ATONEMENT CRITIQUE
In Atonement , one among the many themes that the author, Ian McEwan is implying are the dangers of the power of the imagination and its potential harm when unleashed into the social world. This is the theme that I intend to focus on in this paper. The story is narrated by the protagonist, Briony Tallis ( which we do not uncover till the end) and the destructive implications of her perceptions that she conjures in her mind of the scenarios that she witness’s on a hot summer day in 1935 between her sister Cecilia and the charladys’ son, Robbie Turner. Being that she is only thirteen at the time and not quite exposed to adult intentions and affairs, she implicates Robbie for the crime of sexually molesting her cousin, Lola. This is the elemental reason that transforms all the character’s lives into a downward spiral of guilt, longing, sorrow and hope.
The novel is broken down into three brilliant and vividly written parts, with a concluding chapter simply entitled “London 1999.” Part One is the introduction of the characters and the scenarios that Briony winesses to help setup her claim that she indeed sees Robbie with her own two eyes attack Lola. “The point of view, which is extremely crucial in a story that so dramatically foregrounds perception, is shared by four characters in Part One, set in the Tallis family’s country house in Surrey…”( Hidalgo). Part One ends with Grace Turner, Robbie’s mother, calling out “Liars! Liars!” (McEwan 175) while beating the policecar with her umbrella as they take his son away to prison. Part Two is Robbie’s vivid account of World War II in Northern France and his extreme hardships to reach Dunkirk. It closes with him going to sleep with the hope of going back to London in the morning and him recalling Cecilia’s last words: “I’ll wait for you.Come back.” , before he was hauled away at the end of Part one(249-250). Part Three is now five years later and is Briony’s account of her time spent serving as a nightingale nurse probationer and her brushes with the fatalities of the men at war returning home from Dunkirk. The end of Part Three is Briony leaving Robbie and Cecilia at the Balham tube station after she reaches out to them to try and correct the irrepareable wrongdoings of her false accusations. The novel finally ends in “London, 1999” from a first person narrative where Briony is now about to turn seventy-seven years old and has been diagnosed with vascular Dimentia, which leads her to complete her novel “Atonement”, in her attempt to make up for her crime. These parts are relevant because as the reader, we only discover that it is indeed Briony that has been narrating all along. It is important that the reader makes the connection that McEwan’s Atonement is a novel within a novel, where the main character, Briony Tallis is also a writer.
I shall examine McEwans’ main protagonist, Briony Tallis and her vivid imagination, as well as analyze her characterization, objectives and conflicts within the realm of the novel. McEwan aptly describes Briony as “…one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so” (4). The novel deals with many themes such as guilt, crime and punishment which Briony struggles with after her misconstrued perception of reality that leads her to “lie”. However, because she is still technically just a child, is it understandable that she arrived at such a disastrous notion and further, even forgivable that she commits this crime?
According to Christopher Ringrose, “The telling of lies is significant in fiction written for children, and is often (though not in all cases) performed by child protagonists”. Let us therefore bring forth the epistemological question of many philosophers, what is truth? This writer claims that there are three levels of “lying” in children’s literature and since our protagonist is that of a budding writer, it is apt to consider these levels. The first one I mentioned is the level where the fabric of morality is questioned. The second level, which Briony’s category most likely falls under: “...lying as a social act: a crime, a sin, for revenge or for the sake of malevolence.” And yet, she clearly condemns Robbie because of the tumultuous events that led up to Lola’s attack. She truly believes in her young heart and undeveloped mind that she is protecting her sister from the maniac that she saw earlier that afternoon by the fountain in a confrontation with her sister, and so in a defiant kind of way, Briony wrongly accuses Robbie out of her love for Cecilia. The third level of lying is solely for artistic purposes: “…but in terms of the intoxicating creativity of lying—falsehoods identified as acts of imaginative power…” which could very well be Briony’s excuse. The scene in the library when Briony witnesses Robbie and Cecilia making love but does not at the time comprehend this and instead thinks Robbie is attacking Cecilia is a crucial event that leads to her unwavering conviction. “Though they were immobile, her immediate understanding was that she had interrupted an attack, a hand to hand fight. The scene was so entirely a realization of her worst fears that she sensed that her overanxious imagination had projected the figures onto the packed spines of books” (McEwan 116).This theme of storytelling and imagination seemingly intertwined with the morality of a girl on the verge of puberty is what makes McEwan’s Atonement a brilliant page turner; a saga with a well staged plot.
