On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony's sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge. By the end of the day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl's scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life. Atonement is at its center a profound and profoundly moving exploration of shame and forgiveness, and the difficulty in absolution.
eMusic Review 0
03.12.08
Ian McEwan, Atonement
2008 | Label: Phoenix Audio
Ian McEwan illustrates the dangers of a single lie.
Ian McEwan’s lapidary novel hovers just on the edge of being too beautiful. Set mainly in the run-up to and during World War II, the story opens in a sprawling, dusty English country estate, and then moves to the front lines, both at home and abroad. McEwan’s writing is immaculate, as pretty as a period piece, but you don’t always feel the sweat and blood seeping through the pages.
The simmering romance between Cecilia Tallis a priggish, pampered artistocrat, and Robbie Turner the son of her family’s housemaid, however, does not fail to get other juices flowing. Their furtive coupling in a darkened study is powerfully erotic, and the surest sign that McEwan does not feel bound by the rules of the story’s era. (Surest, that is, until the book’s startling coda, about which one shall henceforth keep schtum.)
Every Eden has its snake, and theirs is 13-year-old Briony, Cecilia’s smart, sullen sister, a precocious tyrant who writes novels and plays for her own amusement. When her playmates decline to act their assigned parts in the play she’s written, Briony creates her own drama, unfairly pinning a horrendous crime on Robbie and ushering in an era of bloody reprisals.
Intriguingly, McEwan’s villain acts as his surrogate. Briony may be a monster, but she is also an author, and her arrogance is that of a creator who expects her puppets to do her bidding. The sin that occurs in the novel’s first part provides for the attempted expiation of its second, but the true nature of Briony’s penance is hidden in the space between words. Whether her contrition amends her crime or compounds it is a question that lives on after the book’s covers have closed.
