Book #13: Atonement

Book #13: Atonement by Ian McEwan

February 28, 2013


Until I got to the "twist" at the end of the book, I felt kind of annoyed, even pissed off, throughout most of it. The plot centers around a day of events at a country home in England, which lead to 13-year-old Briony Tallis, an aspiring writer and quite a naive young girl, accusing Robbie Turner, the son of a family servant and her father's beneficiary, of raping her cousin Lola. The rest of the story centers around the consequences of that day for three of the characters: Robbie and Briony themselves, and Cecilia, Briony much-older sister and Robbie's lover (at least, their relationship had only just started when everything went down). Now, I wasn't so much upset at Briony for what she did; after all, she was a pretty sheltered kid, she didn't understand the things that had happened, and, as she recalls five years after the event, she had not acted out of malice. Indeed, she felt that she'd been doing the right thing. What made me mad was the way that Cecilia and Robbie were so unwilling to forgive Briony. See, I felt that their coldness toward her was undeserved. Even after she goes to them and begs them to allow her to make things right, they still view her in contempt. Poor Briony; though McEwan's descriptions of her at the beginning of the book are not entirely flattering (she was very set in her ways, and had to have everything just so, neat and tidy, and any little disturbance in her world sent her into a turmoil), I felt sympathetic toward her.

I'll explain the twist at the end after a more thorough description of the book. The structure of it is very interesting, and definitely worth noting. The beginning of the book (approximately the first half of it) all takes place over the course of that one summer day in 1935. Talk of war is brewing (of course, history tells us that World War II did not begin until 1939), but none of the characters have been directly affected by it yet. It will affect them all, in the end. But on this day, there is a lot of activity in the house. There are more people there than usual; in addition to young Briony and her constantly-ailing mother Emily (whom the children do not even address as "Mother" or "Mum," calling her by name, due to her lame mothering skills) and her constantly absent father (who, it is briefly noted, is having an affair in London, claiming that his work in the government keeps him), Briony's older sister Cecilia is home from college, recently graduated. Robbie has graduated as well. Their perspectives in this part of the story center around the growing sexual tension between them, which comes to a head that very day.

The Tallis home is also hosting the Quincey children, young ginger cousins. Lola, 15, is haughty and manipulative, though she is ultimately a victim in the strange situation. Her twin brothers, Pierrot and Jackson, are young and rambunctious, but they mean well. They are probably even more pitiable than Briony herself. They are torn up over the impending divorce of their selfish parents, their sister is mean to them, and they are far away from home. Being red-haired, British twins, I thought of the Weasley twins from the Harry Potter series. Besides them, the eldest Tallis child, Leon (the darling of the family) and his friend Paul Marshall, who at first seems to be just a drab guy who owns a company that makes disgusting candy bars, but who turns out to be kind of a shady guy.

With all these people around the place, and so much going on, nobody could possibly know the whole story. At times, the reader is given glimpses of Emily's perspective (as she lies in bed, fighting off an impeding, or perhaps imagined, migraine), and that of Lola or Betty the cook, but otherwise the story is mostly told through Briony, Cecilia, or Robbie...at least, that's what the reader is lead to believe. But with the two presiding adults in the house, Emily and Cecilia, distracted by their own troubles, it's no wonder that they had no idea what was going on with the kids. That the twins were distressed, or that Briony was upset about her little play, which she'd planned on her cousins performing in her brother's honor, in ruins...or that Lola was being attacked and raped by Paul Marshall. So really, if anything, I would blame Emily, and perhaps even Cecilia, for what happened (and of course, Marshall himself, as the rapist). But not Briony.

Cecilia and Robbie's affair was only beginning on that ill-fated day, when it was cut short by these events. You see, the sexual tension between them had been building for years. When they were both in school, they did not socialize with one another, supposedly on account of their shaky social standing. But that day, after their fight over the broken vase by the fountain (during which Cecilia stripped to her underwear and bra and went to fish out the broken piece...as Briony watched from an upstairs bedroom), and the very sexual letter that Robbie "accidently" sent to Cecilia (yeah, I would definitely call that one a Freudian slip) through Briony (who read the letter, and was shocked and confused by the use of the word "cunt"), the two of them came very close to consummating their relationship in the library. They were in the process of fucking against the shelves, or just starting, when Briony walked in on them.

