Photo: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright
It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter into these different minds and show how they had an equal value.
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Time and again, Balzac writes from the perspective of an all-knowing observer who fully understands and transmits to his reader the laws that supposedly govern society and human interaction. If we are privy to the words and thoughts of a Rastignac, we only know the thoughts of Old Goriot’s other characters to the extent that they share them verbally. From the mid-nineteenth century on, however, novelists increasingly introduced shifts in perspective—the technical term is “focalization”—that gave readers direct access to the thoughts of multiple characters. This technique, already firmly in place in Tolstoy, marked a major step forward in the novel’s capacity to serve as a school for wisdom. By giving readers insight into the particular passions and foibles of multiple characters, psychological realism à la Tolstoy (as distinct from its later development in Henry James) allowed readers to see how those particularities inflect the characters’ interpretations of the novel’s unfolding events and to assess the accuracy of those interpretations, both on a first reading and (especially) on rereading. Inasmuch as wisdom requires a heightened attention to the many different values and contextual frames that can drive human action, and thus to the play of Sternberg’s “multiple competing interests” with “no clear resolution,” the benefit of multi-perspectival realism for wisdom is palpable.
Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement is a strong recent example of what its protagonist calls “an impartial psychological realism” (38). Although first and foremost a coming-of-age story focused on young Briony Tallis’ birth as a writer, Atonement explores the desires, fantasies, and moments of self-doubt of three main characters—Briony, her sister Cecilia, and the son of the Tallis family’s cleaning lady, Robbie Turner. In so doing, it also puts the reader ‘in the head’ of several other key characters, including Briony’s mother Emily, her cousin Lola Quincy, and the visiting chocolate magnate Paul Marshall.
The first half of Atonement recounts the events of a single summer day in 1935. We are introduced to Briony as a 13-year old budding writer with a penchant for romance, self-mythologizing, and theatrical behavior, as well as an uncommonly precious love of language. Living, as Robbie would later phrase it, in “an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and recrossed unpredictably,” Briony is still very much in the thrall of that quintessential childhood feeling that only she possessed a rich and vibrant internal life:
Was everyone else really as alive as she was?… If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. (132, 34)
As the novel opens, Briony is arranging for the production of a romance in verse, The Trials of Arabella, that she has composed in honor of the return home of her brother Leon. But Briony’s plans and need “to have the world just so” are frustrated at every turn. This is due in part to the rush of events and the disinterest or ineptitude of her cast (her visiting cousins Lola, Pierrot, and Jackson Quincy), in part to her deciding “halfway through… to become a novelist” (4, 348). But we as readers hear enough of Trials to confirm Briony’s self-centeredness and childish love of the romance plot and to encounter this foreshadowing stanza, spoken by the heroine’s father: “My darling one, you are young and lovely, / But inexperienced, and though you think / The world is at your feet, / It can rise up and tread on you” (16).
Photo: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright
On the cusp as she is between the childhood and adult worlds, Briony’s literary tastes and ambitions are revolutionized when she witnesses an otherwise unremarkable scene from the window of the family nursery. Seeing her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the “only son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father,” standing inexplicably beside the Tallis family’s half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s Triton fountain, Briony first imagines she’s witnessing a proposal of marriage: “It made perfect sense. Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance” (36). That interpretation falls apart, however, when Robbie “imperiously” raises his hand and Cecilia strips down to her undergarments and climbs into the fountain—in order, we learn later, to retrieve the broken pieces of a long-cherished Meissen porcelain vase (36). After briefly asking herself what “strange power” Robbie had over Cecilia—“Blackmail? Threats?”—Briony has
her first, weak intimation that for her it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong. (37)
Shortly thereafter, the narration jumps forward in time to read this scene—more wisely, but still with a tinge of “self-mythologizing”—as a transformative moment in Briony’s evolution as a writer and as a moral actor:
She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains…. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter into these different minds and show how they had an equal value. (38)
A professor of mine once remarked that all great novels contain a passage—a “little drawer,” as he put it—in which the author reveals what she was after in writing the book and tacitly revels in the fact she has ‘done good.’ These passages detailing “the moment when [Briony] became recognizably herself” strike me as Atonement’s “little drawer” (39). Unfortunately for the young Briony, however, her nascent wisdom on “how easy it was to get everything wrong” does not immediately take.
