An essay that examines whether Briony ever achieves atonement in 'Atonement' by Ian McEwan

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An essay that examines whether Briony ever achieves atonement in ‘Atonement’ by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is held in high esteem as an author, and won the 1998 Booker prize for his novel Amsterdam.  Atonement lives up to these high standards, being short listed for the 2001 Booker Prize and was awarded the best fiction novel of the year by Time Magazine. Atonement is acknowledged to be one of Ian McEwan’s finest works offering a love story, a war story and a story of whether atonement is achievable. We read so much of Briony’s search for it and so little of the result of that search, that perhaps the point of the book is her need for atonement and not whether she found it or not. The ambiguity of giving the story two possible endings is a very effective and clever device used by McEwan; this in turn may leave him open to criticisms by readers who are left frustrated at there being no satisfactory conclusion as to whether atonement was ever achieved.

The work operates on a number of levels.  It has a strong narrative and is written with tremendous descriptive power dealing with complex themes and examining the creative act of story telling via the shared, self-reflection of the main protagonist, Briony Tallis, a budding author. At the beginning of the novel Briony is a girl of thirteen her mind filled with romantic stories containing morally certain scenarios; she views the world around her through the same filters and is over-confident in her ability to judge events.  When she observes a strange interaction between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie, the cleaning lady’s son, she misinterprets the situation as threatening for her sister. This impression is reinforced when she later interrupts them in the secluded library having an amorous embrace, which she construes as an assault. Later that night a girl cousin is raped in the grounds, and Briony, arriving on the scene just as the rapist is leaving, “knows” that the perpetrator is Robbie, even though she cannot actually identify him in the darkness.  Lola, the victim, fails to contradict this assertion for motives of her own.  As a result of Briony’s evidence, Robbie is wrongfully convicted. This then is Briony’s crime, for which she spends the rest of her life trying to atone.

Briony lives in a world of fantasy and romance; she is very controlling and secretive. The secret drawer in her cabinet, and the way she organises the animals in her model farm highlights these aspects. The scene in which Cecilia jumps into the fountain is a key scene in the novel, and marks a turning point in Briony’s perception of herself and of the world. Her sister’s actions are so out of character that she can only make sense of them by assuming that Robbie has some sort of malevolent power over Cecilia.   This view is confirmed later when she discovers them in the library, making love pressed up against a bookcase.  In her naiveté she interprets this as an assault by Robbie on her sister.  Suddenly the real world was more mysterious and fascinating than her fantasies.  Speaking later - as a famous 77 year old author - Briony claimed that this was “the moment when she became recognisably herself” and realized how easy it is to “get everything wrong.”

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McEwan closely links Briony’s crime, and her subsequent search for atonement, with her self-conscious desire to be an author. In the build up to the assault on Lola, Briony repeatedly reflects on how she is emerging from childhood into adulthood. To her, rejecting fairy tales in favour of a mature understanding of “real life” is a crucial step in her literary aspirations and her personal development. Briony is over-confident in her ability to read real-life situations correctly, and her over-active imagination, as McEwan puts it, leads to her guilt in accusing Robbie of attacking Zola. McEwan cleverly repeats terms ...

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****3 STARS This is a very good, thoughtful essay which makes a valiant attempt to answer a difficult question. More quotes are needed throughout but the writer has explored the ambiguity of the novel and remains focused on the question. Some critical comments would be useful. Shows knowledge of novel and attempts to explore the main theme of atonement.