Warning – review contains spoilers, since there’s no way to discuss the book’s merits without discussing the ending.
Ian McEwan’s Atonement
The atonement in question revolves around Briony, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Tallis family, and the way she lets a girlish fantasy and her lack of knowledge of adult relations (physical and emotional) spiral out of control, thus ruining the lives of two people close to her. McEwan has to stretch a little to get to the critical sequence where Briony falsely accuses a man of rape, including the use of a vulgarity I won’t repeat here and that would be almost out of the question for the man in question to have used in that fashion, but in general, the way he progresses through the novel’s first 95% is strong. The seemingly omniscient third-person narrator takes us inside the heads of the three central characters, and there’s a single jump in time that pushes the plot forward past several years where nothing of direct relevance happens, which turns out to be a solid decision that allows the second sequence of events to coincide with (and create parallels to) the dark opening of World War II. The book’s pacing and prose have the feeling of classic 19th century British literature, and while there’s no confusing Atonement with Jane Austen’s work, there’s no doubt McEwan drew Briony as the flip side of Northanger Abbey‘s Catherine Morland.
McEwan himself is an outspoken atheist, thus the novel’s central theme of a search for earthly redemption without reference to or hope for a spiritual one or one in an afterlife. (To be clear, religion or lack thereof is not an explicit theme in the novel.) Briony’s search for redemption – what she calls atonement, but what really is an external forgiveness from both of the parties she so directly wronged – affects her choices early in life, driving her away from education into a nursing job that takes on importance after the war comes home to Britain during the evacuation of British troops from France in 1941. Thus limited by the need for a redemption in the here and now, she seeks out her estranged sister to try to bring about a reconciliation through admission of her own crime.
Or does she? McEwan throws the entire book into doubt in a muddled, tacked-on epilogue. Is what came before a full representation of the actual history of events? An incomplete one? A complete fiction? Briony tells us how, as an author, she can play God and rewrite events, but can not ultimately redeem them – or herself, or fix the lives she ruined. But what then is the responsibility of McEwan? This is his universe, his reality. He can give Briony the atonement she desires, in full or in part. But he needs to be honest with his readers. In fact, by not telling us until that 95-percent mark that what we have read to that point is a meta-novel, a fictional work within a fictional work, with most details true to the fictional reality (stay with me) but some not, and oh-by-the-way he isn’t even clear in the final pages how much of the preceding novel is reality, he’s dishonest with his readers, using our credulous nature – that we step into a novel prepared to believe its reality, to suspend our disbelief, to accept the characters as real people as long as they’re drawn true to life – to his advantage to pull a nasty trick on us. Instead of a deeper look at redemption, atonement, or just plain old-fashioned forgiveness, McEwan turns the book into a writer’s lament, that one can not undo reality or even find catharsis through fictionalizing real-life events and altering them to suit one’s needs. Well, no shit, Ian.
On page 334, I was prepared to praise Atonement as a clever, well-written work with expertly crafted characters and brilliant descriptive prose. In sixteen pages, McEwan tore that opinion apart, turning the book into a wicked bit of sleight of hand that still has the same characterization and prose but that proves terribly unsatisfying as an actual novel because of the betrayal of the reader’s trust.
I completely agree about the ending. It’s a brilliant novel that disintegrates into meta-fictional drivel. It’s so frustrating because the dumb ending was so unnecessary. Nonetheless, it’s one of the best flawed novels I’ve ever read.
Great insight, but next time, could we get a spoiler alert warning?
Also, was in Orlando last week and tried Raglan Road on your recommendation and found it to be great. Thank you for that tidbit.
Spoiler warning added. I don’t think I revealed the major spoiler, at least not explicitly, so I didn’t think one was needed, but I guess I was wrong on that. On the bright side, you might like the book more if you don’t get punched in the gut on the second-to-last page.
Anyone seen the movie and read the book? I’ve only seen the movie, and I thought it was pretty clear what was fictional and what wasn’t after the ending.
Maybe the adapter realized the ambiguousness of it all, and cleared a couple things up. Or was it just easier to explain visually?
*Major Spoilers*
Eh, I really disagree about the ending. Looking back after it, I realized that the ending made perfect sense thematically. It strengthens the themes of atonement or redemption and adds the theme of what it means to be a writer and how he deals with truth–I was particularly moved by the way Briony almost pats herself on the back for not letting them forgive her. She treats her novel as a love letter to the two lives she destroyed, a request for forgiveness far more profound than the one that takes place in the novel-proper. In retrospect, the almost cowardly Woolf-ian draft of the story we see in part 3 fits perfectly with the final draft–a more mature and Woolf-ian in some of the best ways story that takes place in small snatches of time.