Following his tense encounter with Cecilia at the fountain, Robbie returns home and types a “conventional apology” for his clumsiness with the vase. Having indulged in a “cinema fantasy” in which Cecilia gives herself up to him and with a passing thought to Freud, Robbie then adds an addendum that reads: “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long” (75, 80). His draft “ruined”, Robbie rewrites the letter without the addendum, but mistakenly leaves the new letter on a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, opened to the entry on the vagina, and puts the original letter with its seemingly offending language in an envelope (80, 89).
As he walks back for a dinner with the Tallises and their guests, an exultant Robbie channels his inner Briony as he plots a story “with himself as hero,” imagining that he will be a “better doctor” because his reading of “the nineteenth-century novel” at Cambridge, where he excelled, had made him “alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial of the inevitable” (85, 87). Seeing Briony on his walk, he asks her to deliver the envelope, then immediately realizes with horror that he had enclosed the wrong version of his note.
Photo: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright
In surreptitiously reading Robbie’s letter before delivering it, with its reference to “that part of her to which—Briony was certain—the word referred,” Briony is “profoundly” disgusted (107). Yet she writes herself into the story in two, somewhat conflicting ways. Ever the romantic, she senses that “something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principal of darkness” and that Cecilia “was in some way threatened and would need her help” (106f.) And yet the “very complexity of her feelings,” her sense of “contradiction,” convinces Briony “that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit” (106).
On coming down for the dinner, Briony stumbles upon Cecilia and Robbie making passionate if unpracticed love in a dark corner of the family library and misinterprets it as a rape. Shortly thereafter, we learn through omniscient narration that Robbie’s “stupid letter” had “repelled” Cecilia, but it had also clarified something that had “been there for weeks” between them and kindled a passion (122, 125).
Photo: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright
As an awkward dinner draws to a close, the family and their guests hear that the Quincy twins, Pierrot and Jackson, had decided to run away. They divide themselves into search parties, with Robbie and Briony each deciding to search alone. It is here that Briony commits what she will come to understand as “her crime” (146, 152). Wandering alone in the total darkness, she comes upon the rape of her cousin Lola by an unseen assailant. Spurred on by an earlier conversation with Lola, who called Robbie a “maniac” after hearing of his letter, and led astray by her misreading of both the fountain and library scenes, Briony assumes that the assailant was Robbie. In fact, as she will piece together later, it was the wealthy chocolate magnate, Paul Marshall. Once again, she mistakes reality for literature. But this time, it is not the romance plot but a specifically novelistic desire for narrative coherence that leads her astray: “everything fitted; the terrible present fulfilled the recent past…. The truth was in the symmetry” (158f.).
Following a particularly deft scene in which McEwan shows Briony leading a hesitant Lola, who had been more mildly assaulted by Paul Marshall earlier, to agree that the assailant was “him”—“It was Robbie, wasn’t it” (155f.)—Briony’s “glazed surface of conviction” begins to develop “its blemishes and hairline cracks” (158). These doubts are unwelcome, however, to the police investigating the crime, driven—as so many characters in the novel are—by suspicion of a young man, Robbie, who aspires above the class into which he was born (159). In the end, we are told, Briony
trapped herself, she marched into a labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her way back. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar. (160)
Feeling “sudden love” for the police inspector, “who was backed by all the human powers and wisdom that existed,” and energized “by a sense of doing and being good… a joyful feeling of blameless self-love,” Briony finds and shows the police Robbie’s letter (165ff.). When an unsuspecting Robbie returns having found the twins, he is led away in handcuffs, which Briony reads naïvely as “further confirmation of his guilt” (173). Part One of the novel then concludes with Briony’s reflection that “this tragedy was bound to bring [she and Cecilia] closer” (173).
