Though it might have taken me years, I did finally read the absolute masterpiece and modern classic that is Atonement, by Ian McEwan. And yes, though I don’t have a formal English lit degree or any particular qualifications, I am 10000% backing this read as another modern classic, just like The Book Thief. I cannot even begin to express just how much this novel ranks in excellence and how much I enjoyed it.
Unfortunately, I did accidentally watch the film adaptation years ago, so it’s a pleasure to have finally made acquaintance with the novel! Also, I rewatched the film after reading the novel, and my goodness, it’s also such an incredible work of cinema. I cannot recommend both enough!
I literally have enjoyed picking this story up this time around, and I’ve written a LOT. So, get a nice big cuppa and a snack if you actually plan on reading this all the way through, otherwise, have a scan and see what stands out to you :’)
*As always, my Musings posts are replete with spoilers. Continue at your own risk.*
Plot
Once more, and kind of like I mentioned last time, with the set up and delivery of the plots of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall & Persuasion, the stage was set and played marvellously. Divided into three parts, Atonement spans decades, and yet McEwan is adroit in the dissection of a singular moment.
And, before we begin, I am obsessed with the fact that McEwan referenced Northanger Abbey on the page before chapter one. It is all too fitting for the events that will soon enter stage right. I’m going to include the allusion here:
Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observations of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?
They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.
Jane AUSTEN, NORTHANGER ABBEY
Part One
This first section of the book is entirely focused on the events of one day. That’s fourteen chapters—and all of them absolutely incredible. This is thrilling for multiple reasons—if you’re already familiar with the plot, this creates that special kind of tension that only comes from having watched an adaptation before reading the novel. On the other hand, I imagine that if this is the first time you’ve ever entered into this particular world, the peculiar mundanity of these early chapters lends itself well to that different type of suspense as you wonder how all of this is going to climax. The natural chemistry and offset between characters thrillingly contributes to this, and I don’t need to say how potent McEwan’s prose is.
Another excellent choice by McEwan is the shift in perspectives: we open, of course with Briony Tallis’ young, impressionable, and—needless to say—unreliable point of view. However, this does not dominate Part One. We also have Cecilia, Mrs. Tallis, Robbie, and even Lola’s viewpoints. I loved this so much, because it gives us a serious look at the way all of these characters are thinking, all prior to, and in the moments after, the great disaster.
Briony is a young, furious writer with romantic, grandiose visions of her abilities and future displays of talent. She has just finished working on a play when her cousins arrive, and this plays a large part in the buildup to what later happens to Lola. Much could be said about everything that pans out with Briony’s view of herself, and how that ultimately furthers the rest of Briony’s life.
We see the infamous fountain scene from both Cecilia and Briony’s perspective—which of course is important and necessary, since the audience cannot rely upon Briony’s silent view from a window. Needless to say, she was wholly unable to grasp the sexual politics at play, especially since she was unable to hear and understand the words exchanged between Robbie and Cecilia.
And as for the movement towards the search for the twins, and the horrible events that unfolded during that time (perfectly sandwiched between Robbie passing the wrong letter and Briony’s accusation), each beat of every scene was perfectly weighed. You feel an undeniable buildup of tension and you can almost feel the explosion waiting to spring.
Quickly, before we turn to part two, let me just say that I found it meaningful, of course, that Mr. Tallis is so absent—his few actions and traits that we do see are but a shadowy force and idea. Though he does very little, he is still a silent mover within these machinations.
Part Two
This second portion can truly be considered one giant chapter. The only breaks we have are that of scenes, and this choice creates a certain sense of rhythm and useful monotony that parallels the events therein: Robbie has chosen to serve during the war instead of remain in prison. (I say monotony only because the overall setting intentionally never changes until the shift discussed in the next paragraph; part two is anything but monotonous, and if anything, I couldn’t put it down.)
Robbie’s movements are heading to a climax: he and his compatriots are going to Dunkirk and seeking to escape. And before I continue, I have to include a scene from Atonement here because I think it’s one of the most eloquent scenes in modern cinematic history, made all the better because it’s a single tracking shot filmed on sand and with such a variety of elements all perfectly timed:
McEwan creates very real background characters that very much have their own personalities, and their interactions with each other and with Robbie also give the audience an excellent idea of where Robbie is mentally and emotionally. Readers also gradually begin to realise that Robbie is wounded—we don’t know just how badly, but we become increasingly aware of how negatively its affecting him, and again, this extra layer of suspense is utterly incredible.
