On the hottest day of the year 1935, 13-year-old Briony witnesses a scene by the fountain in the garden between her elder sister, Cecilia (Cee) and Robbie. Both Cee and Robbie are down from Cambridge, and the former had barely acknowledged the latter throughout their time there. They move in different social circles after all—Robbie is the housemaid’s son, his stint at Cambridge possible only because the girls’ father, his mother’s employer, sponsored him. But the childhood friends are back together in the Tallis’s stately home for the summer, and everyone is at something of a loose end.
Cee, in particular, is feeling particularly wretched—she has no idea what’s wrong with her, why she can’t bear to speak to Robbie. After that pivotal scene by the fountain, Robbie himself is feeling strangely light-headed. When he gives in to his impulses and writes a letter to Cee that’s not the letter of apology he meant to send her, and by mistake sends the first letter instead, through the unreliable intermediary of young Briony, a chain of events is set into motion that will forever change the lives of these three young people.
WWII is looming and England is soon in the grip of the war. Fighting in France, Robbie carries with him treasured letters from Cee, letters in which she exhorts him to return to her. Briony, meanwhile, has grown up and, instead of pursuing her education in Cambridge, has chosen to start a nursing career in a London hospital. Is this part of her atonement for what she unwittingly did as a child? Torn apart by Briony’s false accusation years ago, will the two young lovers become reunited despite the harrowing ravages of war?
On the surface, Atonement easily encompasses half a dozen genres—it is a period novel with varying aspects of romance, mystery, crime, psychological thriller, and war drama. But deep down, Atonement is Ian McEwan’s very personal treatise on the power of writing. It is a writer’s novel: it dissects and displays everything about writing—the innate talent, the budding ambition, the creative urge, the slave-like devotion to polishing and refining a story, even the choosing of genres. It questions the author’s responsibility, the reader’s perception, the public’s opinion (often of something they have not read, let alone understood) and perhaps most of all, the treacherous nature of imagination.
Author Ian McEwan has an uncanny ability to get inside the heads of his characters, be they children or adults, male or female. His work has been called ‘psychologically penetrating’, and that’s as apt a term as any to describe the way he casually invades his characters’ minds to reveal their innermost thoughts, hopes and passions. In Briony, he has created an awkward protagonist, neither hero nor anti-hero, yet no less important or provocative for all that. It is by Briony’s testimony, via her treacherous imagination, that the young lovers’ course is abruptly curtailed. Never mind the class differences that would have made for an equally effective barrier. Briony is the one responsible for a very dramatic tearing apart of the two young lovers. Her misreading of signals for which her young mind is not ready (especially a letter that betrays Robbie by his own hand—again, the treachery of writing), her misinterpretation of grown-up situations, her overblown imaginings of what surely must have happened—all these follow naturally from the set-up of an innocent young girl, somewhat prim and sheltered, but already showing her talent as a creative writer. Lola, her 15-year-old cousin, is Briony’s foil. At that awkward age ’twixt girl and woman, Lola is the catalyst whereby the fuse is ignited. Aptly-named, and carrying the genes of a mother who’s abandoned her children to run off with a lover, Lola is slyly manipulative in the way of passive-aggressives. Put the two girls together, mix in a suave stranger, and hssst, the fuse is lit.
While the romance between Cee and Robbie is exceptionally well-handled and emotionally engaging, from their initial awkwardness to their sudden and unexpected understanding in the library, to their long-distance epistolic war-time courtship, in the grander scheme of the novel, the young lovers merely take second stage to Briony. Atonement is Briony’s story, and it is also her cross to bear. And while she gives up a privileged Cambridge education for a physically demanding and psychologically challenging nursing career, her atonement for an unforgivable mistake made as a child must seem, to her, to be possible only if the mistake could be undone. And since that cannot be in the real world, she must somehow re-create that which never was.
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