As to what’s fictional and what’s not, I thought it was pretty clearly this: The first part was completely true to the extent it could be known by someone who wasn’t in the heads of all three characters (so the beautiful details of the sex scene are imagined, for instance, but she really did walk in on them, etc.). The story of Robbie in the war is again true to the details as much as she could know from her research–which consisted, I think, mostly of the letters the two wrote back and forth. The third part, with Briony as a nurse, was mostly true (i.e. she really chose a life as a nurse as an ode to her sister, she really treated the soldiers, she really went to the wedding, realizing that chocolate-magnate-guy was the real rapist), but the meeting with her sister and Robbie was completely imagined. I could be mixing things from the movie in there, but I think that was all pretty clear.
As to the movie, I was very unsatisfied by it. Granted it’s not an easy book to adapt, particularly the epilogue, but everything was sort of robbed of a lot of its emotional depth, I thought. And Keira Knightley was very mediocre, rushing a lot of the most challenging moments. I also really didn’t like how obvious it was that chocholate-magnate-guy was the rapist in the movie, so it was no real revelation at the wedding. Anyway, that’s enough, and I’m done.
I got to watch only movie, but I really did not feel betrayed by the ending since I just could not believe that kind of happy ending could be happening in such kind of situation, I mean war. Somehow in the movie, I was able to assume that might not the real ending per se, and maybe Joe Wright to film the move to look like it. If you have not watched the movie, let us know how it was compared to the book, later watching it.
Keith, i was just wondering if you have read The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and if you have, what’re your thoughts on it?
Aaron – yes, it was excellent, and I preferred it to the slightly histrionic (but better-regarded) Madame Bovary. To me The Awakening
represents the apex of the “ruined woman” genre, as well as its last gasp as the field was strip-mined by that point while society’s mores were changing rapidly.
I’m going to agree with Sam here – yeah, I felt a little “disappointed”, but the title should have given it away to some extent – Briony is making atonement, in the only way she can. She can’t change lives or relive her decision-making, so she sets forth a fiction that could have been.
Sam – in that context, don’t you see Briony’s efforts as rather cowardly? She did nothing while the two people whose lives she destroyed were around to benefit. She finally chooses to do something when she won’t be able to face any negative consequences of her actions. Doesn’t atonement require some sort of sacrifice? I don’t think she sacrifices anything at all through that course of action.
Keith–Well, I don’t think the act itself is cowardly, but what she didn’t do before certainly is. I don’t remember everything perfectly, but isn’t there some mention in maybe the epilogue that she really went at least to see her sister (maybe after the wedding), and when she got there, she turned around? I think she clearly *was* a coward then, and she had a very small window of time when she might been able to atone in even the slightest to the real people.
So what is she to do afterwards, live her life in self-flagellation or something? She apologizes in the only way she can, now, and I think there’s sacrifice–as great a sacfrifice as she can now give–in the way she honestly portrays everything without hiding from or trying to justify what she did, and she does at least sacrifice seeing maybe her greatest novel published in her lifetime to clear Robbie’s name once and for all, even if it can’t really matter to him anymore. The question is this: is atonement even possible for Briony at this point? And doesn’t she do the best thing possible? The whole book’s a tragedy, and I think Briony is a tragic figure too.
I finished reading Atonement four hours ago and I’m still not quite certain to make of it. It was a strange book, feeling at times overwritten and at others exquisitely so. After a couple of hundred pages I was convinced that it was, whatever its flaws, a very good book and thus spent the next couple of hours intermittently recommending it to my wife as I read. Then I finished and as soon as I handed it to her I began to wonder if I should take it back and suggest she read anything else. How do you recommend a book while at the same time telling the reader they should try to avoid too great an emotional investment?
Early on the reader is aware of Briony’s role not only as a character but also the narrator looking far back to tell the story. But more than this simple knowledge, you feel the narrator asserting herself on the story giving it the vague feeling of a Milan Kundera story without the honesty. Some of Part One felt indulgent, as when Briony dwells upon the act of moving her finger. While I can relate to the strange moments when such thoughts seem profound, I was never certain that it served a greater purpose. The characterization of Briony’s intellectual maturity juxtaposed with her purported naivety stretched implausibility and I had the pervasive feeling throughout Part One that McEwan was writing on the edge of disbelief. He succeeded in that I did not fall but failed in that I considered the possibility. Still, on the whole, I considered it satisfying and well written.