Robbie’s mind goes between three major objects: his wound, their aim in getting to Dunkirk, and of course, Cecilia. His mind and heart are ever fixed upon her, and his inner dialogue is a moving tribute to true love.
Part Three
Part three finally takes us to Briony and her headspace since her betrayal. It quickly becomes apparent (even before it is explicitly revealed, in my opinion) that her work as a nurse is Briony’s attempt at paying penance on her own. I don’t know that she acutely feels remorse (in that it’s in every fibre of her soul, at every waking moment), but she certainly bears contrition and almost simultaneously seeks to avoid thinking about what she has done whilst making it her sole aim for taking up this work.
We also find out that Briony has continued her ambitions of being a writer by working on something whenever she has a spare moment. Eventually, it is revealed that Briony is putting to words the infamous fountain scene. She even sends this to a publisher and although she is rejected, the feedback she receives poises some incredible questions that of course speak all too closely to what Briony did all those years ago: “the child at the window whose account we read first—her fundamental lack of grasp of the situation is nicely caught… If this girl has so fully misunderstood or been so wholly baffled by the strange little scene that has unfolded before her, how might it affect the lives of the two adults? Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion?”
Throughout the constant work, Briony also wrestles with the idea of visiting Cecilia. After she sees that Paul Marshall and Lola are to be married, she sets in motion a plan, of sorts. She attends the wedding, all the while with the knowledge that she could say something to oppose to the union—absolutely wild, by the way, I don’t know that I could do the same if I was in her shoes—and then goes to Cecilia’s apartment afterward. About seven and a half pages of dialogue between the two sisters—stellar, stellar writing by the way, with of course palpable tension and this horrible sense of loss of love between two who ought to be so close and within each other’s confidences and wherein which Briony tells Cecilia that she’d like to come clean to everyone about what actually happened that fateful night—and then Robbie appears.
He doesn’t even realise it’s her for about a page and a half, and when he does—the climax of the story truly is reached. I really don’t think I could say much that could do this part justice, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Briony offers up a paltry apology, fully aware that her words can mean nothing, but with the faithful promise to come clean about everything so that Robbie and Cecilia can still have the life they’d always wanted together, the life Robbie wanted to come back to.
“Together, the note to her parents and the formal statement would take no time at all. Then she would be free for the rest of the day. She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin.”
1999 (Epilogue/final part)
We move forward to the end of Briony’s life. She has had it all. A writing career, a husband, a sprawling family. Yet she is dying. Her memories are being taken from her by her own body, and what should have been her first novel, she says, will be her last. We find out that Cecilia and Robbie did not get the life they had wanted all along, but Briony can try to give it to her readers, as she makes that better ending, and all of them, their lives and the truth therein, just a figment of one’s imagination—as soon as she and Paul and Lola Marshall are dead.
Characters (& some themes + annotations)
Briony
I think seeing as how Briony is the main character, and it is her actions which drive the whole of the plot, she is be my main focus.
Also, I purchased this copy of Atonement secondhand (@ Phoenix Books!), and I love that it was so well-marked up all throughout the novel. I really got to engage with the reader before me, and I loved that sm!! We agreed, and we disagreed :’) He (I really feel like a dude read this) made some great points at times, and I will def be pulling from some of his thoughts.
Briony as a child
Immediately, fellow-reader-man pointed out that “Briony” means “a tendril producing vine.” That is so incredible. I love that McEwan no doubt made this choice for her name very carefully, and of course, it fits so well. It is Briony’s actions, all throughout part one, that set up the life choices for all three main characters for years to come.
Sense of self
Very quickly, we get the sense that Briony is as many other children her age are: self-absorbed. She believes that the world revolves around her and that her life and sense of self are all that matter. There’s this great scene where Briony moves her finger in front of her face and wills it to move, but it doesn’t because she doesn’t really want it to. And so she knows that only her truest self/soul is ultimately what makes it move.
I like this a lot because it’s so acutely human. I can particularly relate to having thoughts just like this. When I was young, before, and even after, I learned that the brain is what tells our fingers to move, our feet to walk, etcetera, I would wonder at how quickly it happened, how fast the messages travelled from the brain to the muscles and tendons, telling them to contract. Even now as I type this, I marvel at the speed that our brains work at. I type over 75 wpm, and it’s truly amazing how our minds and bodies are built to work in a seamless, simultaneous motion—even though the brain has to start each and every motion of our bodies, however slight.
These thoughts were as familiar to her, and as comforting, as the precise configuration of her knees, their matching but competing, symmetrical and reversible, look. A second thought always followed the first, one mystery bred another: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? for example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did everybody…? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn’t really feel it.
