Atonement, Ian McEwan, 2001
(Spoilers)
In a novel so honest it unsettles me, Ian McEwan’s Atonement gives the full and complete narrative of Briony Tallis, a young 13 year old with the theatrical mind of a writer as she reflects on the part she played in sending to prison the man her older sister loves, after accusing him to be her 15 year old cousin’s rapist during a chaotic night at the family estate in England 1935.
McEwan leaves nothing out of this narrative account. The story’s third-person omniscient narration (which we later find is Briony 60 years in the future) allows us to get multiple perspectives of the crumbling family dynamic: mostly through Briony, her sister Cecelia, the accused Robbie, and their mother Emily. The characters lament on the stress which follows the welcome of their three child cousins—Lola and her younger twin brothers Pierrot and Jackson—and Briony and Cecelia’s older brother Leon (25) who’s visiting home with his friend Paul Marshall.
The cousins are staying with the Tallis’s as a reprieve from their parents’ messy divorce, and are thenceforth prone to emotional outbursts. Briony has created a play she and her cousins will perform for Leon, her older brother who she hopes to impress, but when envy builds between her and her older, more sophisticated cousin Lola, Briony has an internalized outburst of her own and drops the whole thing. This leaves the already sad boys double disappointed, and it leaves herself with extra time to ruminate on her surroundings. This is a strength of the novel—the narrator’s keen subjectivism to the objective world takes up a large majority of the novel’s physical space, and it directly aligns with the way young Briony perceives the world.
From the estate’s upstairs window, Briony bears witness to her sister and Robbie in action. The two are in an inconsequential tiff over a fallen vase, and, as both character’s admit in their own POVs, there’s been for some time a growing sexual tension building in their relationship. Briony sees the obvious amalgamation of sexuality and aggression in their interaction on the terrace below, but fails to understand the rapture that’s within it. Immediately, she believes Robbie has coerced Cecelia into this odd interaction in which Cecelia angrily removes her shirt, but without the given context of the growing sexual desire between them.
A child-like illusory perception of Robbie begins to bud in Briony’s mind—a place where her perceptions can not be challenged—and, in a perfect storm, is solidified when he writes an apology letter to Cecelia about breaking the vase, and gives it to Briony to pass on. Mistakenly, he gives Briony one he had written for himself—for scraps—which includes a sexual fantasy of he and Cecelia instead of the respectful, gentlemanly one he had intended to hand over. Briony, who is young and unaware of the nature of adult sexuality, reads this letter and lets it prove her suspicions of the newfound monster in Robbie Turner.
When Robbie realizes his fatal mistake, he seeks Cecelia out privately before attending a dinner held at the estate for Leon, Paul Marshall, and the cousins by the Tallis family. He intends to apologize to Cecelia for his fantasy and explain where it comes from. They have this meeting in a dark library, and their feelings for one another are revealed in a rapturous consummation of their passion—yet another thing which Briony sees and doesn’t understand. Briony misinterprets the sex they have against a bookshelf in the library as Robbie’s violent act, and, viola, she is set in her perception of him.
There is no other reality. In this child’s innocence, which we may call unconsciousness, Briony knows her sister is none other than Robbie Turner’s victim…yet she is confused at her sister’s willingness to sit beside him, unbothered, at dinner, and even to seem a little repelled by Briony, who had so graciously walked in on Robbie’s terrible act and saved her.
Meanwhile, as the Briony, Cecelia, Robbie narrative is happening, we get an aside through their depressed mother Emily’s perspective about the ease she feels when she hears through the walls that Leon’s friend Paul Marshall is entertaining Lola and the twins—someone to occupy them other than herself, thank goodness. What Emily fails to perceive, of course, is the sick, absolutely disturbing and skewed sexual fantasy of Paul Marshall, which is revealed through the narrator in the form of a dream which Paul Marshall wakes up from after napping in the room where Lola and her brothers play.
During the dinner at the estate, the twins (9 years old) ask to be excused and leave a letter in which they announce they’re running away. The family is immediately panicked, as the Tallis’s live on a large, woodsy estate with a lake and a lot of land, and the boys, in their attention-pleading haste, could easily be hurt, lost, or taken. The family sets out in search parties for the young boys, and Robbie goes out alone.
Briony, who was meant to stay home, is tempted by the night’s excitement and anxiety, and goes out as well. She finds only her cousin Lola, shocked still in a bush, and catches a man seeking off obscurely to the darkness.
Lola is frightened and hurt, after having been raped. In shock, and in the dark, she says she does not know who her rapist is. Briony, however, is sure, without the shadow of a doubt, that Robbie Turner, the monster who has just assaulted her sister, is Lola’s offender. She tells her family and police that she saw him—of course she did see the shape of a man stalking away from the scene—and all believe her, except of course her sister and Robbie’s mother who had worked for the Tallis household all of Robbie’s life.