I’m not certain what to write of Part Two without revealing too much to those who haven’t yet read the book. Should I insert a second disclaimer? It was in Part Two where I had thought McEwan had cemented the merits of the book and the scenes in France were marvelously executed. While I am an unabashed fan of Hemingway’s, I have never been particularly enamored with A Farewell to Arms. In Part Two McEwan creates a homologue to Hemingway’s work that I felt was far superior to its predecessor.
I am a fan of neither correspondence in the place of prose, nor the epilogue. Both seem like shallow literary devices, cheats to tell when the author is either disinclined are unable to show. Both are present here and somewhere in Part Three I began to sense the story falling apart. If the epilogue were permanently redacted from the text and all that remained were the first three parts of the story it would have fallen short of an interesting or satisfying resolution. McEwan attempted to be clever and write two endings but succeeded in failing to write any.
Briony does not see her sister in the epilogue, only attends the wedding of Marshall and Lola. But this is another part of the cowardice of Briony’s character. She confronts no one and assumes no responsibility for her actions. She acknowledges the cowardice of having failed to meet her sister in the epilogue. But that is not the end of it.
Here Briony writes a novel to set the record straight but waits until those who she would accuse are incapable of offering a defense. While I believed as it was presented even when as it was suggested otherwise that Paul was a more likely culprit than Danny, Briony nor more saw Paul than she saw Robbie. Whatever she thought of Lola, Lola never confirmed what Briony assumed- that Lola knew that it wasn’t Robbie. At no point does she choose to face her responsibility for her actions.
True, to an extent, I suppose. She’s was most certainly a coward in the past, and she may still be at the end of the book though I do think she’s doing the best she can with the time she has left–Lola and Paul will never admit to it, and she cannot publish the novel while she is alive without their consent, so she has a choice of being being fair to them (but do you really think there’s more than a negligible chance Paul was not the attacker?) or being fair to Robbie. I think she makes the right one.
But is this discussion a debate about Briony or about the book itself? Or do you (and Keith) think her being a coward invalidates the book’s major theme? I don’t see it that way obviously, but that would make sense to me.
I just wanted to note that you shouldn’t let the bad ending of Atonement deter you from reading McEwan’s other work, particularly if you liked 90% of Atonement. Enduring Love is great, as is Black Dogs and Saturday. Also, Cement Garden is disturbing but awesome. Avoid Amsterdam (I’ve no idea how or why this won the Booker Prize) and definitely stay away from On Chesil Beach (his most recent).
I’m uncertain what the theme of the book was ultimately supposed to be. If Briony intended to create a testament to the love of Robbie and Cecilia, it fell short for me in part three. If the theme was Briony’s atonement, it is precluded by the character’s cowardice. If it was the impossibility of atonement, then it was an overwritten, ham-handed attempt. If McEwan intended to highlight that fictional characters are not real and thus it doesn’t matter what happens to them because they are constructs, then I would congratulate him on a job well done. However, I suspend disbelief when I read not sanity.
Nothing required Briony to identify an attacker to vindicate Robbie. She comes to believe it wasn’t him after several years, but she doesn’t know that. It could have been him, or a tramp, or Danny, or Paul. I felt throughout that it was Paul, but that assumed author’s intent and was not sufficiently substantiated by the facts of the book to warrant a public charge.
Despite my criticism of Atonement I generally enjoyed the writing and while I won’t be going out of my way to read another of McEwan’s novels I would be receptive to reading his work in the future.
Kevin –
I read the book and then saw the movie. The movie seems almost as if it used the book as a script until the very last segment (The year 1999 when Briony is 77 years old). The movie makes it abundantly clear where reality ends and Briony’s fiction begins, but the book deliberately leaves that decision up to the reader, which I found to be a much better way to end this story. Overall, I enjoyed the book better, but I will applaud the movie makers, it was a very well done adaptation, if only the end could of followed more to the book. The movie left out a heart wrenching passage in which Briony’s distant relatives reenact The Trials of Arabella at her 77th Birthday party.
“By Michael on Feb 19, 2008
I’m uncertain what the theme of the book was ultimately supposed to be.”
How about imagination, innocence, guilt and the idea of atonement?