This is by Ian McEwan, and it was published in 2001. My audio-version was perfectly narrated by Harriet Walter, who has the most amazing voice.

And why, particularly, am I reading it? Stupid reason, but anyway... Last year we had the famous New York Times list of the 100 "best books of the 21st century" (well, the first quarter of it, anyway). Readers were invited to tick the ones they'd read. I ticked away, like everyone else, and found I'd read 11. Including Ian McEwan's Atonement (No 26 on the list). It was only afterwards that I remembered I'd seen, in December 2007, the superb film, directed by Joe Wright, but I'd not actually read the book... OK, I thought, so I'll damn well read it (well, listen to it anyway). In atonement, as it were... (Later still, I discovered I'd muddled up another title, so there'll be another bit of reparation needed there too, but more on that when the time comes.)


Victoria, Australia. The month we saw the film

There are four sections to Atonement (and, beware, the discussion below contains major spoilers).

First, in the hot, classically beautiful environment of an English country house, in the summer of 1935, we meet our principal players: Briony Tallis, a naive 13-year-old, who is a budding writer, and busy discovering the power of narrative; Cecilia Tallis, her older sister, who is confused about life in general, and more specifically about her feelings for the lad she grew up with, Robbie Turner, the son of the Tallises' cleaning lady; and Robbie himself, whose university studies were financed by Tallis senior, and who is desperately in love with Cecilia.

This long, languid, beautifully executed section is the one that takes us unflinchingly to the pivotal point, the terrible thing that Briony does.

Three Robbie-related scenes, all of which the story-obsessed teenager witnesses, but does not fully comprehend, lead to the fateful lie she tells: The events at the fountain, which are full of the tension of unexpressed passion; the letter that Robbie asks Briony to deliver to Cecilia, not thinking that the little messenger will read it (a circumstance made even worse by the fact that he has inadvertently picked up the wrong version, the one with the very explicit language that Briony construes as really terrible); and the scene in the library, when Cecilia and Robbie have realized that they really DO love each other, and are just about to do something about it, when Briony walks in on them.

Briony is responsbible for what she subsequently does. But there's a perturbation in the environment that certainly doesn't help. The household has been upset by the arrival of the three cousins from the North (whose parents are deep in marital troubles): The small twins (Pierrot and Jackson, both confused and anxious); and their older sister (Lola, who just longs to grow up, and has been involved, before the key event, in some kind of violent altercation that she blames on the twins). Briony also has a long-absent big brother to impress, and he has brought a faintly sinister house guest, Paul Marshall, a confectionery tycoon hoping to make a killing with chocolate bars for the troops. Then there's a mother who's a slave to her migraines, and a father who's away doing something connected with the war everyone feels is imminent. So there's no calm central figure who might have brought sanity to events. And it's so, so hot...

There follow two catalytic happenings: The twins run away, and in the ensuing panic, when everyone is out in the dark looking for them, Lola is raped. Briony says the rapist was Robbie. She says she saw him.



How do we evaluate what she does? She makes an error? She deliberately or semi-deliberately tells a lie? She confuses fact and fiction? There's some truth in all these motivations. But the authorial voice behind this first section says quite clearly that Briony commits a "crime". And it's a crime that upends at least three people's lives, hers included.

Of course, there are all sorts of explanatory factors. She's only just starting to grow up; she doesn't understand adult emotion, let alone sexuality; she used to have a crush on Robbie herself, so there's probably some unacknowledged jealousy in there. She also, as Brian Finney puts it, in an excellent analysis, "suffers from an inability to disentangle life from the literature that has shaped her life [so that] she imposes the patterns of fiction on the facts of life". And, if we're brutally honest, she's also petulant, self-important, and somewhat spoilt, so she doesn't exactly object when her accusations put her firmly in the limelight.

But there are contributory factors outside her remit, too. An inbuilt class bias, for example. Jack Tallis might have been good to Robbie, but his wife finds such generosity towards the lower classes entirely misplaced. She's all too ready to believe that such a violent act couldn't have been committed by a class-equal.

Anyway, the upshot is that Robbie goes to jail. He gets out early only because he signs up for the army, which is now fighting World War II.



The second section begins five years after that key evening. It places an injured Robbie amid the surreal and chaotic scenes in and around Dunkirk, as retreating soldiers battle to get to the coast, harrassed by German air power all the way, and then have to wait in miserable circumstances for an evacuation by sea that they're not even sure will come. It's a brilliant description of the horrors and confusion of war. We leave Robbie in pain and feverish, but still clinging to the hope that one day he will be able to return to Cecilia. She has always believed in his innocence, has broken off all ties with her parents and sister, and has already communicated to him the positive news that Briony, now five years older and wiser, wants to withdraw her damning testimony.

The third section depicts the unforgiving milieu of a wartime hospital in London, where Briony, perhaps in some act of penance, has given up her aspirations to go to Oxford, and is training to be a nurse. The wards are continually swamped with injured and dying men, as the survivors of the Dunkirk retreat start to pour in. It's a brutal education for a young trainee.

Briony is still writing, however, and are shown a detailed letter rejecting a submission that apparently consists of a first draft of the novel's first section. Too Woolfish, she's told. People want a story.

Briony hears, meanwhile, via her father, that Lola and Paul Marshall are to be married. She now understands. Lola's aggressor that night was the man she is now going to marry... She attends the wedding, uninvited, but makes no effort to challenge anyone. We're then told that she plucks up her courage to visit Cecilia. Robbie is there, having been rescued from Dunkirk, and is unsurprisingly furious with her. He tells her that if she wants to put things right -- not that they ever CAN be put right, with so much water under the bridge already -- she needs to see a solicitor, draft a formal statement, write an explanatory letter to her parents, and detail all the circumstances of that night in a letter that she will send to him.