Time and time again we return to Briony’s egocentric reality: life is about her. She has main character syndrome down to a T, and this of course makes her the most unreliable, biased perspective ever. She resents Lola for taking her role in the play that she wrote (a role she obviously wrote specifically for herself, in order to highlight her great talents as both writer and actress), and she considers it a catalyst for switching to novel-writing (which is of course so much more mature) instead. Briony is such a girl, but more than that, she is such a human. The way McEwan writes her is so utterly, perfectly, human-ly human. (That last sentence from that last quote, for example, is just PERFECTION—the placement of the commas is divine and spot on and executes all the preceding thoughts so WELL. Can’t get over it.)
I hope that makes sense. I don’t think any of us can deny just how relatable Briony’s inner dialogue is. How many of us felt the exact same way growing up—knowing, on some intellectual level, that all human life is on the same level of value and worth, but still feeling like we were the only ones seeing it so crystal clear, so inside of ourselves. It reminds us to be very careful before we begin to judge Briony too harshly—who says we would have been that much better than she? At the very least, we would have been very tempted to do just what she did. I feel grateful to have been raised the way I was because that’s the only way I was able to keep such selfhood in check—knowing that all human beings were carefully crafted by God, in His image, is a good way to inhibit pride, the most natural, and the most hateful, of all sins.
Pride
Pride, chiefest of the seven deadly sins, is very often the root of every other sin. This is something I’ve come to realise over the last couple of years. When we do not want to forgive—even if we are completely innocent and were wholly wronged by someone else—this is because of pride. We are apparently too perfect to extend undeserved forgiveness to a fellow human being, how dare they? Don’t they know who we are? Don’t they know how we’ve slaved away? How we’re so good at being so kind and humble and compassionate? Why and how do they even dare???? I encourage you to examine yourself—how many of your everyday flaws, or mistakes against others, result from pride? Pride is typically the core of most, if not all, wrongs, and I am the first to admit that I need a lot of work in that area.
Briony, like me, is no exception, and it is her pride that causes Robbie and Cecilia’s downfall.
Briony in adulthood
Physical discomfort helped close down Briony’s mental horizons. The high starched collars rubbed her neck raw…The shoes she had to buy with her own money fiercely pinched her toes. The uniform, like all uniforms, eroded identity, and the daily attention required—ironing pleats, pinning hats, straightening seams, shoe polishing, especially the heels—began a process by which other concerns were slowly excluded.
And yet the reader cannot help but wonder if Briony really does feel sorry and want to make amends: she retains so much of that aforementioned self-conceit, that egocentrism which coloured her youth with a gross inability to discern reality. She keeps a journal, which “preserved her dignity: she might look and behave like and live the life of a trainee nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise.”
A short aside on true righteousness:
Still, there is much hope for her redemption. I personally am inclined to hope that she is truly contrite and is seeking to be righteous, though I cannot help but feel so sorry for her. As a follower of Christ and believer of Scripture, it is all too clear that there are no works we can do to put us in right standing before God, and even amongst our fellow men. We are dead in our trespasses—and we know that the dead cannot do anything to revive themselves—and it is only the grace of Christ presented in the undeserving gift of saving faith and true repentance which can grant to us absolution and justification before a holy and perfect God. Only that can enable us to have a clear conscience before God and man, allowing us to pursue holiness and Christ-like love with regards to our actions. Furthermore, that gift of salvation is what grants us true perspective of our lowly estate: how little we deserve Christ’s sacrifice, how sinful we truly are, how poorly we treat our fellow brothers and sisters, how little we are before the pure beauty and righteousness of an infinitely perfect, loving, gracious King.
Throughout the day, up and down the ward, along the corridors, Briony felt her familiar guilt pursue her with a novel vibrancy…All she wanted to do was work, then bathe and sleep until it was time to work again. But it was all useless, she knew. Whatever skivvying or humble nursing she did, and however well or hard she did it, whatever illumination in tutorial she had relinquished, or lifetime moment on a college lawn, she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable.
Fin
There is obviously so very much more that I could say about this incredibly moving work of prose. I wish that I hadn’t waited so long to write this after my initial read last May. I really wanted to touch on Rob and Cecilia separately and then their romance, but I clearly have written far too much already, and this isn’t a dissertation (although maybe I should write one on my own just for funzies when I reread this in the future). Have you read Atonement and/or watched the film, and if so, please share all the thoughts you ever have had about it/them?