restrained and calm. • There's an extensive, chilling scene in the book, omitted from the film, in which Robbie witnesses a group of soldiers picking on a scrawny Royal Air Force flier in a bar at the coast, as they wait for rescue; blaming him personally for the lack of air support, they assault him and work their way up toward lynching him. Robbie, resenting his life and his position, seriously considers joining in on the mayhem, not because he blames the RAF man, but because he "understood the exhilaration among the tormentors and the insidious way it could claim him. He himself could do something outrageous with his bowie knife and earn the love of a hundred men." In the end, he doesn't have the courage to intervene or the cruelty to participate, and it's his hated road-companions who step in and cleverly defuse the situation, getting the RAF man to safety. • Finally, the film ends sparingly, with Briony's revelation—at the taping of a television talk show–that she's dying, that she wants to clear the air, and that what we saw earlier of Robbie and Cecelia was a fiction she wrote. And then Wright and Hampton show the lovers together, in an imagined—and, once again typically for the movie–dialogue-free, almost silent scene. The book, on the other hand, gives Briony a lengthy, detailed wrap-up, talking about her life as a senior citizen, how her career progressed during the time McEwan elided, and what happened to various family members, including Paul and Lola, who apparently had a happy marriage and went on to be fantastically rich, much-respected members of the community. Toward the end, Briony attends a birthday party at her childhood home, with some 50 relatives, and the children perform The Trials Of Arabella, the play she wrote as a child, in the opening scenes of the book and the film. When she makes her confession about what happened to Robbie and Cecelia, it's alone, at night, to her writing, though it's clear because of her fame that the story will eventually come out. SATURDAY McEwan's characters swiftly learn that "innocence" is a mutable, morally complex state, never free from its annoying siblings, responsibility and guilt. This is what eminent neurosurgeon Henry Perowne discovers, as he works his way through what turns out to be a pretty hairy Saturday. The 50-page opening set piece of Saturday, though less cinematic than a ballooning accident, is magnificently meditative, and expansive without being flabby. From his bedroom window, Perowne witnesses the apocalyptic image of a comet in the night sky, which turns out to be a burning plane struggling over central London towards Heathrow. Or is it a terrorist attack? Instead of raising the alarm he makes love to his waking, beloved wife, Rosalind. Seen from the small hours both outcomes, deliberate terror or terrible accident, are equally possible truths. Perowne muses on the famous conundrum of Schrödinger's Cat (whose death/life for the external observer is equally true until the box is opened for confirmation). This motif hangs over Perowne's day, framing a powerfully evolving theme of public and private responsibility for the consequences of action or inaction. This particular Saturday is 15 February, 2003, the day on which millions converged on London to march against the imminent, though not yet certain, invasion of Iraq. Perowne gets up, buys some fish, visits his memory-less mother in a nursing home, calls in on his son Theo's band rehearsal and returns home to cook supper for a delicate family reunion. They are expecting Rosalind's cranky father, the poet John Grammaticus, who insulted the first literary success of their daughter Daisy, coming by train from her new lover in Paris. Perowne's dreamy domestic warmth, vividly conveyed by McEwan's free-ranging, empathetic imagination, is sapped by the sense of unease flaring out behind his trajectory ever since witnessing the ominous non- comet. This unease materialises in the form of Baxter, the edgy BMW driver he collides with on his way to a squash game with a colleague. Perowne narrowly evades a beating by swiftly diagnosing the degenerative disease fuelling Baxter's hostility; but the undesirable side-effect of this is that he accidentally humiliates Baxter in front of his sidekicks. McEwan seamlessly combines Perowne's anxiety over the state of the world with a richly detailed, ruminative celebration of his clinical work, his family and the exuberant, physical pleasures of life: wine, food, music. In stark contrast, Baxter is denied all Perowne's pleasures; but if his condition (trapped by a tiny genetic defect into an early, slavering demise) can be sympathised with on social or medical levels, his aggression cannot be condoned. How to balance succour with intervention? In Baxter's bullying violence, McEwan crafts a very personal, in-your-face foil to the intractable arguments pro and con invasion, which Perowne is forced to articulate when Daisy arrives fresh from the massive Hyde Park anti-war rally to excoriate her father's balanced opinions. Their shockingly sudden, hot, sour row, within minutes of greeting each other after six months' absence, only underlines the moral complexity of the humanitarian dilemma. Perowne's reduced defence feels very much the nub of Saturday: no single course of action, including taking no action, is without ramifying consequence, potential casualty or guilt. Refreshing and engrossing, Saturday has a pleasing intimacy, dense with revelation, and is not at all encumbered by dogmatic argument. Perowne is an admirable man grappling as best he can with an idea of the world and his responsible place in it. He rarely reads the fiction that his daughter prescribes for him because, as an atheist clinician, he wants the world explained factually, not reinvented as stories. McEwan's superb novel amply demonstrates how good fiction, by dramatising unwieldy and fraught ideas in a deeply personal narrative, can fashion the world into gobbets sometimes more digestible than factual reportage. NUTSHELL