The first part of Atonement is initially a recollection of a single day in 1935. The main character is Briony, a thirteen-year-old, but the narrative voice is in the 3rd-person; and fully aware of the competence of a young girl acting as narrator. Briony is the youngest daughter of an upper-middle-class English family. It is summer. And the second world war hasn’t shattered illusions of class and expectation for a second time. Briony’s major preoccupation is a play that she has written for herself and visiting cousins to perform; and her major concern is about their ability to be faithful to their characters; and an assumption that she is Arabella, the play’s principle character.
Dickens begins David Copperfield with the same question for his main character; is he the main character in the novel or not. And what is it that defines a central character. Briony also learns the difference between fantasy and reality when, at the end of that first day, she has to provide a different kind of narrative. It is the consequence of this that provides the book its title.
Being third-person, the narrator is able to make many jumps in point-of-view; but, within chapters, stays close to the few principle characters: Briony, Cecilia, her sister, and Robbie Turner, the lower-class boy that the family has ‘raised up’ and who now is exceeding the family’s own educational possibilities. This provides for many interesting, and sometimes quietly ironical scenes, where we are shown a particular incident, and then reshown it from another character’s physical and psychological perspective.
It’s overall a very stylish book; full of sophisticated language, interesting themes that are very well handled. Someone sensible is bound to make it into a film, with it's historical backdrop, a number of intense and dramatical scenes, and its easily translatable visual themes. It also contains a very interesting movement between childhood and adulthood, between classes, between war and peace and between the countryside and the city, and between innocence and sophistication. In some respects it's also a book about how to write a book (which I guess is now as common a theme as an author's first book being autobiographical). Given the various changes in location and time, and its handling of complex emotions, the author never falters in his treatment of the subject matter (compare the usual critical response of readers to Hardy's treatment of rural vs urban scenes); and as the novel moves from childhood past to the present, he adapts the style and pace appropriately (a film-maker would use black-and-white for the early scenes, and move toward colour in the latter scenes - or perhaps the reverse?)
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