Atonement

Wow, what a book! Yet another novel that has stayed on my shelves for far too long, partially because I was so intimidated by it and partially because of all the hype surrounding it a few years ago. As it turns out, I needn't have worried on either of those counts. It wasn't a difficult read at all, and the hype was entirely justified!

At its barest of bones, this is a book about two lovers and the girl who tears them apart. Cecilia Tallis, a rich young woman, and Robbie Turner, her charlady's son, have both recently returned to the Tallis estate from Cambridge University, where they have been studiously avoiding one another. It is only during the hot summer following their return that they realise how deep their feelings really show more are.

Waiting for them back home is Cecilia's younger sister. I have to admit, I hated Briony in the first half of the book. She reminded me of a young version of Barbara in Notes on a Scandal: manipulative, naive, attention-seeking, self-obsessed and utterly destructive in her unswerving self-righteousness. Briony wants to be a writer and a grown-up, not necessarily in that order, and her imagination tends to run away with her. When a collection of bizarre encounters and Briony's overactive mind are thrown together during one frightening night, Robbie is arrested for a crime he didn't commit, and the Tallis family falls apart.

Moving on a few years, Robbie is fighting his way across France in a desperate attempt to get back to Cecilia; the love of his life is pouring out her devotion in her letters, waiting for him to return, and Briony is seeking to redeem herself by following in Cecilia's footsteps and training as a nurse. From the innocence and family atmosphere of the first half of the book, suddenly the reader is plunged into Robbie's terrifying trek towards the beaches of Dunkirk, and from there into Briony's horrific experiences in the hospital as the first soldiers are brought back from the retreat. Will Cecilia and Robbie be reunited? And will Briony ever manage to atone for what she did and finally set things to rights?

I cannot believe how much I underestimated this book. McEwan's writing is simply sublime. He keeps the pace steady, picking out tiny details and observations, exploring personal motives and flights of fancy, revisiting memories, and immersing the reader completely inside his characters' heads - yet I never felt impatient for things to speed up. It would have been so easy for chaotic moments in France and in the hospital to be flitted over and churned together into a frenzy, but their impact would have been halved. There is no escape from the thoughts, the joys, the horrors, the beautiful and haunting things that McEwan wants us to see. With a single sentence he can rip the rug out from under the complacent reader, then with a beautiful description encourage us to regroup and reflect once more. As with so many stories during which I become deeply attached to and emotionally invested in each and every character, I had a feeling I was going to be a bit tearful by the end, and I was right - I spent fifteen minutes sobbing into my pillow! It is an epic and exquisite rollercoaster, and I am so glad I finally chose to stop procrastinating and experience it for myself! show less

This book is a marvel of presuppositions, fictions and perceptions. The first part is a beautiful prism-like construction of points of view, so carefully crafted that the rest of the story simply flows. The plot is very secondary - it is the make-up of the characters that is fascinating: described in glimpses and through various voices, they all come to stand on their own. The events, as they unfold, came as no surprise to me; if anything, when there were lies (or untruths), they came as jarring since they were not true to the basic personality of the characters. This, to me, is a testimony of the power of McEwan's writing: all the characters evolve according to their basic personality, despite their age and revelations.
A show more heart-wrenching tale which will haunt me for a long time. show less

As has been said plenty of times by plenty of people before, Atonement is a novel about a young girl named Briony Tallis, aged ten when we meet her, aged eighteen when she we meet her again, and aged seventy-seven when we leave her behind. Briony is a fantasist of the purest kind, an "organized spirit" whose juvenilia tends to be pedagogical rather than, say, entertaining. Part One of Atonement explores her confrontation with the moral chaos and ambiguous emotions of the adult world, through the budding romantic relationship between her older sister Cecilia and the Cambridge-educated son of the Tallis' charlady, Robbie Turner. Briony glimpses bits and pieces of this relationship: a soundless, senseless argument viewed from her window; a show more sexually frank letter meant for Cecilia from Robbie, read without permission; and, finally, catching the young couple making love in the library, an act that she interprets as an attack. When a young cousin, Lola, is raped on the Tallis grounds, Briony, convinced that Robbie is a perverted sex maniac, confidently declares him to be Lola's violator; upon her testimony alone, and the fact that no one saw him at the time the rape took place, Robbie is sent to prison and he and Cecilia are ripped apart, unable even to visit due to the nature of Robbie's purported crime, forced to boil all contact down to censored letters.

In Part Two, the action jumps ahead four years: war has come to Europe, and Robbie has been freed on the condition that he join the army. We meet up with him as he is tramping through the French countryside on his way to Bray-Dunes to join the evacuation of Dunkirk. He tells us of his time in prison, although, as one might imagine, he is far more expressive on the subject of his love for Cecilia, and his hatred for Briony, than the details of his incarceration. We come to know Robbie so much better as we see the war experience in miniature through his eyes. We see that his heart isn't hardened by his suffering, and that he has grown from an idealistic boy into a realistic man--he doesn't want the world, he just wants his freedom, and he's willing to risk his life to get it back. Sadly, and this is really my only qualm with the book, we don't get any of Cecilia here except through Robbie's eyes, but I believe that McEwan knows what he's doing--perhaps it would have been redundant.

