Contemporary Reads: Atonement

This 2001 novel was written by British writer Ian McEwan. Its opening setting is the Tallis family's country house in Surrey on the hottest day of the summer of 1935.

Part One describes the events of that day and how they changed the lives of the three main characters of the book: Briony, Cecilia and Robbie. Briony is the youngest of the Tallis' children. A 13 year old with a fantastic imagination who fancies herself as a writer. Cecilia is her older sister who has come back from Cambridge with a third in English. Robbie is the son of their charlady who, being quite intelligent has had his Grammar school and Cambridge education paid for by Mr Tallis. In fact, he has also just returned from Cambridge although, unlike Cecilia, with a first.

Robbie and Cecilia had somehow fallen for each other. Robbie writes two love notes to her, one of them being quite graphic: "In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt." He gives this note to Briony and asks her to pass it on to Cecilia. Briony, who is upset because the play she had written for that evening had to be cancelled due to her cousins' inability to perform read the note. Shocked, from that moment on she will think of Robbie as a maniac who has to be stopped. This is only confirmed to her when she sees Robbie and Cecilia fucking in the library that evening and wrongly assumes that he was raping her sister. She will confide on her 15 year old cousin Lola.

Later on in the evening Lola's brothers, twins Jackson and Pierrot, go missing. Search parties made up by all the dinner guests, including Cecilia and Briony's brother Leon and his best friend Marshall and Lola, are sent out into the dark summer English night. Lola is raped that night outside while the search is still going on. She is found by Briony who, although she did not see the attacker clearly, falsely accuses Robbie of the violation. As a result Robbie is arrested the following morning when he shows up in the garden having found and brought back the missing twins.

Part Two is where we discover that Robbie ended up in gaol. He and Cecilia stayed in touch all those years and were reunited briefly after his release. She has become a nurse and he has been enlisted to go to war in France. On this part we follow Robbie's war experiences.

Part Three focuses on Briony. She has now become a nurse like her sister. She attends her cousin's Lola's wedding with her true raper, Marshall. Thus, we discover that is not just Briony who lied and send an innocent man to gaol but also Lola and Marshall who are now getting wed. After the ceremony, Briony visits her sister and tells her that she will confess to the police and her family about her terrible lie. Robbie is present also at that time. But why did she lie? This is not very clear but we do now know it was not out of jealousy.

In the final part of the novel, London, 1999, we found out that Briony has written what we have been reading so far. Her novel (and McEwan's), that echoes Navokov nd Virginia Woolf, is part of an act of atonement that will be completed once it is published after the death of everyone involved in the story. Everything in the novel is truth except for its ending: both Cecilia and Robbie died in 1940 and, therefore, were never reunited after the war.