Atonement

“Atonement” by Ian McEwan

Synopsis

The novel opens on the hottest day of summer, 1935, in the Tallis household. Briony, the youngest in the family at thirteen and a budding novelist, has written her first play which she intends to perform with the help of her cousin for the homecoming of her older brother Leon, who will be bringing with him a friend, Paul Marshall. Briony’s cousins – fifteen year old Lola Quincey and her younger twin brothers Jackson and Pierrot – have been sent to stay with the Tallis family in order to be kept away from their parent’s messy divorce, in a society where marital problems are frowned upon and kept from the public eye at all costs.

            Later that day, when rehearsals for “The Trials Of Arabella” fall apart and Briony’s cousins leave to amuse themselves, Briony finds herself looking out of the window onto the front lawn, where she watches a shocking scene unfold before her – her elder sister Celia stripping off her clothes before her childhood friend Robbie (the son of a woman working in the household who lives on the Tallis’ estate), before plunging into the fountain on the lawn. Here Briony’s young, overactive imagination comes into play as she creates her own explanation for her sister’s actions, leaping to adult conclusions of Robbie, a long-time friend of the family, being a sexual predator and forcing her sister’s actions on the lawn, and it is this idea that ultimately leads to the unravelling of all of their lives.

            Later in the evening, Lola is raped whilst out searching for her homesick brothers who have tried to run away, and Briony, participating in her own tragic tale in which she is the heroine, vehemently accuses Robbie, backing up her theory of his being a sexually-crazed maniac by presenting to her family and then the police a letter he accidentally sent to Celia earlier that day, in which he wrote of how he dreamed of making love to her. When further questioned by the police and realising that she in fact did not see Robbie rape Lola, Briony stuck by her accusation, leading to the unfair arrest of Robbie, bringing with it a sadness for both Celia and the reader that is made all the more poignant by the realisation of Celia and Robbie’s love being made only hours before.

            The second part of the novel follows Robbie, who is in France fighting as a soldier in the Second World War, a position offered to him as an alternative to completing his jail sentence. He has become the unofficial leader of two other men, and the three of them are making their way back across France to Dunkirk to be shipped home, where Celia is waiting for him. Through Robbie’s eyes, McEwan shows the reader the horrors of the Second World War, and through his thoughts we see the effects that his experiences have had on him.

            The third part of the novel is seen through Briony’s eyes, following her training as a nurse in the hospital Celia trained in, and seeing the effects the war had at home, both in the wounded Briony treats and in the society she sees when outside of the hospital. Briony’s character has changed greatly in the years that have passed – when she was younger we saw how self-centred she was, craving attention and being pettily jealous of those who had it when she didn’t, however now she is completing training that will enable her to help complete strangers, and no attention is paid to her – patients are not even allowed to know her first name, so she is merely “Nurse Tallis”, with her only identity being her profession. As Briony has grown, we see that she has realised the extent of the terrible crime she had committed years before in misinterpreting the relationship between Robbie and her Sister, perhaps separating them forever, and this realisation leads her to seek out her sister who had estranged herself from the family after Robbie’s arrest.

On her way to visit Celia on her day off, Briony detours to a local church, sidling into the back of a service – the marriage of Lola Quincey and Paul Marshall, the man who actually raped her the night Robbie was arrested. Briony makes her way to the house her sister is living in, and tries to make amends, to no avail – Celia will never forgive Briony for ruining her life, and Briony doesn’t expect her to. Whilst there, Robbie comes in, and becomes agitated and angry to an extent that he becomes lost in his horrific memories of jail and the war, for which Briony is solely to blame, but Celia brings him back to the present, and it is here that for the first time Briony understands the love between Celia and Robbie that she is seeing –when she was younger she didn’t understand their relationship for what it was, but as she has grown she realised what really happened, and it is only now that she could see it with her own eyes and understand it for what it is.

The epilogue follows Briony Tallis on her seventy-seventh birthday, when she attends a birthday celebration with her family, and the youngest family members put on a production of the never-performed “Trials Of Arabella”. She has finished the last of a number of drafts of a novel - the true story of the terrible crime that she committed aged thirteen, when she didn’t understand the world or the repercussions of her actions. In her novel, she has changed the ending, giving a happy ending to the tale of two lovers who both died in 1940 – Robbie of septicaemia, and Celia months later by the bomb that destroyed the Balham Underground station – preserving the memory and love of two young people that suffered due to her actions, because in Briony’s mind “As long as there remains a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.” This is Briony’s final act of kindness – giving her sister and Robbie the life and love that they deserved.

