Atonement by IAN McEWAN SYNOPSIS On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl’s imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone. ‘A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama’ John Updike STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION Has Briony atoned by the end of the novel? Is this novel an exploration into the endless possibilities of story-telling? What do you think actually happened in Parts Two and Three? Did Robbie and Cecilia survive the war? Assess the boundaries that are crossed in Part One and the consequences played out in the rest of the novel. Discuss the romantic ideals portrayed by Briony in Part One – are they upheld throughout the novel? How successfully does Ian McEwan portray the possibility that a life could hang on one decisive moment? The narrative voice shifts throughout the novel, and several of the same situations are retold from a different perspective Discuss the different narrative viewpoints. Are you more convinced by one narrator than another? Are there significant differences in their accounts? What is the effect of the story being told from several different viewpoints? The war is a constant presence throughoutAtonement : the war is impending in Part One, and is experienced in all its horror in Parts Two and Three. Consider the impact of the war on various characters. Compare Robbie’s experience of war to that of Briony. How did you respond to the graphic descriptions of the violence of war? Crime, on any scale, and its punishment is a constant theme throughout Atonement. Discuss the various crimes committed and the resultant consequences. With the theme of crime and punishment in mind compare the situations of Lola and Marshall with that of Robbie, Cecilia and Briony. Do Robbie and Cecilia ever commit a crime? To what extent would you agree that guilt is Lola and Marshall’s punishment for their crime? Briony’s entire life revolves around punishing herself for a crime she committed when she was thirteen years old. Would you agree that the other characters are also involved in punishing her? The novel begins and ends with Briony’s first work of fiction -The Trials of Arabella. Is the story of Arabella reflected at any point in Atonement? Is Arabella mirrored by any of the other characters? Consider this ‘final draft’ of Atonement – allegedly to be published after Briony’s death. How much faith do you place in the accuracy of this final draft? Do you think it is an objective historical account or has Briony adapted or manipulated it to suit her own purpose? To what extent is Atonement an exploration of the powers of the imagination? Do any of the characters’ thoughts or imaginations ever surprise you? There are noticeable changes in the imaginative accounts as the novel progresses; why do you think this is? Consider the character of Briony. By the end of the novel could she still be described as a fantasist, consumed by her own imagination? What changes in her character can you identify as the novel develops? Do you ultimately view her as a sympathetic character? A chaotic household, a mother who is often ill and a father who rarely comes home: the Tallises are a dysfunctional family even before the events at the end of Part One. How weak is Emily Tallis? How do Jack Tallis’s actions lose him the respect of his children? How does the Tallis family mirror the problems of contemporary families? RECEPTION & REVIEWS ‘Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence’ Independent ‘Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book. A superb achievement which combines a magnificent display of the powers of the imagination with a probing exploration of them.’ Sunday Times ‘He is this country’s unrivalled literary giant...a fascinatingly strange, unique and gripping novel’ Independent on Sunday ‘Just brilliant, particularly for the clever, poignant final chapter. I loved the shattering, satisfying twist’Red ‘This masterly novel succeeds at every level’ Daily Express ‘The best thing he has ever written’ Observer INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR This is an extract from an interview with Ian McEwan featured in Ian McEwan: The Essential Guide from the Vintage Living Texts Series by Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes. Jonathan Noakes: Atonement is partly about guilt. You’ve said that a novel can look at all sides of a question and it can refuse to take sides. Nevertheless, we are encouraged in Atonement to take sides, partly because the narrator turns out to have been part of the story, and is therefore partial. What’s the significance of the possibility that this ‘atonement’, this account - the nearest Briony, as a non-believer, can get to atonement’ - may be inaccurate? Another fantasy? Ian McEwan: Part of the intention of Atonement was to look at storytelling itself. And to examine the relationship between what is imagined and what is true. It’s a novel full of other writers – not only Briony of course, who’s stalked, haunted by the figures of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, but Robbie too has a relationship, a deep relationship with writing and storytelling. The danger of an imagination that can’t quite see the boundaries of what is real and what is unreal, drawn again from Jane Austen – another writer who is crucial to this novel –plays a part in Briony’s sense that her atonement has consisted of a lifetime of writing this novel. She’s condemned to write it over and over again. Now she’s a dying woman, she has vascular dementia, her mind is emptying, and finally she writes a draft which is different from all the others. She fails, as she sees it, to have the courage o her pessimism, and rewrites the love story so that the lovers survive. What really then is the truth? Well, as she says, when the novel will finally be published, which can only be after she’s dead, she herself will become a character, and no one will be much interested in whether she is real or not, she will only exist within the flame of the novel. So I wanted to play, but play seriously, with something rooted in the emotional rather than the intellectual. I wanted to play with the notion of storytelling as a form of self- justification, of how much courage is involved in telling the truth to oneself. What are the distances between what is real and what is imagined? Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, was a girl so full of the delights of Gothic fiction that she causes havoc around her when she imagines a perfectly innocent man to be capable of the most terrible things. For many, many years I’ve been thinking how I might devise a hero or heroine who could echo that process in Catherine Morland, but then go a step further and look at, not the crime, but the process of atonement, and do it through writing — do it through storytelling, I should say. TN: So Briony’s a writer. Joe is a writer. Stephen is a writer. What do you think about being a writer, writing about writers? IM: I think it could be immensely sterile if that’s all it was. I think that I’m always drawn to some kind of balance between a fiction that is self-reflective on its own processes, and one that has a forward impetus too, that will completely accept the given terms of the illusion of fiction. I’ve never been interested in that kind of fiction that triumphantly declares that art is not life. Only novelists ever think that art is life. Readers never have any problem with it. But I do have an interest in something self-reflective along the way. TN: A number of novelists born just after the Second World War have written about the experiences of their parents’ generation. What are the reverberations of the violence of the Second World War to the generation that grew up in its shadow? IM: Well, I was born in I 948 and my father was a professional soldier. The war shaped our family life. It was the war that brought my parents together and that killed my mother’s first husband. I grew up in army camps in places in the world in which, again, our presence was to some extent determined by the recent war. And then, more importantly, I suppose, it was the war that shaped the alliances of the Cold War. My father and his friends, as soon as they had a beer in their hand in the evenings, which was every evening, would talk about the war. Wherever they started in their conversation, that’s where it would always end. It was a constant presence, and geopolitically it remained a presence. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, at which point, as people said at the time, the Second World War finally ended.