Alexander H. Shapiro, McEwan and Forster, the Perfect Wagnerites

July 2011, Volume 5, Number 2, 20–45.

Along with the ill-fated characters of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, an inanimate object also plays a dramatic role: a porcelain vase from the Meissen workshop. But what is a piece of 18th-century German pottery doing in the thoroughly British household of Jack Tallis? Indeed, it is unlike anything else in the Tallis home, which contained ‘mostly junk collected by Cecilia’s grandfather’. As McEwan describes the item: ‘It was genuine Meissen porcelain, the work of the great artist Höroldt, who painted it in 1726. It had most certainly once been the property of King August.’ Decorated with ‘little painted Chinese figures gathered formally in a garden around a table, with ornate plants and implausible birds’, this piece of Teutonic china is endowed by McEwan with an elaborate provenance.