Authorial Atonement in Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Sweet Tooth

Ian’s McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement ends with a question: “how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?” (350). And it concludes, in response to this question, that there “There is … No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists” (350–51). I consider in the first part of this article what leads Briony Tallis, the novel’s fictive author, to this bleak conclusion. In the second part I consider how McEwan takes up the question again in his 2012 novel Sweet Tooth and how he arrives at a more hopeful answer.