When Robbie returns to the estate hours later, after finding the lost twins and bringing them home safely, Briony watches through her window as the police take him away in handcuffs. She watches the emotional goodbye between Cecelia and Robbie—which confuses her, because it looks tender—and his distraught mother, who is screaming that they are all liars and her son did not do this.
The story then switches to fully Robbie’s perspective in Part ll. Here is where the story became harder for me to follow, though despite my lost grasp of the events, I was able to appreciate McEwan’s incredibly detailed images and the awful nature of war, which is the serving purpose of Robbie’s perspective in the plot. Robbie is part of the infantry of World War 2; he is with a few more soldiers, and I believe he is journeying by foot to Dunkirk.
In this terrible time, Robbie reminisces on his past with Cecelia and Briony to ground him. In one scene, he recalls an event which happened with Briony in which the precocious young girl admits she has a crush on him. He is angered by this memory, wondering if it was her jealousy which caused her to turn on him. He and Cecelia exchange letters, in which we learn Cecelia has completely forgone all of her family, enraged, unable to forgive, and has become a war nurse.
In my notes I wrote about how incredible a writer McEwan is that he’s able to bring us the saddest, highest form of disappointment as well as the most tender sense of love all in the same scene; Robbie and Cecilia meet during Cecelia’s lunch break a day he’s on leave, and it’s filled with awkward and tense inanities (as, really, is probably what would happen after so lengthy of a time apart). But then, right before their goodbyes, they cry and kiss and squeeze, and it becomes clear their love is still strong and present.
At the end of Robbie’s part, he is ill, falling in and out of consciousness, and he thinks of Cecilia.
Part 3 is Briony’s POV where we find she, too, has become a war nurse—a probationer, they call her—as punishment to herself, and deeply regrets being a part of Robbie’s conviction. As she is now 18, she has had 5 years of maturation, and is able to see that as a child she was imaginative and wrong about Robbie Turner. She writes a letter to her sister, saying she will retract her statement, and, as she gets no reply, visits Cecelia, where she and Robbie are together, and they are cold and unable to forgive her. She understands.
During this portion of the novel, we also see Lola and Paul Marshall marry, and Briony knows that Lola has married her rapist.
The novel ends, and in an epilogue-style last chapter, Briony is 77 years old, and has just come from a doctor’s appointment with a poor prognosis. She has vascular dementia, and will soon lose her wits. She returns to the estate for a family reunion/banquet held to honor her as a well established published author. There are over 50 people in attendance, most of whom she doesn’t know. Lola and Paul Marshall, who are not present, she knows are in good health. She tells the reader she will not be able to publish her atonement—the novel we have just read—until after her death, because it is honest and will convict them of the crimes they committed 60 years earlier.
The novel, she reflects, is honest in all aspects except one. Robbie Turner died after falling ill, and Cecelia died that same year during a subway bombing of the war. They never got to reunite, and Briony never got to apologize, and she never got their forgiveness. Once they have all died, and the only thing left of the story is the unpublished novel, it is then that they will have their happy ending, as that will be the only recollection there is. The saddest piece, I believe, in the entire novel, is how we find that the happy ending she gave them was her own fantasy, and even in that, she still did not get their forgiveness because she—the creator of the narrative—does not grant herself their sympathy, even in their fictional states.
This was definitely one of the hardest things I’ve read. McEwan’s shrewdness about the inner workings of the mind, especially in the self-centered nature of childhood, which is where many of us have made our gravest mistakes, feels like a personal account of ourselves. And the way one becomes disillusioned by their own perception is another.
My Goodreads rating was a 4 out of 5, though that is only because I had a hard time following through the middle, and it must be said that is because the story diverted from the drama of the Tallis girls, and I enjoyed that part most. It stands, however, that Robbie’s experience in war is incredibly important to this narrative, in showing how awful the war was—which he was forced into— and in showing how thoughts of Cecilia were his beacon in the last few months of his life.
Trigger Warnings: Heavy SA, pedophilia, war, death
Quotes: (these are some of the best quotes)
—beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Uglines, on the other hand, had infinite variation.
Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.
She smiled. Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was? She no longer understood him. They had fallen out of touch at Cambridge. It had been too difficult to do anything else. She changed the subject.
Cecelia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember with gratitude for the rest of her life—with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.
Cecelia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid.
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation—it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.
It was only then that it occurred to him that she might not be shrinking from him, but drawing him with her deeper into the gloom.
They felt watched by their bemused childhood selves. But the contact of tongues, alive and slippery muscle, moist flesh on flesh, and the strange sound it drew changed that. This sound seemed to enter him, pierce him down his length so that his whole body opened up and he was able to step out of himself and kiss her freely. What had been self-conscious was not impersonal, almost abstract.
At last they were strangers, their pasts were forgotten.
Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining toward the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally.
“Do you love me?” She hesitated. “Yes.” No other reply was possible. Besides, for that moment, she did. He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die.
She sat on her bed in her nightdress with the letter in her lap and thought about the boy.
Briony pressed on. She was, after all, in a part of the conversation she had rehearsed.
