Atonement - Ian MC Ewans

Ian McEwan’s Atonement
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. IAN McEWAN’S
Atonement
JULIE ELLAM
Continuum
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Contents
1.
The Novelist 1
2.
The Novel 21
3.
Critical Reception 61
4.
Novel’s Performance and Adaptation 67
5.
Further Reading and Discussion Questions 77
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. 1
The Novelist
I an McEwan has had a long and successful writing career

that dates from the mid-1970s. Since then, he has gone on to prove
his versatility and although he is mainly known as a novelist and
writer of short stories, he has also written two librettos, Or Shall We
Die? (1983) and For You (2008), and the film scripts The Ploughman’s
Lunch (1985) and Soursweet (1988), which is based on the Timothy
Mo novel. The Daydreamer (1994) is a work of children’s fiction.
He has become a mainstay in British contemporary literature
and each new publication is largely welcomed by the critics and his
expanding readership. His fiction has become known for its dis-
plays of meticulous research and his novels are recognizable,
especially since the late 1990s, for an economy of style. From the
outset he was seen as a promising new talent and with his first
publication, a collection of short stories entitled First Love, Last
Rites (1975), he received a Somerset Maugham Award. His second
work, In Between the Sheets (1978), which is another collection of
short fiction, has a similar thematic use of violence while also
2 Ian McEwan’s Atonement
maintaining a distance from its subject matter. Over the decades,

his writing has been less willing to shock and he has evolved
gradually into a writer with broad appeal. It is also of note that his
novels are studied more at A-level than works by any other living
British novelist (Mullan, 2007).
His work was highly regarded before the publication of Atone-
ment (2001a), but this particular novel continues to stand out as
one of his greatest achievements to date and is an exaggerated
testament to how he is a rarity in the literary establishment. That
is, Atonement highlights how he is both celebrated as a writer of
literary fiction and also massively popular with the reading public.
Since its original publication, it has been on national and inter-
national bestselling lists and has sold four million copies, which,
again, is an unusual feat for a work of this type. The adaptation to
film in 2007 has served to contribute to the novel’s high profile. It
has brought about a further resurgence in sales and was repub-
lished as a tie-in with the film.
McEwan was born in 1948 in Aldershot and spent the early part
of his childhood abroad according to where his father was posted
by the army. In an interview with Kate Kellaway, he refers to how
he ‘grew up with the ‘‘detritus of war’’ around him’ (Kellaway,
2001). He belongs to the generation that grew up immediately
after the war and it was made a part of his life with the stories his
father told him of his involvement in it and with the fact that his
babysitters were corporals. This is significant in relation to Atone-
ment given that his father used to tell him about what happened to
him in the Dunkirk retreat.
From 1959 to 1966, he attended Woolverstone Hall, a state
boarding school in Suffolk, and this is described by Matthew
Kibble in Literature Online as a place where ‘working-class children
from central London were taught alongside those who, like
The Novelist 3
himself, came from military families’, and is a former school of

