Saralee Says
The word “atonement” is defined in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as the “reparation for an offense,” and the premise of Atonement by Ian McEwan (Anchor) is whether or not one can ever really make amends for lying about another person. McEwan, who also wrote Black Dogs and won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam, has mastered his gift of writing in Atonement.
Atonement is 350 pages in length, and the first 175 pages are about the events that take place in just one day. The rest of the story concerns the reaction of the characters as they live their lives with the consequences of what takes place during the one day.
Who were your favorite characters and who was the most romantic person in this book? Cecilia is mine, and my complaint is that there is too much Briony and not enough of Cecilia in Atonement. Did you become as impatient with Briony as I did during the first half of the book? She was a little too precocious for me. Did Briony ever come close to making amends for her actions? She did not make amends as far as I was concerned, but I was delighted with the way the author used Briony’s skills as a writer to tell the closing chapters of Briony’s life.
How did you feel when you read about the battle of Dunkirk? Were the hospital scenes too harsh in light of the current war in Iraq? I found those pages some of the most compelling in the book. What about the style of McEwan’s writing? Do you enjoy a novelist who takes his time weaving a story? Did you write your own ending about what finally happened to Robbie and then to Cecilia? I think McEwan’s decision about what he did to them was brilliant and will play well when this story plays out on the big screen as a movie.
Larry’s Language
Remember the old Mickey Rooney childhood movies where the plot is wrapped around Mickey’s proposal to put on a play in the back yard? From beginning to end, Atonement is much like the Rooney sequence of events as we first see the characters, then watch the things they imagine or make up, and finally we see how it all may have ended.
Author McEwan tells the story two or three different ways. In the first half of the book, which reminded me mostly of a Jane Austen/Edith Wharton class-status story, a young child, Briony, spies on her older sister Cecilia and the servant’s son Robbie as Cecilia partly undresses to pick up a broken vase from a pool of water. Briony believes that Robbie is forcing Cecilia to undress, so when there is a vicious assault later that night, Briony accuses the servant’s son Robbie, who is then taken to jail.
Mistakes are made. Lives are irreversibly changed. As these characters grow older during World War II, their interaction is intense and jarring. It is difficult to relate to the central character whom the author McEwan pictures as making atonement through her life work. In fact, that character could have done far more to seek forgiveness in far more direct ways but made a choice not to do so. This is especially heartbreaking at the end of the book when we possibly learn what happened, and when it possibly happened, to two of the appealing characters.
This novel poses interesting questions for our book club about the difference between reality and fantasy. In the world of literary fiction, the author’s word is true, but what if the author is unsure? What if the writer deliberately misleads and does not clarify the sequence of events or the actuality of happenings at the end? Can such a novel still be satisfying and complete?
Join us for our next discussion, which is Founding Brothers — The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis.
