"Atonement" by Ian McEwan

One single event can turn your world perception upside down. One single word can change someone’s life. One single mistake can end in a tragedy… “Atonement” tells about child’s naivety and one cowardly action that changed lives of many people for years to come. One hot August day of 1935 thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses something not meant for her eyes and makes some hasty conclusions which, spoken out in wrong time and place, will lead to irreversible consequences. For the rest of her life Briony’s mind will keep coming back to that episode and discovering new details and interpretations of it, wishing just to be able to repair the damage done. Sixty years later, already a famous writer, she will find the way to atone but is atonement itself a fair price to buy forgiveness?

This work of literature was written by one of the masters of British postmodernism which couldn’t but influence its outer form. Montage method, polyphony, usage of different narrative techniques, playing with the artistic time – all these features of McEwan works are characteristic not only of those novels that were written during his early, chronologically postmodern period,  but also of later works like “Atonement” published in 2001.

Structurally the novel falls into three parts, the last of which blends with the epilogue. Each part is different from the others both in stylistic representation and due to the usage of different types of narration.

The first part taking more than half of the novel, describes one single summer day of 1935 when the estate of Tallises not far from London is expecting numerous guests – older son Leon with his businessman friend Paul Marshall, Mrs. Tallis’s teenage niece Lola and her little twin brothers Pierro and Jackson, as well as Robbie Turner, the son of their former butler who is also a childhood friend of Cecile, Briony and Leon. The day turns out to be difficult for everyone in Tallis estate – the servants run around the house, preparing rooms and dinner for the guests, Briony in a blow of inspiration tries to engage her cousins into a theatrical performance of her own play, Mrs. Tallis suffers from another fit of migraine, hiding behind thick curtains and wondering when her ever busy husband is going to return from his office, Leon tries to entertain an important guest while Cecile and Robbie who are madly in love with each other can’t dare to confess their feelings.

From the very beginning of the novel three figures who are going to play the key roles in the complications of events, move forward.

Briony is the youngest and the favourite of the family, a girl slightly spoiled with attention and blessed with an excessively vivid imagination, the latter being very useful for her hobby – writing short stories. As any writer she lives in a world created by the power of her mind and often fails to draw the line between imaginary and real. She is concentrated on herself and constantly but not consciously strives to be the centre of everyone’s attention.

Cecile who is separated from her sister by ten years, is desperately trying to find her own place in the world, to come to terms with her tangled feelings, thoughts and desires. Trying to fit in the society surrounding her, Cecile colours her behaviour with tones of snobbism and arrogance, quite uncharacteristic of her, but can’t help feeling alienated from both her family and the society in general. Attached to her relatives she can find strength neither to break up with her family and usual lifestyle, nor to accept their values.

Her beloved Robbie owes his position in society to Mr. Tallis who has been very generous supporting the friend of his children. The Tallises pay for Robbie’s school and university studies, moreover, they treat him as a member of their family. Robbie, it’s necessary to admit, absolutely deserves such attention, as he is smart and erudite, eager to learn, make discoveries and broaden his mind. Apart from this, he is ambitious and very optimistic about his future prospects – medical education, researches, his own private clinic.

The time in the first part of the novel is slow-flowing, it stretches and comes close to the real one. The author describes all the events in the tiniest detail, switches from one viewpoint to another, penetrating into the thoughts and feelings of his characters making the reader literally live through those endlessly long hours. Hot weather becomes the reflection of the characters’ emotions – the hotter it gets, the stronger are the emotions within the house.

The centre of the events is Briony, disappointed with the failure of her play. Trying to conquer her emotions she suddenly witnesses someone other’s – from the window of her room she sees a quarrel between Robbie and Cecile. Being only a child Briony is unable to understand everything she has seen, but the scene makes her realise that there is so much knowledge she doesn’t yet possess and that the world might turn out to be much more complicated and multifaceted than she used to think.

“Briony had her first, weak intimation that for her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong.”