Quotes

"Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated." Part 1, Chapter 3, pg. 36.

Context: Briony has been sat on the floor, thinking of how familiar she is with herself – with her thoughts, as she is with the ‘precise configuration of her knees’ – on thought follows another, a question always creates another question, and she asks herself if everyone is really as alive as she is, and does everyone think as she does.

Analysis: Briony is questioning the identity of others compared to her own – do others think the same way as her? Briony wonders at whether you ever really know someone’s true identity, or do you only ever know the face that they show you, with their true self and thoughts concealed inside? Briony compares her sister to herself, as she has nothing else she can compare her sister’s identity to - she is of the opinion that she has the most vivid, interesting life and the deepest thoughts and most complex identity, an opinion that is at odds with the childish selfishness that she is revealing through the thought that she is the most important and interesting. Her childishness is also presented in her thought that if everyone had a hidden, more complex identity, the world would be “unbearably complicated” – this suggests that Briony is opposed to the idea that everyone is as complex as she is, and that childishly she would like the world and everyone in it to be as simple as they first appear, isolating Briony even among her friends and family, a position that we get the impression Briony, with her wild imagination and the stories she so loves to write, would relish, painting herself as the long-suffering heroine in the story of her life, who isn’t understood by those around her.

The idea of others having a hidden identity resurfaces later in the novel, with Briony’s musings on the subject later bringing Briony to jump to the conclusion that secretly Robbie, who she has known all of her life, is a sex-crazed maniac, an idea that leads to his arrest.

"She (Briony) had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing.”….. “Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know."….. “At the age of eleven she wrote her first story – a foolish, childish affair” ….. “But this first clumsy attempt showed her that imagination itself was a source of secrets” Part 1, Chapter 1, pg.5-6.

Context: Briony is a child that is “possessed by a desire to have the world just so”, and she realises that this attribute prevents her from having any secrets, something she desperately desires to have.

Analysis: Briony is much more straightforward than she would like to be seen as, and she finds that the driving force behind her writing is in expressing aspects of herself that no one else knows about, in such a way that no one realises she is talking about herself – she puts her most private thoughts and feelings into her characters. McEwan gives the reader the impression that Briony wants desperately to be more complex – she makes attempts at having secrets, in an attempt to grow up and not have people take her at face value – as the baby of the family, she desires to grow up and feel more included.

“But of course it had all been her – by her and about her, and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky.” ….. “She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.” Part 1, Chapter 7, pg. 76-77.

Context: Briony is returning to the real world from a daydream ,in which she competed in the Berlin Olympics the next year in the Nettle-Slashing tournament, a daydream born from the vicious slashing of the nettles in the grounds whilst in a temper, due to the falling apart of “The Trials Of Arabella”. 

Analysis: Briony, the youngest of the family amidst all of her older family members, who were preparing themselves for Leon’s homecoming and the evening to follow, feels incredibly insignificant – physically the smallest, with her thoughts and opinions carrying little if any weight in the household, and now even her cousins have abandoned the first play she has ever written, written for Leon, in the hopes that he will notice and admire her efforts – a feeling amplified by the jerk back to a reality made to seem worse by her happily self-centred daydream of being internationally known and admired, attention on a scale that she has and will never know, but craves none the less. The repetition of “her” – “it had all been her – by her and about her” – in referring to Briony’s daydream reveals her childishly self-centred nature, and the line “she felt herself shrinking” shows the very literal feeling she has of her insignificance returning, and suggests at how sharply she feels it on a daily basis.

“He paused to gather his courage. ‘It’s a divorce!’ Pierrot and Lola froze. The word had never been used in front of the children, and never uttered by them. The soft consonants suggested an unthinkable obscenity, the sibilant ending whispered the family’s shame.” ….. “’How dare you say that.’” …… “’You will never ever use that word again. D’you hear me?’”

Context: Twins Pierrot and Jackson are homesick, and are in the playroom with Lola who, trying to comfort them, assures them that they will be going home soon. Jackson sees the blatant lie in this and calls Lola on it.

Analysis:  This passage reveals a lot to the reader about the attitude of the society of the time – marital problems were never to be made public knowledge, and were such a taboo subject that even the children of those involved were shielded from it – even the word ‘divorce’ is taboo.