Time (magazine) named Atonement the best fiction novel of the year in 2005 and included it in its All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels. One of the critics of the magazine, Richard Lacayo says on their website:
But McEwan is crafty. Even as he shows us the deadly force of storytelling, he demonstrates its beguilements on every page. Then he leads us to a surprise ending in which the power of fiction, which has been used to undo lives, is used again to make heartbroken amends.
That surprise ending that Lacayo speaks of are two things. One—the narrator was Briony, the protagonist all along which we only discover at the end of Part Three as mentioned earlier, and secondly, through Briony’s talents as a novelist, she pens a version where the lovers actually do unite. “It is only in this last version that my lovers end well. Standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away” (McEwan 350). When in fact, Robbie never makes it back from Dunkirk and “…died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station” (350).
However the novelist, art historian and critic, Anita Brookner does not agree with our earlier critic, Richard Lakayo. In the online U.K magazine, The Spectator, she writes :
Whether Briony’s conscience can ever be clear, and, more important, whether McEwan’s purpose can be adequately served by such a device, is open to question. That these are troubling matters is certainly well established. The ending, however, is too lenient. (…) Here his suave attempts to establish morbid feelings as inspiration for a life’s work -- and for that work to be crowned with success -- are unconvincing.
About changing the fates of Robbie and Cecilia in her final version of the book, Briony says “Who would want to believe that the young lovers never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism?” (McEwan 350). Atonement has two endings---one in which the fantasy of the lovers are fulfilled, and one in which the fantasy is stripped away. The emotional effect of this double ending is perhaps what the critic Brookner is unconvinced about. She perhaps does not think that McEwan is successful in having his protagonist absolved of her sin by her attempt at “atonement” through her work of fiction. She justifies her creativity as a means for her atonement in the lines: “In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all” (351). How is atonement at all possible if there is no superior being that can cleanse one of their sins? Briony claims that this is a concept that is unreachable. Although she hints that it is not how it ends but the effort it took to achieve the purpose, the painstaking recalling of events and endless rewrites and drafts before materializing the final copy. “By analogy one could argue that even if the truth of the self simply cannot be reached in confession, what matters is the attempt, the performative process of confessing, which generates and reveals a true story” (Elke).
Is Briony right in thinking that “…it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them in the end.” (McEwan 351). Is Briony’s novel effective, in her own conscience as an act of atonement and does the completed novel implore the reader to forgive her crime of condemnation towards Robbie?
Ian McEwan, the author of this masterpiece says, “Part of the intention of Atonement was to look at storytelling itself. And to examine the relationship between what is imagined and what is true” ( qtd. in Reynolds and Noakes 19). He was able to capture storytelling in it’s highest form through his characterization of Briony. She is an excellent example of how art has shaped her thoughts, her mind and her impulsive actions. From the beginning of the first chapter, her powerful imagination works to interchange the real from the fantasy. She says herself, “…the imagination itself was a souce of secrets” (McEwan 6).Upon reading Robbie’s shocking letter to Cecilia, she is mortified at the four letter word with which she has yet to fully have a handle on and yet this letter was never intended for her eyes and subsequently transforms her into the world of adult notions—“No more princesses!…With the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principle of darkness…she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and would need her help” ( 106-107).