We rejoin Briony in Part Three; she is eighteen now, and beginning to understand fully the weight of what she did. She has separated herself from her doting family and become a student nurse in the hopes of working off what she sees as her debt, and though we can see that she is aware of her tremendous guilt, she still hopes--in vain, she knows--for forgiveness; she is still a fantasist. She wants to get in touch with Cecilia, to find out how Robbie is, to make a plan to begin earning back redemption, both for herself and for Robbie. Though Cecilia won't answer her letters, Briony goes to see her after discovering that Lola has married Paul Marshall, another guest of the Tallis' that fateful night, and realizing that Marshall was Lola's rapist, and that now that they are married he is protected forever because Lola will never testify against him. Cecilia and Robbie are naturally angry and unforgiving, but Briony promises that she will do everything she can to make things right, and they depart, if not reconciled, then at least bonded by tragedy. Briony's pain at being unable to undo her crime absolutely is palpable, and she becomes the story's real tragic figure, the ghost in the shadow cast by the light of Robbie and Cecilia's undying love.

This, however, is not the end of the story. In the epilogue, Briony is a celebrated author returning to Tallis House, now a hotel, for her seventy-seventh birthday. Bri NY insists that this is where you can tell that something is amiss, because neither Robbie nor Cecilia are at the party--one would think that, if everything turned out the way it should, they would have forgiven her by now. I disagree, but I'll get to that in a moment. Finally, Briony reveals the sickening truth: that what we have been reading is her novel, not that of a dispassionate narrator, which we should have been able to guess as whoever is telling the story struggles throughout to both castigate Briony for her terrible betrayal, and to justify it. And not only that, but in real life, Robbie died at Bray-Dunes of septicemia in June of 1940, and Cecilia died soon after in the Balham Underground station, which was flooded in October of the same year. Briony was too cowardly to visit her sister after leaving Lola's wedding to Paul Marshall, and here is where we get to the part where McEwan is devilishly brilliant.

When Briony goes to Cecilia's flat in Balham, Cecilia ends up talking to her on the stairs for a while, until they are shooed away by the landlady, who Cecilia hates. She takes Briony into her flat, and you think that it is empty but for them, but then Robbie comes through on his way to the bathroom and says nothing to Briony, seems not even to see her. Later, you understand that he has mistaken her for someone from the hospital (Cecilia is also a nurse), someone he doesn't know, and it isn't until he comes back from the bathroom and goes to shake Briony's hand that he recognizes her. In this moment, Robbie passes through the room as if either he or Briony is a ghost, and Cecilia's explanation, "I thought it best that you didn't meet. I didn't want to wake him. He sleeps so soundly these days," is mystifying. If she didn't want Briony to see Robbie, why did she bring her upstairs, knowing that he was there? That has always confused me. I know I promised not to mention the movie, but I had forgotten, since I read this book for the first time about two years ago, exactly where the narrative becomes fiction (fiction in the sense that Briony, as narrator, is fabricating), and as soon as I saw this scene I knew that we had crossed the line. Interesting, because that day that Briony did not, as she wrote in her novel, go see her sister was after Robbie's death, so even if she had, Robbie would not have been there at all--but wouldn't he have been there, all the same, a ghostly presence the way Briony for a moment appears to be in the fictionalized version? And even more interesting, in Briony's fantasy version Cecilia tells her that she's moving away from Balham in a week--Briony's grasping wish that her sister had not had need to be in that Tube station when the pipes were destroyed by a Nazi bomb.

The film loses a layer of fictionality, unfortunately, because it is a film. With the book, we are reading a novel within a novel within a novel--Briony's novel framed by Briony's reality framed by McEwan's novel, and in the film Briony's novel becomes merely a story. It's this sort of thing that makes me miss writing papers; I need to read Atonement again and note all the times when Briony the writer slips into the prose and manipulates the way we see things. I don't know what I'd do with that information, but I think that until you investigate this aspect of the novel, you cannot quite understand exactly what McEwan is saying about the relationship of the writer to his/her work and the powerful nature of fantasy and imagination. show less

At the age of 13, aspiring writer Briony Tallis has a play in mind to present to friends and family when her cousins come from the north. When she sees something between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the young man whom her father is putting through college and the son of their washerwoman, her story about what happened changes their lives forever.

