Atonement

Ian McEwan

Atonement is the kind of book which makes me want to join a discussion group instead of writing a review. Reviews are easiest if you either loved or hated the book. But Atonement is more complex than that. There were parts of it that I devoured; there were other parts that dragged. The ending is both exhilerating and disappointing. And I have at least half a dozen questions I need answers to.

Anyway, to the plot. Or at least that part of it I can tell without revealing too much of the detail of the crime on which the whole book turns. The setting an uncomfortably hot summer's evening in 1935 and a special dinner is planned in the Tallis household. The household consists of an ineffectual mother, Emily, her grown up children Leon and Cecilia and her 13-year-old daughter Briony. Visiting them are "the cousins", 15-year-old Lola Quincey and Lola's two younger brothers. Two young men are also present. They are Paul Marshall ("the chocolate millionaire", a fantastically wealthy friend of Leon's) and Robbie Turner (the brilliant son of the Tallis's cleaner, with whom Cecilia has only just begun a raw and clandestine love affair).

Although the later parts of the novel span sixty years its first half 1935 setting is not the pre-war idyll convention demands. The Quincey children are unhappily billeted with the Tallises while their parents' divorce is processed. Cecilia is bored and frustrated. Briony is a lonely child and prey to an over-active imagination. She is also feeling overshadowed by the arrival of the older and wiser Lola.

Nor is this the pre-war upper-class-bound England of literary tradition. The setting is a substantial pile set in generous parkland but the house itself is ugly and modern. The Tallises are newish money (their fortune made in padlocks by some recent ancestor). Paul Marshall, of course, is even newer money. And Robbie Turner, despite his humble origins, has claimed a first at Cambridge and is set for a career in medicine. His education has been paid for by the Tallis family. There are echoes here, dare I say it in the Barn, of Howards End.

That evening a series of disasters occur. An obscene letter is discovered. The Quincey boys are discovered after dinner to have run away from home. Worst of all, that night, Lola is sexually assaulted in the grounds of the house. Briony, in a fever of excitement and fantasy names the wrong man as Lola's attacker.

Fast-forward to 1940. While Robbie Turner is part of the British retreat to Dunkirk, the two Tallis sisters have joined the war effort as nurses in London. The Dunkirk retreat is described in brutal detail (Birdsong is its obvious WWI parallel) but while other reviewers describe it as a brilliant and a powerful piece of writing I found it hard to get engaged. Better done, in my opinion, is the description of the nursing experience as Briony's London hospital is buried under a massive caseload as the flotsam of Dunkirk is washed back to England. Here and there in the narrative McEwan also leaks out the details of how his characters have fared since Lola's rape five years earlier.

But, as I said, this would work better as a discussion than a review. I've said nothing about Briony's obsession with being a writer, although this is clearly important to the novel. I've described what happened to Lola variously as a rape, an attack and an assault and by the end of the book I'm no longer at all sure what happened there. Was it even consensual? And the "Atonement" of the title? A strange and discussable book.