Cecilia should have talked to her sister. Briony thought she'd walked in on Robbie attempting to rape her sister, after reading the note and dubbing him a "maniac." But Cecilia, embarrassed or annoyed at the interruption, would not talk about it. Again, in this case, I would lay some blame on Cecilia for not setting her sister straight, for not explaining that she and Robbie were really in love, or whatever. Anyway, she and Robbie would not get the chance to consummate their relationship officially for a few more years.

At dinner (where scratches are visible on both Marshall and Lola, hinting at an earlier attack), it is discovered that the troubled twins have run off, and all of the party (save Emily) take off to the dark grounds to find them. Briony, wishing to avoid Robbie in case he wants to take out his frustration on her, comes upon her cousin Lola being raped by a man whose face she does not clearly see. In her mind, it is logical to assume that it was Robbie, and Lola does not contradict her story. Robbie is arrested at dawn (after returning with the lost children), and he is only freed from prison when he agrees to go and fight with the war.

The story jumps ahead five years for the remainder. First, there is a relatively short section about some of Robbie's experiences in the war as he and two officers are crossing through France, headed for the coast as the British troops retreat. He reflects a bit on his bitterness toward Briony, and how he believed that she acted out of jealousy and anger...you see, she'd had a crush on him when she was young, perhaps 10 or 11, and he thought that this had prompted her to lie and get him arrested and charged for the crime of raping Lola. He and Cecilia, who has cut herself off from her family, are still together. She is a nurse in London, having realized that the "degree" issued to her as a literature major is worth absolutely nothing (especially due to the fact that she is a woman). He dreams of them being together again, and at the end of his section, he makes it safely to the coast. The ending drastically changed my perspective of this section, for sure.

Next, back in London, 18-year-old Briony has decided to skip college and become a nurse herself, following in her sister's footsteps, though they have not spoken since she sent Robbie to prison. She is still passionate about her writing, though a story that she'd written about the events of that fateful day in 1935 failed to get published. One day, after getting a day off from the hospital at which she's been working hard to care for the influx of injured soldiers, she journeys through the city, first to the private wedding of Lola and Marshall, then to her sister's apartment, where she confronts both Cecilia and Robbie for the first time in years, and promises to do what she can to "atone" for what she has done to them. She has carried her guilt for years, which is very sad to me. I don't feel that she deserved to beat herself up over it so much, nor did she deserve her sister or Robbie derision. When she parts from them, though, there is hope. They have given her instructions for how to help them, which she plans to enthusiastically carry out.

Then, the twist.

The entire story, up to the final 20 pages, was the final draft of that first failed story, written by Briony. Therefore, all other perspectives were merely imagined. She was able to recreate Robbie's experiences from correspondence with a prisoner and with an army officer, and through the letters written back and forth between Cecilia and Robbie themselves, housed in a war museum. Because Robbie and Cecilia did not survive the war. They both died in 1940; Robbie got some kind of infection or disease that soldiers in war are prone to, and Cecilia died when her hospital was bombed. Briony never did see them again after that day in 1935; her reunion with them was imagined. Lola and Marshall's wedding was not, and in those final 20 pages, told in the first person from 77-year-old Briony's perspective, she actually sees the aged couple one more time, noting that though Marshall looks withered, Lola is still vibrant as she approaches 80. Briony wishes for them both to die, so that she can publish her book with their real names in it. She needs to do it for her own atonement, though she acknowledges at the end that she may die before it is carried out.

So in the end, Briony really did not make amends for the "crime" she committed, unwittingly, as a child. It cannot be said how much of her sister and almost-brother-in-law's contempt of her was real or imagined. That kind of lessened the tension for me, thinking that some of that coldness must have come from Briony's own guilty imagination. In the end, though she really had not been able to "take back" her "crime," she seemed to be at peace with the new ending that she had created for the people that she cared about and had hurt. She felt that, as long as the manuscript of her story existed, they would live happily forever, in love. Though some might argue that she had never been able to properly atone for what she'd done, she seemed at peace with it in the end, as she also began to accept the fact that she mind was starting to go to dementia. But she created a world that fit with what she really wanted, through her stories, just as she'd always done. She created a world in which she'd been forgiven, which was good enough for her.

A group of nurses, circa WWII. Briony describes her experiences as a nurse in training. They are unsung heroes of the war, risking their own safety (and often their lives, as was the case with Cecilia) to work in what were essentially giant Nazi bomb targets.

The Weasley twins from the famous Harry Potter films. They sure were lovable characters; shame that one of them was (spoiler alert, in case you're years behind) killed in the last one.