Ian McEwan’s flawlessly drawn novel, Atonement, delves into the human psyche.
But this isn’t a psychology textbook. It’s not a lecture. There are no facts to remember, no flashcards to painstakingly scrawl.
It’s raw human fault woven into a tale that, once begun, is impossible to put back down.
McEwan examines human emotion, instinct and flaw. For each character’s mistake there is not just a consequence, but an excuse. He lets no drama unfold without explaining that character’s actions from a human standpoint. He doesn’t let the reader forget that, if his characters did indeed breathe, walk and think, they’d be average people.
The lives McEwan weaves together, the paths that change and the stories that result from one vicious, mistaken lie are impossible to separate after Briony’s accusations. Each lives with a palpable anxiety, a realization of what their lives could have been — had that summer in 1935 been taken back, had a letter not been sent, had Briony Tallis not found two young adults in the library of her house.The story unfolds in the Tallis family’s English rural estate as Briony Tallis, an aspiring, 13-year-old playwright lost in her words and thoughts, makes plans to welcome her cousins, who have been sent to live with the Tallises due to the marital problems of their parents, with a play.
But “The Trials of Arabella” — for which she designs posters and a ticket box, casts her family as the characters and even has mandatory rehersals — never premieres. Arabella’s tale of wronged lovers and redemption, of a life by the sea, is never realized.
For the night it was to open, Briony made a horrible mistake.
Briony’s black-and-white mindset causes her to see nothing but a fictional view of the world — the way things should and shouldn’t be.
And when she walks in on her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of the Tallis’ cleaning woman, in a compromising act, she pieces together events from previous days and misinterprets the situation — she sees it as the way things shouldn’t be.
Briony doesn’t see gray. She doesn’t see her sister’s conscious decision. She sees rape.
And when her cousin Lola does get raped, she points the finger at Robbie — who is, in fact, innocent — and changes his entire life.
But though Briony’s ignorance is condemnable, it’s not hard to understand her rationale. Secluded in a house inhabited by a father who is rarely home, a mother who doesn’t notice the talents her daughter so urgently shows her and two grown siblings who are too involved in their own lives to spend much time with their younger sister, Briony is left to her own devices. She wanders through the estate alone, fathoms extravagant stories and keeps to herself.
The next segment of the book follows Robbie who, having spent time in jail, is fighting with the Allied Forces in Dunkirk, France. Robbie and his comrades weave through the town, through the forests, through the houses and barns of those who risk their lives to take the troops in and through a constant, pressing danger.
Had Briony not been so lost in her own fictional scene, in her black-and-white world, Robbie might have gone to Cambridge, might have become a doctor.
And instead, he’s fighting for his life.
Leaving Robbie, the reader is taken to London, where an older, less fragile Briony is working as a nurse.
Driven to remedy the hell through which she put both Robbie and Cecilia, who never forgave her younger sister for what she did, Briony starts to act.
She is driven toward atonement.