Atonement, Part 1

Snuggle up

Author: Ian McEwan

Category: I tried to read this about seven or eight years ago, and couldn’t get into it. Then I saw the movie on which it is based, and decided to give the book another chance.

My thoughts: Ok, I’m going to write about Atonement in two stages. Because I saw the movie (which is really good), I know how this story turns out, but I still think this is a great read. The first part of the story documents a very eventful summer day in the Tallis household in the English countryside in 1935. At the beginning of the story, Briony Tallis, who is thirteen, is preparing for a play that she wrote for her brother Leon, who is visiting the Tallis home with a friend, Paul Marshall. Briony intends for her visiting cousins—fifteen-year-old Lola, and nine-year-old twins Jackson and Pierrot—to be in the play with her. Briony, I should mention, is one of those girls who is always in her head, and too attached to the world of make-believe had happily-ever-after.

During the course of the book's first part, we also learn that there is a simmering attraction between Cecelia, Briony’s 23-year-old sister, and Robbie Turner, who is the son of the Tallis family’s housekeeper. Cecilia and Robbie were both at Cambridge together, but did not mix in the same circles. Briony misinterprets situations that she witnesses between Cecilia and Robbie (children…they just don’t know about grown folks’ business), and at one point believes that Robbie is assaulting her Cecilia. Later, the twins run away, and during the search for them, Lola is assaulted. Briony convinces herself that the assailant was Robbie, and accuses him of the crime. With this act, she seals the fates of Robbie, Cecilia, and herself.

It’s a sad story, Atonement, but it is beautifully written. I am reminded of my experience reading Maud Martha—rereading certain passages, drinking in the language. I am also reminded of The Portrait of a Lady. I think it’s because of the sort of slow but purposeful pace of the two novels. Neither book feels rushed. I have never read anything by Ian McEwan before, and I wonder if his other books are this good. Anyway, back to the plot…I once saw a quote from The Tale of Despereaux that has stuck with me: “Every action, reader, no matter how small, has a consequence.” This is a lesson that some adults forget, and children are often too young to understand. But it is so very true.

Great passage: She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess, such independence of spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar.