Atonement by Ian McEwan: A Summary and Reader's Guide
What Atonement is about
Ian McEwan published Atonement in 2001. It moves across three time periods: England in 1935, England and France during the Second World War, and present-day England. The engine of the whole book is a single misunderstanding. A thirteen-year-old girl sees something she does not understand, tells a story about it, and the story destroys two lives.
Part one takes place over one hot day and night at the Tallis family estate in Surrey. Briony Tallis, the youngest child and a precocious writer, is staging a play for her brother Leon's homecoming. Her cousins have arrived while their parents divorce: fifteen-year-old Lola and the nine-year-old twins, Jackson and Pierrot. Leon brings a friend from Oxford, a wealthy manufacturer called Paul Marshall.
Meanwhile, Briony's older sister Cecilia, newly down from Cambridge, is circling Robbie Turner. He is the housekeeper's son, Cecilia's childhood friend, and his university education was paid for by her father, Jack Tallis. The two bicker over a vase by the fountain. It breaks. Cecilia strips to her underwear and dives in to retrieve the pieces. Briony watches from an upstairs window and reads the scene entirely wrongly.
Things get worse. Robbie drafts a love letter to Cecilia and hands Briony the wrong version, a crude one he had meant to throw away. Briony reads it. She decides Robbie is dangerous. Later she walks in on Robbie and Cecilia together in the library and sees an assault. That night, in the dark grounds, she finds Lola being raped by a man neither girl can identify, and tells the police it was Robbie. Robbie is arrested in the driveway at dawn, having just carried the lost twins home.
The main characters
Briony is the centre of the novel and its problem. She has a writer's instinct for shaping events into a clean story with a hero and a villain, and she casts herself as the hero. McEwan is careful to show that her lie is half-innocent. She is thirteen and genuinely believes the version she has built.
Cecilia and Robbie are the lovers whose relationship is cut off almost at the moment it begins. Robbie is intelligent, funded through Cambridge by the family that then abandons him, and class sits under every exchange he has with the Tallises. Cecilia is the only family member who believes him, and she cuts off contact with the rest of them for what they did.
Around them are Emily and Jack Tallis, distant parents; Leon, affable and useless; Lola, damaged and compliant; and Paul Marshall, who has a long scratch on his face and who shares cigarettes with the policemen while the house falls apart.
The themes
The obvious theme is guilt and the wish to make amends. The title is a question as much as a promise: can anything Briony does later actually repay what she took? Part two follows Robbie, released from prison on condition that he enlist, as he retreats with a wound towards Dunkirk during the Battle of France. He thinks of Cecilia, hates Briony, then concludes she was too young to carry the full blame.
Class runs through the 1935 section like a wire. Nobody in authority finds it hard to believe that the charwoman's son is a criminal. Briony's accusation works because the adults around her want it to work.
The deepest theme is storytelling itself. Briony's crime is a writer's crime, imposing a narrative on facts she did not have. The novel keeps asking what fiction is for, whether a writer can grant forgiveness she has no right to grant, and what the reader is really being handed.
How it ends
Part three finds Briony at eighteen. She has refused her place at Cambridge and trains instead as a nurse in London, which reads as a deliberate penance. She has worked out that the man she saw with Lola was Paul Marshall. She is still writing, and receives a rejection letter from Cyril Connolly for a draft she has submitted. The novel's final movement, set in the present day, turns back on everything that came before and asks what the preceding pages actually are. Readers who want the full force of that turn should meet it on the page.
Why it still matters
Atonement was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize and is widely regarded as McEwan's best work. In 2010, Time named it one of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923. Joe Wright's 2007 film adaptation, starring Saoirse Ronan, James McAvoy, Keira Knightley and Vanessa Redgrave, won both BAFTA and Academy Award recognition and brought the story to a far wider audience.
It suits readers who like a novel that works as a country house drama and a war novel and then turns out to be about the ethics of writing fiction. Expect to want to read it twice.
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