writers such as Rudyard Kipling (Kibble, 2000). McEwan is quoted
in John Mullan’s ‘Profile’ as saying he looks back at himself at this
time as being ‘sort of depressed’ and ‘more or less obedient’ to the
requirements of studying for his exams up to degree level. He
reasons that this is understandable when one considers that his
parents were 2,000 miles away in North Africa at the time. He says
that his early fiction showed a ‘bold’ and perhaps too violent side
that, he implies, was an outlet for the more introverted aspect of
his personality in these younger days (Mullan, 2007). He is also on
record as saying that he did not weep when he attended boarding
school, but ‘just clammed up for four or five years’ (Deveney,
2005).
He went on to study English and French at Sussex University
from 1967 to 1970. His parents were working class and both left
school at the age of 14, and in an interview with Catherine
Deveney in the New Scotsman he tells how proud his father was that
his son went on to study at university. He sees his parents’ gen-
eration as a ‘wasted’ one, in that although his father was intelligent
he was inevitably unable to go to university because of the need to
earn a living (Deveney, 2005).
When tracing McEwan’s background to explain his success, his
decision to take the then new MA in Modern Fiction and Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia (1970–1971) appears to be
one of those pivotal moments that he favours so often in his work.
The MA, which was founded by Professor Malcolm Bradbury and
Sir Angus Wilson, has since been recognized as influential for many
others, such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright and Tracy Chevalier,
but McEwan was the first: ‘The significance of the Wilson-
Bradbury connection, in a broader literary-historical sense, is that
McEwan comes out of a literary stable (so to speak), associated
with the liberal identity in crisis’ (Head, 2007, p. 4). This point is
proven plainly in his early fiction and with more confidence and
complexity in later novels such as Enduring Love (1997), Atonement
and Saturday (2005).
Dominic Head gives further biographical details of this period
and outlines how in 1972 McEwan joined the hippie trail to
Afghanistan. In 1974, he moved to Stockwell from Norwich and
became involved with the New Review, which became a magnet for
other emerging writers such as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and
Craig Raine. At this time, he was also awaiting the publication of
First Love, Last Rites and working on In Between the Sheets in pursuit
of a writing career (Head, 2007, p. 4).
Early fiction
McEwan’s writing career from this period into the 1980s is sig-
nificant because of the use of violence, obscenity and taboo-
breaking subject matter. Morality is twisted or rejected, as in the
story ‘Homemade’, which is included in First Love, Last Rites and
was his first publication after being accepted by The New American
Review. This is where the adolescent first-person narrator decides
to lose his virginity by raping his 10-year-old sister, Connie, and the
story begins at the end with her crying. It goes on to detail how he
learns to become an adult with Raymond, who is a year older, and
begins to think of his virginity as a ‘malodorous albatross’ (McE-
wan, 1991, p. 29). This chilling tale succeeds in being as shocking
and disturbing as appears to have been intended.
The eponymous short story, ‘First Love, Last Rites’, is set over
the period of a summer and is also preoccupied with the devel-
opment from adolescence into adulthood. The first-person narrator
The Novelist 5
and his girlfriend, Sissel, hear noises behind the skirting board and
the last rites refer to the death of the rat that they have heard,
which the narrator refers to as ‘our familiar’, as well as the end of
their youth (McEwan, 1991, p. 96).
McEwan’s first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), is an unsettling
take on family life and culminates in sibling incest after the four
children are orphaned. When they are left alone, their circle
tightens in a harsh parody of the institution of the family and it is
only disrupted by the outsider, Derek. In McEwan’s interview with
Deveney, he explains how this novel is about ‘absent parents’. He
also says how it addresses the sentiments he had while growing up
in which he wished his parents would ‘somehow painlessly melt
away’ as this would leave the ‘ground cleared’ for him (Deveney,
2005). This daydream echoes the Freudian formulation of the
family romance, where the child imagines being free of his or
her parents, and is connected to the process of growing up
and separating from the once idealized parents. The orphaned
child has been a significant figure in literature as he or she is then
given a freedom and independence from parental (and societal)
control.
The Comfort of Strangers (1981) is his second novel and is set in
an unnamed city that can only be Venice. The narrative follows two
tourists, Colin and Mary, as they become caught up in a relation-
ship with Robert and Caroline. Just as The Cement Garden refuses to
offer a traditionally moral perspective of the family, The Comfort of
Strangers destabilizes the truism of a loving relationship as it
represents sado-masochism rather than dismisses it. Because it
refuses to simply criticize violence it is an unsettling work, as the
concept of collusion in the perpetration of violent acts is placed in
the foreground (again) and the readers are entrusted to evaluate if
it is possible to be complicit as a victim. In terms of questions of
morality this is a problematic debate, as there is the implication

that there is a choice taken in being a victim, and also the sug-
gestion that it is possible to take pleasure from this too.
By engaging with taboo subjects such as incest and sado-
masochism rather than only condemning them, McEwan has
earned the reputation of a controversial writer, and in the past has
been known by the moniker ‘Ian Macabre’ and as an enfant terrible
of contemporary British writing (Kellaway, 2001). Some may say
this view was confirmed in 1979 when the production of Solid
Geometry (which he adapted from a story taken from First Love, Last
Rites) was halted by the BBC on the grounds of obscenity. The
storage of a penis in a jar is the standard cited reason for this
censorship, but, as Kiernan Ryan points out, the smashing of the jar
and the obvious ineffectuality of the member is also an allegory for
questioning patriarchal dominance (Ryan, 1994, p.29). The
screenplay was later published in The Imitation Game: Three Plays for
Television (1981) and refilmed and screened on Channel 4 in 2002.
Ryan regards the adaptation as significant when looking back over
McEwan’s early career: ‘Solid Geometry emerges with hindsight as a
kind of bridge between McEwan’s first three books and the new
territories mapped in The Imitation Game’ (Ryan, 1994, p. 27). He
goes on to imply that this play version highlights a movement
towards demonstrating an interest in feminism, and possesses a
wider understanding of sexual politics than has previously been
seen in McEwan’s writing.
Of his next main novels, there is a continued examination of the
effects of horrific incidents on the main protagonists, as well as an
increase in confidence in his storytelling techniques. In The Child in
Time (1987), for instance, Stephen and his wife are observed as
they suffer the grief that comes with the abduction of their child.
Irony is also heaped on as Stephen is an accidentally successful
The Novelist 7
children’s author and a member of the Official Commission on

