This is only the second of Ian McEwan’s novels that I’ve read, the first being his 1978 novel,  the Cement Garden. The Cement Garden surprised me with how well it was written, so when I got a  copy of Atonement I decided to give it a read.

Atonement begins in England, 1935. Cecelia Tallis and Robbie Turner have, after studying at university, returned to their childhood home, the Tallis family estate. Over the next two days, Cecelia and Robbie (the son of Tallis family’s housekeeper) realise that they’re in love, and are ultimately interrupted during sex by the Tallis’s youngest daughter, thirteen year old Briony.

Briony interprets this sexual act as an assault by Robbie on her sister. Robbie, she believes, is a maniac, and her sister must be protected from him. She begins planning how she might do this.

Later that night, while walking on the estate grounds, Briony interrupts the rape of her cousin, Lola. The rapist runs off into the darkness with neither Lola nor Briony seeing who it is. But because of her conviction that Robbie is a sexual predator, Briony tells Lola and her own family that it was Robbie she saw running off.

On Briony’s word, Robbie is arrested and eventually jailed. After spending three years in prison, Robbie is released on condition that he enlists to fight Germany in World War II. Cecelia distances herself from her family for what she feels is their abandonment of Robbie.

The story jumps to a few years later, when an older Briony wants to find atonement for so thoroughly damaging Robbie and Cecelia’s lives. She begins by locating Cecelia, who she discovers is sharing a flat with Robbie. Robbie himself has been through a harrowing ordeal in France, during the British withdrawal and evacuation at Dunkirk. Briony offers to recant her testimony concerning the rape, and, at Robbie’s request, agrees to write a long letter explaining how she had come to name him as the rapist. The bulk of the book ends shortly after this, and is signed by its fictional author, Briony Tallis.

Briony’s true search for atonement isn’t as simple as she had hoped, and hasn’t yet ended, which we discover in the novel’s remaining twenty pages. The setting is now 1999; Briony Tallis is 77, and it is only in these last pages that the reader begins to discover what writing the book (the long letter asked for by Robbie) meant to her, and what her thoughts on her atonement are. I thought the end was devastatingly sad, and this is one of the most emotionally powerful books that I’ve read in a long time.

The novel ends with this thought on a novelist’s atonement:

“… how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.”

Atonement is written in the third person omniscient, and the viewpoint often shifts between characters within any given scene. These shifts are always handled with care, and leave us knowing exactly whose viewpoint the novel is told from; the characters themselves are each distinct and detailed, with their own understanding of the events that they’re going through; each of them leaves us knowing what they feel towards the Tallis household, their role in each others lives, and what they want from the future, a future that is not only broken by the onset of World War II, but by Briony’s crime.

Not only are the characters detailed and well-rounded, but so to are the descriptions of the novel’s various scenes. Those that stand out most include Robbie’s travel through France while wounded and being intermittently attacked by German forces, as well as Briony’s work in a hospital caring for the wounded soldiers returning from Dunkirk. Here we see the wounds the soldiers have suffered and are dying from — with one soldier missing portions of his face — and what the nurses, including Briony, must do to care for them.

The plot itself begins slowly, with the book’s opening more focused on the characters, on setting the scene and building the mood. The book is, in more ways than one, a tragedy, and as such it makes it clear that bad things will be happening to the characters, the eventual culmination of which I found myself beginning to dread as the story moved along. The story never focuses on the rapist, and Briony becomes the novel’s villain. This makes it somewhat surprising, but fitting, when we find the book signed in her name. The novel would never have been as strong as it is without its final coda, and the emotions that those pages bring to the reader come about in large part because Briony, the book’s “villain”, is also its author.

My thoughts: I loved this book. Ian McEwan’s eye for detail is amazing, and his characterisation top notch. He also plays with meta-fiction, something I always find amusing: for instance, Briony not only “writes” the novel, but her own character in it writes a novella covering the book’s first half. On submitting the novella for publication, she receives a rejection letter criticising its focus on characterisation and its lack of plot.

Since I’ve finished reading it, I’ve often thought about the book, and the role that story plays in our lives. I recommend reading Atonement. Go out and find a copy!

The book’s opening: “The play — for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper — was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a break-fast and a lunch.”

Ian McEwan’s website: http://www.ianmcewan.com/
Ian McEwan on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McEwan