Photo: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright
Part Two of Atonement is wholly narrated from Robbie’s perspective. Having secured early release from prison by enlisting in the infantry, an already wounded Robbie experiences both the horrors and the fog of war on the ignominious retreat to Dunkirk. McEwan sets the tone for this section in the first pages when Robbie inexplicably encounters “a leg in a tree… severed cleanly above the knee… a perfect leg, pale, smooth, small enough to be a child’s” (180). Later, as soldiers and French citizens alike are strafed by the Luftwaffe, Robbie will watch a Flemish boy and his mother whom he’s been safeguarding being “vaporized” by a German shell (226).
Robbie’s interactions with his fellow soldiers underscore the extent to which, as in Part One, he stands between the classes: “What’s a private soldier like you,” one of them asks, “doing talking like a toff?” (181). Cecilia, now alienated from her family, remains faithful, understanding “the snobbery that lay behind [her family’s] stupidity” (196). Yet both she and Robbie remain convinced that it was the son of a family retainer, Danny Hardman, who committed the rape, not the wealthy Paul Marshall (215). Despite wondering whether they might not have “run ahead of themselves” in a romance that “rested on a few minutes in a library years ago,” Robbie and Cecilia continue “making love for years—by post,” using literary allusions to escape the military censors (192f.). Ending all of her letters with the lines, “I’ll wait for you. Come back,” Cecilia calls Robbie her “reason for life” (190, 197).
Photo: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright
Having left Robbie on the beach at Dunkirk, Atonement shifts back to Briony in Part Three. Rather than going up to Cambridge as anticipated, Briony has opted for nurse’s training at Cecilia’s former hospital “as a sort of penance,” while all of London awaits a German invasion (199, 271). That sense of self-identity that a younger Briony had cultivated obsessively, albeit tragically, is now being stripped away under a training regime, modeled on Florence Nightengale’s, replete with “strictures, rules, obedience, housework, and a constant fear of disapproval” (260). Tellingly, as if to confirm the Aristotelian view that practical wisdom only accrues through experience, Briony would come to feel that she learned “everything she understood about nursing” in the course of a long night dealing with the first wave of dying evacuees from the Continent, especially her time at the bedside of a dying Frenchman with a monstrous head wound (286).
Not surprisingly, Briony is still writing. She writes and submits a novella based on the fountain incident that reflects the “modern sensibility” of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a style that eschews characters and plots in favor of the “onward roll” of the “conscious mind as a river through time” (265). In a long letter back requesting another draft, the journal’s editor suggests more plotting, a greater “sense of forward movement,” and “some tension, some light and shade within the narrative itself” (294ff.). Unwittingly, the editor hits the mark in asking: “Might she [i.e., Briony as the original observer of the scene] come between them [Robbie and Cecilia] in some disastrous fashion?… Might the young couple use her as a messenger” (295f.). This leads Briony to realize that her adherence to “some borrowed notions of modern writing” served to “conceal her cowardice” by drowning “her guilt in a stream—three streams!—of consciousness…. It was not the backbone of a story she lacked. It was backbone” (302).
Briony’s guilt is compounded when she receives news of the forthcoming marriage of Paul Marshall and Lola Quincy, which her silence had made possible. Attending the ceremony uninvited, she comes to appreciate that “the truth that only Marshall and his bride knew at first hand was steadily being walled up within the mausoleum of their marriage” (307).
Photo: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright
Following the marriage ceremony, Briony pays a long-avoided visit to her estranged sister Cecilia, only to discover that an unforgiving Robbie is there as well. Informing Cecilia and Robbie that she plans to retract her evidence and to tell her parents everything in the hope of forgiveness, Briony discloses that Lola’s assailant was Paul Marshall, not Danny Hardman, and that she has just come from their wedding (327). As Briony takes her leave of Cecilia and Robbie at the Balham tube station, she recalls that Cecilia used to speak to her just as she had spoken that day to the shell-shocked Robbie—“Come back. It was only a bad dream. Briony, come back.”—then concludes: “She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin” (330). There follow an author’s initials, “BT”, and a date, “London, 1999” (330).
