Atonement

Atonement by Ian McEwan was a satisfying choice novel. I really like Part One (the first half of the book) with the set-up of the crime Briony commits. The second half was harder to get through, especially Part Two when Robbie was a soldier.

One major theme of this book, as the title suggests, is atonement. Briony commits a crime that destroys her family, mostly her sister, and feels like she must make up for it through her writing. Yet when she tells the story to a magazine she keeps her crime out; when she gets it back from the publisher who wants more depth she asks herself, “might she obscure the fact by concocting a slight, barely clever fiction and satisfy her vanity by sending it off to a magazine” (302)? When she approaches Cecilia to try to make things right, Cecilia says, “I won’t ever forgive you” (318). It is at the age of 77 when Briony realizes the reality of compensating for her crime, and the relation to her writing. “How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God” (350)?

Throughout the book the thing Briony devotes her life to, before she needs to make amends with her sister, is writing. “At the age of eleven she wrote her first story,” and at thirteen she writes her first play where she conveys her apprehensions saying, “the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself” (6). What Briony loves about her writing, however, is that “everyone would adore her” (11). At 77, when she is waiting for her novel to be published and sees her first play acted out, she concludes that her writing “was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all” (351).

I feel like Ian McEwan, as an author, is trying to reveal his own feelings about writing. Through Briony’s eyes, McEwan is showing the process he goes through to complete his own works. If this is true, McEwan is comparable to Tim O’Brien in the fact that he “heats up the truth.” Briony uses people from her real life and changes the details to make it fit in her story. “Who would want to believe them, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining…But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish” (350). I can relate to altering information in my writing from writing my personal narrative.

McEwan’s writing style also remined me of O’Brien’s because of the way he set up the chapters. Each of the chapters gives different characters’ perspectives on what is going on, mentioning events that get explained later on. For example, Briony walks in on Cecilia and Robbie having sex, and “her immediate understanding was that she had interrupted an attack, a hand-to-hand fight” (116). Yet later on, Cecilia describes the details of her sexual encounter with Robbie. This is similar to O’Brien’s writing style when he mentions an event, like Kiowa’s death, and then explains it with more data in a later chapter. This technique builds suspense for the reader; it helped me stay involved in the book.

Another major theme of Atonement is maturity. Lola, Briony’s 15-year-old cousin, “had come to the nursery that morning in the guise of the adult she considered herself at heart to be” (32). Yet Lola is still a girl; after being beaten by her brothers, Lola sought out Briony to console her. While Lola is weakened by this experience, Briony is strengthened. “That a girl so brittle and domineering should be brought this low by a couple of nine-year-old boys seemed wondrous to Briony, and it gave her a sense of her own power” (110). Briony, as only a thirteen-year-old, doesn’t really grasp the power she has. She destroys her family by telling them what she thinks she sees (Robbie raping Lola), but she doesn’t foresee the repercussions of her actions. When Briony apologizes to her sister, she explains that what made her change her mind about Lola’s rapist was “Growing up” (323).

Atonement helped me see a cultural view of upper-class British life. It also helped me look through a feminine lens at a marriage that most would consider failing, but keeps the couple strong. Mainly Atonement reminded me that while a relationship can be destroyed with a single sentence, it may never be restored, even after a lifetime of feeling sorry.