December 1, 2002

Considering Ian McEwan’s well-known predilection for probing the murky side of human nature, Atonement, at first, does not at all feel as if its been written by him. Part 1 of the novel begins languidly in 1935 at the Tallis family country manor in Surrey on a sweltering summer’s day. Amid a scene of rural bliss, the strongly imaginative Briony Tallis, a 13-year old budding writer, goes about arranging the performance of a play she has written to celebrate the arrival of her elder brother, Leon. Her mother Emily is nursing one of her never-ending migraines as she waits for her philandering husband Jack’s routine phone call telling her that he is spending the night in London because of ‘work’.

Briony’s restless older sister, Cecilia, is bothered about her recently developed awkwardness with Robbie Turner, son of the family’s charlady and her childhood playmate. Robbie, at 25, has been Jack Tallis’s charge for years; thanks to the benefactor and his own brains, he has obtained a First at Cambridge and is presently contemplating medical school. Cecilia has also studied at Cambridge. While at University they had met rarely, occasionally crossing each other in the street with no more exchange than a passing smile.

The other cast of characters include the adored brother Leon, who brings with him his friend Paul Marshall, a rich, dim-witted young businessman, and the three cousins who are staying at the Tallis home; the attractive and manipulative fifteen-year old Lola and her two feeble younger twin brothers.

As the day progresses, we follow a frustrated Briony’s furies and daydreams as her plans for staging the play are thwarted by her cousins. She then witnesses a perplexing squabble between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, who unbeknown to her soon grow to realize their mutual attraction. Some hours later Robbie trying to voice his passion sends the wrong draft of his letter to Cecilia via Briony who opens and reads its pornographic contents.

By now she had succumbed to the notion that Robbie has transformed himself into a rampaging sexual maniac. When, in the evening, Briony innocently intrudes upon her sister and Robbie ‘grappling’ with each other in the dimly lit library, she mistakenly concludes that Robbie has forced Cecilia into participating in some distasteful act.

When, later that night, Briony’s cousin Lola is attacked from behind and sexually assaulted in the garden, Briony, the solitary witness, assumes that the shape she saw, running away in the dark, was none other than Robbie. Caught on the threshold of adolescence, Briony turns her powers of imagination into damning evidence. Events now skid out of control and soon Robbie Turner is led away in a police car charged with a crime he never committed

Part 2 of the book takes us to May 1940. Robbie Turner has been released from prison and is now a private in the British Expeditionary Force caught in a humiliating trudge backwards to Dunkirk. Using extraordinary descriptive powers McEwan powerfully evokes the horrors and bewilderments of this episode of the second world war. Gone is the image of the heroic retreat of Dunkirk. Instead we get chaos, anarchy and a weary struggle to survive as German aircraft repeatedly bomb and strafe the plodding and dispirited confusion of straggling soldiers.

In the story, corpses, craters, grime, thirst and hunger abound, along with the occasional act of compassion and courage. The inherent savagery of humankind also makes its mark. Infuriated by the lack of protection from the air some angry soldiers turn upon one of their own — an RAF clerk — and try to pummel and kick him to death. Using guile and trickery one of Robbie’s companions drags the battered and bleeding man to safety. Having watched the scene the wrongly convicted rapist later asks, “But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was.”

In Part 3 we return to England. Briony is now working as a trainee nurse at a London hospital. We learn that she is filled with guilt and remorse for what she did in 1935. In a bid to atone for her misdeed she has turned down Cambridge and devoted herself to nursing. Once again we are made to visit the shocking horrors caused by war through the savage wounds inflicted upon the youthful soldiers she is called upon to treat. Among the injured is a young man missing a cheek, the wound exposing his tongue “glistening, hideously long”, and there is another youth with bits of skulls missing that reveal his “spongy crimson mess of brain” — McEwan’s grip of detail can be horrifyingly expressive. Later Briony builds up her courage to visit and seek forgiveness from her sister Cecilia, who has not lived with nor spoken to the members of her family since that fateful day in 1935. The eighteen-year old Briony now wishes to retract the statement she gave to the police enabling Robbie to clear his name. We discover Cecilia, also a nurse, contrary to the conventions of 1940’s Britain, openly living in her flat with Robbie (who is on a short furlough), much to the chagrin of her enraged landlady. After five torment-filled years the lovers finally appear to be reunited.

Part 4 is in actuality a ‘postscript’ set in 1999, as we once again meet Briony, now a seventy-seven year old eminent novelist. We now discover that the first three parts of the book — the country house, Dunkirk and the hospital scenes — were actually written by Briony as her final act of atonement to the two people whose lives she had shattered so completely long ago. She had been working on this novel ever since 1940 when she learned that a person is, among else “a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended”.

Quite unexpectedly, on the third to last page of the book, the reader is subjected to a sudden McEwan twist, which leaves him momentarily winded as he tries to come to terms with all that he has read and then make sense of it. The answer lies with Briony. Having finally completed her book Atonement (the novel within the novel) she asks: “How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?” She then answers it by admitting, “It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.”

The book reveals Ian McEwan, the masterful storyteller, to be at the peak of his powers. After finishing Atonement the reader is left dazzled not only by the understated display of fine writing but also for the thought-provoking McEwan delivered worm left twisting in his head. The book was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize and was generally regarded as the favorite to win, only to be pipped at the post by Peter Carey’s True history of the Kelly Gang.

Atonement
By Ian McEwan
Vintage
Available at Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi
Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 09 943804 6. 372pp. Rs292