Lizzy's Reviews > Atonement

The subject matter of Atonement is literature itself, but it is much more. First, the writer is one of its characters; second, because Ian McEwan’s novel creates a world where subjectivity and objectivity interfere mutually. The characters are full of life and the language, even if elaborate and subtle, does not go around or makes inroads into itself.

The narrator and protagonist, Briony Tallis, emerges in the beginner as a pre-adolescent that dreams to arrange the world in her texts, as in the play she is writing. Her love for order, for the careful design according to her spoiled desires, is translated into an impulse to write that hardly depend on the theme.

“There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.”

Her cousins, Lola, and the twins will be the actors, with which she plans to awe the assembled family, that include her parents, her older sister Cecily and the son of the housekeeper, Robbie. On that day of 1935, Briony sees Cecily and Robbie in a game that culminates in a fateful scene. Briony believes she sees something that profoundly perturbs her. The development of the story doesn’t let the reader stop. When, later, Lola is raped by a man that was not seen, Briony, without any grounds, makes a ‘deduction’ of who committed the crime.

Here we are, therefore, in the territory of Jane Austen, cited in the epigraph, or Henry James, George Eliot, and many other English authors: social tension versus sexual stress, pride and prejudice conflicts, mere misunderstandings that adopt dramatic dimensions. McEwan considers the simple distortions that physical acts, such as vision, can suffer when clouded by moral bias. Briony is attracted to Robbie and envies in Cecily her independence and, and in her anxiety to wipe out her shortcomings recreates the world in her own way, succumbing to prejudice and threatening her already reduced capacity to accept reality.

But, more than that, what McEwan shows is how a writer can worsen weaknesses such as vanity, cowardice and credulity, sentiments that derive from the solitary and fallible condition that is above all human. Briony, with an absent father, a sick mother, a distant brother and an adult sister, fills her solitude with words that want to arrange everything, as she organizes her room.

“But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. 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.”

She is emotionally deprived as all of us, but a few degrees above the Richer scale: her need to be praised, her inability to deal with her environment, her surrendering to a fantasy of perfection – it is as if she were an immature child, seeking protection from life itself.

However, the novel goes beyond an intimate recounting. In the second half, McEwan throws the reader into the Second World War, with memorable descriptions of the United Kingdom’s empire ultimate whisper at the battle of Dunkirk. McEwan uses this as background to show us Robbie’s feelings. Among dead and wounded, he drifts with his head down and wrapped in his own sentiments to protect himself and to dream he will be exonerated for having survived in a battle where so many had died.

“Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. ...He knew by heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily.”

But what rots and sustains him is his hate for Briony:

“In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.”

Above everything:

“Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.”

The ability of McEwan is very well known, but in Atonement he arrived were he had not reached before and where few living authors – maybe Coetzee, Philip Roth and a few others – were able to arrive. The force of his narrative comes from its plot and its magnitude as well as from its richness and structure. The story is strong, but who narrates is not subservient to its hierarchy and its rhythm: it’s a subject that lets it flow and, at the same time, chooses the moments and the way to reveal its parts. McEwan does not need to resort to fragmentation and mysticism to deal with the battle between affection and speech, tolerance and freedom, a clash so in evidence nowadays.
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