Throughout the novel we can observe the opposition of a simple and organized world of childhood and the chaos of the adult one. This opposition can be seen in the ways of thinking typical of the characters, in their preparations for the party where methodical, systematic organization of Briony’s performance doesn’t a bit resemble the “natural disorder” of her sister’s bouquets, as well as in the description of the sisters’ bedrooms:

“Whereas her big sister’s room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony’s was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way - towards their owner - as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled”.

The differences between the adult and the child’s world, so suddenly discovered, leave Briony anxious and curious so she keeps looking out for other details of relations between Robbie and Cecile and where she fails to find them her imagination comes in handy. Because of this she jumps up to conclusions which turn out to be very dangerous for all three of them.

The author pays a great deal of attention to the power of circumstances. All the further events are not just Briony’s fault, there were many other, more objective factors. During this day each character makes a choice, a choice of words, actions, judgements, that drive the situation closer and closer to its climax. If only Briony’s play didn’t go wrong, if only Cecile and Robbie didn’t quarrel, if only Lola wasn’t that reckless, if only… Too many of such “ifs” appear in the novel introducing the motif of fatalism into it.

Besides, there is another feature about this novel, which plays an even more important role – the image of an artist and the development of one’s artistic method. Briony, notwithstanding her young age, is represented as a writer and all the events of the day become a milestone in her creative life. The girlsevaluates all the incidents from the point of view of an artist and attempts to take something useful for her writings from them. This may look cynical, but the relations of her sister are, furthermost, a great plot, a story, worth narrating. Many years later, she will describe this day as a transition to “an impartial psychological realism”, as a day that brought up her ability not only to imagine the stories but also to find them in her surroundings.

But for now she is just a little girl awed and fascinated by her discoveries which she yet fails to interpret. She only begins to think that playing the role of the narrator, she might have stepped out of her game and gone way too far.

The second part of the novel takes the reader to France, five years later, and deals with the war period. Robbie, like many other soldiers, finds himself amidst the personification of the most impressive chaos of the adult life. Following his character the author, very impartially, in detail compared to that of Remarque or Hemingway, describes the horror of those years, making the reader wonder: how much can a human being endure? Is there a limit to what one can get used to? For his descriptions the author chooses one of the most inglorious events of WWII, survived by Great Britain – the Dunkirk evacuation, when British soldiers were ordered to leave France and return to their native land. An army of thousands was moving along the narrow corridor towards the seashore, constantly undergoing the air attacks of Nazis. Wounded, madding from hunger and thirst, suffering from heat and exhaustion, the soldiers were running alongside with local inhabitants, understanding that only a few would be lucky enough to reach the British shores. For McEwan this episode is the most clear representation of the pointlessness, the horror, the insanity of war, the author in this emotional way highlights the price which common people paid to gain the victory over Nazism.  

The consequences of this cruel war are shown in the third part where adult Briony works as a nurse in St. Thomas’s hospital in London. Feeling lonely and forsaken, she keeps remembering the greatest mistake of her life, and realizes she needs to find a way to repent. The best way for her is to use her creativity and let the whole world know about her beastly actions… In the epilogue the author shows us Briony in her elderly age and at last breaks the suspense: how did Briony’s life develop? What was the end of Robbie’s and Cecile’s plotline? And was there really any atonement?

Briony’s atonement is far from catharsis, for it is deprived of any tragedy: like an experienced surgeon, she splits up the minds of all the characters of this tragedy, including herself, only to analyze them later in her novel. Repenting she still stays concentrated upon herself and everything she does to atone is aimed at the relieving her consciousness rather than at repairing the lives she has broken with one thoughtless phrase.

Whatever changes her life brings, Briony is still a writer and she sees the world from a writer’s point of view. At the sunset of her life she comes to the conclusion which very precisely expresses the message of this novel and, in many ways, explains the essence of the literary creativity:

“The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: 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.”

Acting as a “God” in a small world of her characters, creating their lives and fates, controlling each of their steps, thirteen-year-old Briony decided that she can overtake the role of the Creator in the real world as well. But she didn’t consider that the lives broken cannot be mended by tearing up the disappointing page. Her plot was someone’s life, her mistake – someone’s tragedy. She atoned for her fault on paper. But in life?.. This the author leaves for his readers to judge.