This is the second time I read Atonement, a book I disliked the first time around and would never have picked up again if we had not chosen it for book group. Though it was eight years ago and I was not reviewing every book I read at the time, vivid images from the story stayed in my mind, and the anger and betrayal I felt at the end of the story stayed with me a long time show more afterwards. I picked it up again with reluctance. Because I knew the story, however, I could look at it with new eyes. I noticed a lot more what the author was doing playing with narrative and point of view, symmetry, and the idea that real life is so much more messy than what we read in books. His writing is exquisite, with an ear for language and description that took my breath away at times and had me reading slowly - less out of reluctance than having to follow the rhythm he set for the story. Having World War 2 as a setting is no accident, either, as it is a backdrop for the individual, human story of Briony and her unforgivable ignorance. What ignorance did people have in allowing Hitler as much freedom as he had in the years leading up to the war? And how did we rewrite the story to sound better, to make us less culpable? Does silence implicate someone as much as willful deceit? These are some of the very challenging human questions the story poses, and we are not given any easy answers. show less

Of course there is always something spellbinding and touching in a love that’s faithful enough it crosses boundaries of distance and surmounts the passing time. A love that endures, as one might say, is both a blessing and a curse for it doesn’t deter from any kind of struggle, however the affliction, and reunites with a soulful fervour. But when it’s weathered by insufferable theatrics it becomes almost a borderline melodramatic excess. Such is Atonement. Told in paragraphs much too beautiful it can be emotionally dismantling, it successfully distracts from its subtle mediocrity. For one, Atonement is almost irredeemable with its usage of rape as a cheap, underwhelming plot device. As if it is not disturbing enough that the show more victim and perpetrator reach the most appalling of conclusions, the others are too caught up in their own confusing snobbishness, selfishness, and tiring anguish to prevent it at all. What’s more surprising here is my utter indifference to Briony Tallis which near the end turned to sympathy then pity of some sort. I don’t believe she is completely and solely culpable. A child exposed to some kind of trauma can’t be fully held accountable for acting out of fear. Some of the characters’ decisions are absurd (looking at you, Cecilia Tallis) too. And without any relevant interactions to invest much on, Cecilia and Robbie’s love story gets diluted into that one lustful library encounter. And perhaps if some form of explanation to Briony was provided after, it’d have been entirely different. Nonetheless, the chapters about the second world war are the strongest in the novel as they capture, also mirror, a life-altering catastrophe which victimises everyone. Nobody goes out unscathed. A theme present throughout the book. Amidst some flaws and predictability, McEwan’s prose kept me tangled (and fairly satisfied) in its depressing mess.

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”

If there’s anything of genuine value here, it’s how we tend to forget that words can be both sharp and dull: they can alter a moment, injure those closest to us, and they become smoke when they have burnt a cellophane of emotions. That and it’s surely romantic to be made love to against a row of bookshelves (but mind the cunt-calling please). show less

Ian McEwan's novel, Atonement, is a story of chance encounters that disrupt even the most carefully controlled lives. Set in England during the period between the two World Wars with a leap to the present, the plans of members of a wealthy family are changed because of the conscious misperceptions of a creative child, Briony. Because of her disingenuous account of an assault that takes place on the family's estate, irreversible life paths are set for the characters, and the reader is aware of the novelist's deliberate plot decisions.

The beautifully written story follows the lives of the characters most affected by Briony's embellishment of her observations and her desire to tell stories, to become a novelist. McEwan presents a novel show more within a novel and surprises the reader on many occasions with plot twists. He has a very good ability to give the reader insight into the characters' motivations, describing reasons for their life changing choices.

The most impressive aspect of Atonement is McEwan's illustration of the power of a life review, the revisiting of personal history by a person as she gains wisdom through aging. In Brionys' life review, initiated both consciously and by chance encounters with people and cues from the environment, a resolution of her life is achieved. The task of aging is atonement through memories, a unity of the story of the self and a personal history with others. The most difficult conclusion to reach is that upon looking back, it all makes sense. show less

ATONEMENT (2001) is my third Ian McEwen novel, and I will start by saying this was also the third time I started reading it, because I put it aside a couple of times because it seemed to move sooo slowly. And it did this time too, but I stuck with it and finally finished it. But it was something of a slog, even this time. McEwen has created a great cast of characters, especially in the sisters Briony and Cecelia Tallis and Robbie Turner. There is a barely requited love story (Cee and Robbie) set in 1935 England, cruelly cut short by either an outright lie or mistaken identity (Briony) which sends Robbie to prison for three years, until he is released for army service in the war against Germany. Cecelia cuts all ties with her family and show more becomes a nurse. Robbie becomes part of the disastrous rout of the British Army and its retreat to Dunkirk, which was, for me, the best part of the book. Then Briony becomes a nurse, treating the casualties of that rout. There is an attempted reconciliation with her sister. Post-war she becomes a successful novelist and ... Well, it's complicated, and even a bit confusing, even with its tacked-on "epilogue" written by Briony nearly sixty years later.

While I was often caught up in the beautiful writing of this complex tale of love and war, at other times I wished he'd just get ON with it. Get the plot going! That "slog" I mentioned. A good editor could probably have cut at least a hundred pages from this too-long narrative. That said, there is, I think, a memorable and very moving story here. I have not seen the film adaptation, but I suspect I may like it more than the novel, as it would certainly contain those necessary edits.

Good story. Too long. Recommended with those reservations.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less