McEwan wittingly builds Briony’s imagination woven with a web of fear which catapults her reprehensable crime. He has been praised by The Oregonian : “Thorougly convincing… Memorable…The book’s battle scenes are some of the most vivid and disturbing in recent history” (McEwan prologue). He has been commended on many occasions for his gifted ability to write about World War II and he has stated in many interviews that war had such a constant presence in his childhood. Having been born in 1948, his father was a soldier and so he attributes how the war has shaped his family life and even reveals how this time brought his mother and father together. He spent his early childhood on British military bases in England then in Singapore and Libya. It was in the 1970’s when his career as a writer took off and to date has written ten novels, two stories, two children’s fiction books, three screenplays and two liberato for oratorio’s. He has won over ten awards and prizes for his various works and not too recently found himself in a plagiarizing scandal with the deceased writer, Lucinda Andrews, whom he clearly acknowledges at the end of his novel. He defends himself wtith a statement published on November 27,2006 in the UK newspaper The Guardian:
No Time for Romance, the autobiography of Lucilla Andrews, a well-known writer of hospital romances - my mother used to read her novels with great pleasure. Contained within this book was a factual account of the rigors of Nightingale training, the daily routines and crucially, of the arrival of wounded soldiers from the Dunkirk evacuation and their treatment. As far as I know, no other such factual account exists. Andrews even recounted an episode that paralleled my father's experience of being told off for swearing.
He addresses this shameful accusation of a Sunday newspaper that claims he has copied the work of Ms. Andrews by a graceful one liner: “An inspiration, yes. Did I copy from another author? No.”
Atonement is a masterpiece and I enjoyed McEwan’s destructive yet very romantic themes of crime, guilt, love and regret, within the context of fiction. However, can atonement be rendered to McEwan’s heroine even though the harm that Briony has caused has already been unleashed into the “real” world and she herself confesses that no amount of poetic expression on her part can bring back the time stolen from the lovers, Robbie and Cecilia? Briony’s characterization and her inner conflict of sorrow and regret are projected with such powerful complexity. These themes that McEwan explores so vividly made me realize how easy it is for anyone of us, child or not to commit this same crime (on a much smaller scale of course). Judgment plays a factor in our lives as human beings every single day. We are constantly sizing each other up and are easily swayed by hear say and gossip, that even sometimes, like Briony, our minds and our perceptions play tricks on us. Sadly, we believe what we want to believe and sometimes we do not see the simplistic facts before us because we are too caught up trying to break down a situation to find hidden meanings when all along the messages are straightforward and precise. Besides, there is a saying that I always thought was amusing and comical. It goes: “Who are we to judge, when we are not a judge?”
In this case, the cinematic version starring Keirra Knightly paled in comparison to McEwan’s novel. I had watched the film prior to reading Atonement and thought it was indeed a beautiful story. But upon completing the novel, I found myself wanting to reread certain elements that got lost within the film. A particularly important element was how the ending of the novel is marked by Briony’s return to Surrey on her seventy-seventh birthday. The play she had written that long hot summer back in 1935, The Trials of Arabella is being staged for the very first time by the younger generation of her family as a birthday presentation to her. It takes place in the library where she had witnessed Robbie and Cecilia in their moment of passion,. The film version ends on an entirely different feel, where she is being interviewed for a television broadcast and is far less touching and gripping than McEwan’s element of loving familial respect and support.
If I can forgive Briony or not, for the disastrous consequences of her vivid and creative imagination is not the point. “It is this kind of imagination that Briony spends the rest of her professional life seeking to acquire. The novel we read and that took her adult lifetime to write is her attempt to project herself into the feelings of the two characters whose lives her failure of imagination destroyed” (Finney). My favorite lines in Atonement is spoken by Briony, which the thesis is about, as she says, “The attempt was all” and that her atonement “was always an impossible act, and that was precisely the point” (351).
McEwan states that Briony was the most completed person he’d ever conjured, and he’d like to do that again and take it further. (qtd. in Reynolds and Noakes 23). I have developed a fascination for Briony Tallis’s mutlifaceted characterization and I am anticipating to see what kind of fictional person can top her off. I really can’t wait to read what McEwan comes up with next, as I am sure it will be a masterpiece just like Atonement that I can enjoy time and time again.
