It’s a sweltering summer day in England, 1935, and the teetering Tallis family drape themselves across their upper-class country house. Like dolls being perfectly positioned throughout the home, we meet the Tallis children—Leon, Celia, and Briony—from oldest to youngest as they linger between a misspent summer and a scandal that will alter their lives and scatter their bonds forever. Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement, published in 2001, and its movie adaption released in 2007, is an almost love story, or what a young love could have become, if not for childish deception set during World War II. McEwan’s detailed characterization of the main character, Briony Tallis, represents a psychological study of guilt and remorse that follows her formative lie.
Narrated in the third person, we meet 13-year-old Briony as she becomes an aspiring writer and “possessed a strange mind and a facility with words.” Briony is a storyteller, a liar, in which her innocent household plays become projected onto her older sister, Celia’s, budding intimacy with the son of their housekeeper, Robbie Turner. McEwan captures the rushing and illogical behavior of a summer crush between Celia and Robbie’s chemistry, from family friends to acquaintances at both at Cambridge and contrasts the romance with Briony’s voyeurism as she misconstrues intimacy for a crime. Misunderstanding the relationship between Celia and Robbie, Briony accuses the housekeeper’s son of a life-altering crime as the summer climaxes with Robbie’s arrest and Celia resenting her family for dismissing his innocence. Depicting the power play between the words of an upper-crust teen against that of a lower-class man reaching beyond his social worth, Briony frames Robbie for a crime that separates the couple for years and uproots their life together and forever asks, “What if?”
Relying on the unreliable narrator and the perfect catastrophe it creates, Briony attempts to atone even as she realizes her lie subjected the couple to a life of war, labor, and longing. Briony writes to Celia and confronts her within her new household trapped within an unhappy marriage, then tracks down Robbie’s active regiment through the evacuation of Dunkirk. All she can do is bear witness to the aftermath of the immature lie and falsehoods in which she offers us the rectification of the novel itself. Mimicking the Greeks, almost all of the characters live a life of despair as Briony’s ignorance stands at the epicenter of their suffering.
McEwan seems to string out an endless summer through visual description and a foundation to set the dysfunctional Tallis family dynamic in order to represent what was lost after Briony’s deception. A cushioned summer of romantic potential and familial warmth fragments as Robbie is enlisted into the British forces of World War II to shorten his prison sentence, and Celia enters a life of nursing and labor completely cut off from her family. We follow Briony as she ages and comes to terms with the repercussions of that summer in which she also condemns herself to a life of penance, desperately reaching out to Celia for forgiveness and any form of atonement. The novel presents us with three lives ruined by a child’s wild imagination to criminalize a socially condemned relationship in which McEwan asks us what the meaning of ‘atonement’ really is and the power it continues to hold.