And that's where we leave her, walking away, determined to do all these things.



Finally, there's the fourth section. We've fast-forwarded to 1999; Briony is now 77; she's a successful writer; and this coda is part of her diary.

We now realize that the book we've been reading up to now is the novel she has written about the events all those years ago. Because there'll be a risk of libel suits until all the players in the drama are dead (and Lola, in particular, seems hale and hearty), and because Briony has just received a diagnosis of vascular dementia, and knows she won't be compos mentis for much longer, it seems likely she won't live to see its publication.

The backdrop to this finale is a big family party held to celebrate Briony's birthday. It is being held at the hotel that is now the successor to the country house where the novel opened, and some younger members of the family even perform the abortive play that 13-year-old Briony had planned to stage for her brother on that awful evening.

It's at this point that Briony confesses that everything that came after the wedding of Lola and Paul Marshall is purely fiction... In the real world, Robbie died of septicaemia from an infected wound before he managed to get out of Dunkirk; and Cecilia was killed months later when a bomb was dropped on Balham underground station.

The truth comes as a gut punch.

But Briony defends her invented ending, protesting that the reality is too bleak: "I like to think 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 at the end."



So what exactly is the atonement here?

True, Briony has laid out her mistakes, and admitted that she accused an innocent person. But confession is not atonement. She paints Robbie and Cecilia in heroic tones, as fighters who will never give up. But hagiography is not atonement either.

Is atonement ever possible? McEwan's story would seem to be saying no.

The novel is so powerful precisely because it looks the impossibility of putting things right squarely in the face, and owns it. No excuses can make anything any better. As I wrote in my diary entry in response to the film: "The old lady, at the end, has tried to atone, through her literature, but she can never really do that. This is where you need religion -- the belief that someone has borne that burden for you, out of grace. Because YOU can never put things right. Humans can never atone. It's part of our human fate. Frighteningly, guilt has to be shouldered; responsibility has to be accepted." Interesting that I saw it that way. I read while writing this post that McEwan is an atheist. And Briony herself comments on the problem of making amends when there is no-one, no higher entity or being, that she can appeal to, or be forgiven by. From the beginning, the task was unfeasible, but it was the attempt that was everything.

So why change the fate of the lovers? It's only the last of the half-dozen or so drafts, Briony-the-old tells us, that has the couple ending well. All the previous versions were merciless. So why the revision?

She says she has come to believe that her objective wouldn't be reached by telling the truth. What sense, or hope, or satisfaction, she asks, would a reader get from that? And she no longer has the courage, she tells us, to be pessimistic. Instead, she sees letting the young lovers find each other again as a final gesture of kindness, a way of speaking out against oblivion and despair. But, she says, she wasn't selfish enough to have her characters forgive her. Not exactly, not yet.

Finney quotes an interview with McEwan where he says, "When [Briony's] novel is published, these two lovers will survive to love, and they will survive... They will always live." Which is true. Real people fade away, even after the longest life. Characters in a novel live for ever. Yet would they not live for ever even if they had died?

And -- we have to ask -- in writing it like this, is she not letting herself off the hook? A terrible act, a terrible follow-up. But all right in the end.

Briony-the-old wonders, she continues, about summoning them to her birthday party, having them there, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library with all the others. It is not impossible, she suggests...

So does that mean that there might be further, even more exculpatory versions? None of which get any closer to truly constituting atonement. She can write the wrong, but not right the wrong...

Is she just whistling in the dark, then, knowing that she can never make amends? Bottling out from the hard, bitter reality, because she just can't stomach it any longer? Is her fiction, as Aatif Rashid suggests, "a way of avoiding emotional truth"?

All her successes, with her ambitions achieved, and her family around her to celebrate, contrast bleakly with the premature death of Cecilia and Robbie, and the extinction of all their hopes.

And here you start to glimpse something more insidious than "just not being able to put things right".

Hillary Kelly suggests: "Perhaps the most subversive thing about Atonement is that its narrator isn’t hobbled by the weight of her guilt." In an interview, she asks McEwan whether some bit of Briony is not "triumphant". He politely disagrees: "I would take the Jamesian view... that she's lived the examined life." But Kelly concludes: "One that’s been examined -- and fiddled with -- until it’s no longer a life. It’s a novel."

Authors are notoriously predatory, cannibalistic even, in the ways they use real-life suffering. Is this Briony's last attempt to exploit the harm she's done? Is the self-aggrandizing little girl now the congenitally self-nourishing adult author?



***

Finney is right when he says this is "a work of fiction that is from beginning to end concerned with the making of fiction".

Briony uses fiction to "correct the errors that fiction caused her to commit". It's a correction of the imagination: "The novel... is her attempt to project herself into the feelings of the two characters whose lives her failure of imagination destroyed. Having mistakenly cast them in a story that totally misrepresented them, Briony seeks to retell their story with the compassion and understanding that she lacked as a thirteen-year-old girl... The attempt to imagine the feelings of others is perhaps the one corrective that we can make in the face of continuing human suffering."

Hillary Kelly quotes McEwan as predicting to his editor that they'd be lucky to sell 10,000 copies of Atonement, "because it’s really a book for other writers about reading and writing". By 2021, the date of that article, it had sold over two million copies -- and surely not just because of the sure-fire selling-points the editor listed in response (a country house, the Second World War, and a love affair).

At the end of the day, thank goodness, there are still plenty of people who like books that make them THINK.

***

Previously, I'd read only two of McEwan's works: Enduring Love, which my diary describes as a riveting read, and ironic in its suggestion that the only lasting love might be mad love; and On Chesil Beach, an excruciatingly sad domestic drama about two newlyweds for whom the sixties had definitely not yet begun to swing. But, for sure, I'd now read more.