The fact that the publishers reject this draft, however, arguing that "you need the backbone of a story" in which there is also a plot and suspense, to please the desires of the reader, seems to echo the views of Ian McEwan, in which he argued that he wanted to escape the "dead hand of modernism" while still using some of its techniques. Briony sends her first draft as a novel into the publishers, in which she has only included the beginning of the novel where she sees the scene of Robbie and Cecelia by the fountain and explores different perspectives and her intrigue in this situation, without going in further to see the consequences of this. McEwan makes direct interest to this through Briony referencing 'The waves' by Woolf, saying that she is impressed by this and says that 'it was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll.' However, McEwan seems to criticise this style of writing, possibly arguing that it is not enough in a novel. Ian McEwan seems to incorporate ideas adopted by Woolf, in the way she wanted to "record the Atoms that fall on the mind.' In Woolf's 'Modern fiction' work of 1921, she argued that Edwardian predecessors were so concerned with the material world and describing this that they neglected the importance of psychology.
The whole novel is structured by Briony's desire to write a novel, and we find out at the end that the book in itself is her finished work. Hermione Lee argued that McEwan, through this novel, shows what the English novel has inherited, in which Briony makes her way through a 'whole history of literature while discovering for herself psychological realism'.
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