Atonement is an Ian McEwan novel from 2001, shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. The initial scenes take place at a country house in 1935. Briony Tallis, a young girl with a talent for writing, witnesses the beginning of a love affair between her elder sister Cecilia, and Robbie, the clever son of a family servant. She misinterprets what she sees, which leads to misunderstandings, accusations and disastrous consequences. Events are then picked up five years later in 1940, around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation. Finally there is a short postscript where Briony on her 77th birthday looks back at the book she has written about Cecilia and Robbie.

You can read Atonement in two ways, first as a good story, a who-dunnit, a powerful page turner, particularly in the 1940 sections; or as fancy, multi-layered, self-referential work about novels, their history, limitations and potentials.

Which would we prefer? One sounds entertaining. The other sounds interesting but hard work. Maybe one doesn’t exclude the other. Atonement seems to link them together in Briony’s own writing efforts. In 1940, she submits a story based on Cecilia and Robbie, to Horizon magazine. She writes this in Virginia Woolf mode, adopting a trendy stream of consciousness style, eschewing the artificial conventions of plot. But then we get the more traditional entertaining approach when Briony sees that her story gains realism and authenticity once she accepts that her behaviour in 1935 had cause and effect. You could say these events became more real once they have plot, rather than floating around in their own disconnected universe. They also become more readable.

Novels are a fiction, a distortion, intrinsically misleading. Life is not arranged like a novel, and yet life does involve plot-like cause and effect, deception and efforts to reveal hidden secrets. I came to see plot as both an artificial device, and a reflection of reality. Maybe that’s the atonement novels in general have to make. They have to take their artificial nature, their entertainment value, and atone for it with the truth. This one does that very well.