What we have been reading, it turns out, is a novel within a novel, a much older Briony’s attempt for atonement through her “last novel,” which “should have been her first” (349). This revelation, of which McEwan has dropped hints throughout, forces us as readers to confront the suspension of disbelief inherent in the compact we habitually strike with the novelist, granting the reality of the events as described in exchange for the pleasure—and, yes, wisdom—of the story. Suddenly, for example, that editor who counseled Briony to abandon streams of consciousness and confront her active role in an unfolding drama looks a lot like Briony, and ultimately McEwan himself.
Atonement ends with a present-day frame entitled “London, 1999,” narrated from Briony’s perspective on her 77th birthday. In it, we learn that Briony, now an accomplished author, is experiencing “a series of tiny, nearly imperceptible strokes” consistent with a diagnosis of vascular dementia: “The process will be slow, but my brain, my mind, is closing down” (334). Slowly, and without the “mood swings and aggression” of Alzheimer’s, she will lose her memory and simple nouns, then language itself, motor control, and her entire nervous system (334f.). The reveal at the end of the embedded novel had confirmed that the wisdom dialogue in Atonement was between the younger and older Briony. The frame repositions that dialogue under the shadow of death.
Briony’s day begins with a chance sighting of Lord and Lady Marshall, now well into old age themselves and known for their philanthropy. We learn that the novel we just read—detailing “our crime—Lola’s, Marshall’s, mine”—will need to be published posthumously, due to the Marshalls’ “vigorous” propensity to sue for libel (349, 337). But the main event of the day is a family dinner in Briony’s honor on the old family estate, now a hotel. And the highlight of that is the much-belated premier of The Trials of Arabella, acted with gusto by the great-grandchildren of the original participants. As she hears the play’s opening lines, Briony has a moment of ironic self-awareness that recognizes, quite wisely, both how far she has coming in the intervening 64 years and how much of her 13-year old self still remains:
Suddenly, she was right there before me, that busy, priggish, conceited little girl, and she was not dead either, for when people tittered appreciatively at ‘evanesce’ [Arabella is said to ‘evanesce from her home’] my feeble heart—ridiculous vanity!—made a little leap. (346f.)
Briony has not transcended the authorial vanity that drove her in 1935, but it is now bathed in an irony that is self-aware and recognizes the complexity and contradictions of human motivation—precisely that recognition that she first intuits in the scene by the fountain.
Photo: Screen Rant
This awareness that the two parties of the implicit wisdom dialogue—the younger and the older Briony—are both markedly different and still very much the same carries over into the novel’s final pages, in which Briony confides that “[l]overs and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long” and that she may not “have traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play” (349). For it is only in her novel’s final draft—the one we have read—that her lovers “end well” (350). In fact—but of course that fact is itself fiction—Robbie dies of septicemia near Dunkirk in June 1940 and Cecilia is killed by the bomb that destroyed the Balham tube station that September. Briony initially justifies this choice in seemingly aesthetic terms: “Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love… except in the service of the bleakest realism?” (350). But she quickly acknowledges that she has “doubled back to my starting place” because she’s “too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining” (350). She has united the lovers at the end as “a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair,” without being “so self-serving as to let them forgive me” (351).
Early on in the embedded novel, just after she reads Robbie’s letter of apology, Briony reflects on how she as a writer might transcend “such nursery-tale ideas as good and evil,” positing that there must be
some lofty, godlike place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but noisily jostling together in all their glorious imperfection. (108)
In its final pages, Atonement returns to this notion of the author as God in two ways. In time, as those who appear in her novel die andare forgotten, Briony argues, no one will care about the misrepresentations; “we will only exist as my inventions” (350). But this power is also a problem—indeed, Briony’s problem of the past 59 years: “how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?” (350). Hers was “always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all” (351).
