MC EWAN'S ATONEMENT

Mc Ewan's Atonement

Mc Ewan's Atonement

Introduction

For many, Atonement is McEwan's best novel. The story of this novel is based on the facts of conventional realism. The novel opens on an unusually hot summer day in 1935 with the Tallis family living near London in a country house that they have inherited. (D'hoker 2006, 31-43) In her seventies, Briony, now a literary celebrity, reworks the same material into a much more complicated book with a strong story line, one that, because it draws directly on actual incidents and people, cannot be published during her own lifetime. That novel, Atonement itself, reverts to the model of nineteenth century fiction, in which a narrative deity controls everything. The text of Atonement is an attempt to rewrite history. It is Briony's bid to repair a terrible wrong that she committed when she was thirteen. Though the book will be her gesture of atonement, Briony recognizes that atonement is submission to an external authority and that, for a sovereign author whose imagination is supreme, such submission is impossible to achieve. In her final sentences, while vascular dementia begins to deplete her memory and defeat her imagination, seventy-seven-year-old Briony asks: “How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her.” There is, nonetheless, another author, Ian McEwan, as well as a reader outside Briony Tallis, and Atonement, which she despairs of as a mere attempt at impossible atonement, succeeds despite itself.

Conventional Realism

The novel starts with conventional realism and points out of thirteen-year-old Briony's actions during a hot summer day in 1935. On her family's country estate in Surrey, Briony conscripts her three cousins, fifteen-year-old Lola Quincey and Lola's nine-year-old twin brothers, Pierrot and Jackson, to perform a silly play, The Trials of Arabella, that she herself has written. The cousins, troubled by their parents' divorce, are not very cooperative, and the production is aborted. The imperious young playwright, described as one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so, fabricates another script that reconstructs the world for everyone around her. In Briony, McEwan examines the ambiguity of his own art—the storyteller as both creator and prevaricator. Robbie Turner, the handsome, brilliant son of the Tallis family's housekeeper, has recently graduated from Cambridge University with financial support from Briony's father. Despite the social chasm separating them, Robbie dares to love Cecilia, Briony's older sister, also a recent Cambridge graduate. Briony senses, without understanding it, a powerful bond between the two, but she is confirmed in her assessment that Robbie is a “maniac” when he asks her to deliver to Cecilia a lewd, sealed note that she opens and reads. Robbie had written another, less blunt letter of affection and does not realize that he has inadvertently put his crude expression of sexual longing into the envelope ...