Child Care.
The Innocent (1990), which is set in Berlin in the 1950s during
the Cold War, is both a thriller and love story. The idea of the loss
of innocence is a central concern and this is examined through
its central protagonist, Leonard Marnham. Black Dogs (1992)
remembers the lasting effects of the Second World War through
the horror generated by the eponymous dogs and also returns to
Berlin after the wall comes down. This was followed by Enduring
Love, which begins momentously with a tragedy involving a hot-air
balloon and goes on to cover the theme of obsession most notably
when Jed Parry stalks Joe Rose. Science is another key theme, and
this is made central because of Joe’s work as a populist science
writer.
The Booker Prize-winner Amsterdam (1998), which beat off
other contenders such as Master Georgie (1998) by Beryl Bainbridge
and Breakfast on Pluto (1998) by Patrick McCabe, begins with the
funeral of Molly Lane and introduces three of her former lovers.
The underlying theme of euthanasia is brought in at this early
stage and provides the means for the final element of black
comedy. It is commonly thought by critics that this is one of
McEwan’s weaker novels and has been regarded, therefore, as an
unlikely one to win the Booker (Lyall, 1998). Both The Comfort of
Strangers and Black Dogs were shortlisted in previous years, and it
has been touted that McEwan was given the prize for Amsterdam as
a consolation.
More recent fiction
Since then, Atonement, Saturday and On Chesil Beach (2007) have also
been shortlisted for this award, and McEwan has been named
twice as a contender for the Man Booker International Prize (in
2005 and 2007). He has also been the recipient of numerous other
awards, such as the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 2003 for
Atonement and the Whitbread Novel Award for The Child in Time. As
if to confirm his stature as a highly thought of British author, and
perhaps to confirm his place in the establishment now, he was also
awarded the CBE in 2000.
Over the decades, his writing has moved from placing a covert
rather than overt psychological pressure on his characters and
readers. In 1994, Ryan argued the case that claims of a vast change
in McEwan’s writing should only be made cautiously: ‘The focus of
McEwan’s did shift dramatically after The Imitation Game. But the
temptation to reduce his development to an exemplary tale of
moral maturation or artistic depletion needs to be resisted. Such
simplified accounts of his trajectory obscure the continuities and
contradictions of his work’ (Ryan, 1994, p. 4).
Following Ryan’s reasoning, a sweeping account of his oeuvre
would only be detrimental to the individuality of each of his works,
but one only needs to compare Atonement, Saturday or On Chesil
Beach with The Cement Garden to see a more developed use of
characterization and intricacy of structure in each of these later
works. It is also necessary to remember that Ryan’s point was made
in the early 1990s and so he did not have the luxury of seeing the
considerable change in McEwan’s later style. It is not that his
earlier writing was immature, but the point stands that a desire to
please with more complexity has taken over from the desire to
shock, and this is evident when considering his trajectory. McEwan
The Novelist 9
states in ‘The Ghost in My Family’ that his ‘heart sinks’ at what he

now calls his ‘staring-at-the-wall fiction’ and now wants to create a
‘realised world’ (Appleyard, 2007). At this point, he says he feels
he has greater clarity as a writer than he did in the 1970s and is
more able to expand on his ideas. This gradual shift in perspectives
has come about with a more ambitious view of the possibilities
available. On Chesil Beach, for example, is a pared-down tale of a
doomed marriage that does not survive the honeymoon, and
although it retains some of the now-familiar McEwan bleak
worldview as well as looking at the effects of a single, momentous
action, its style is elevated from his earlier work.
Atonement is less willing to challenge taboos than his earlier
novels, but it still maintains the same overhanging threat that has
been a consistent feature over the years. In ‘A Version of Events’,
Robert MacFarlane explains how because of this it is still recog-
nizably McEwan’s: ‘While the explicit morbidity of, say, In Between
the Sheets (1978) or The Cement Garden (1978) has receded in his
more recent work, the air of imminent calamity remains. This is
powerfully the case in the opening part of Atonement.’ This long
opening first section maintains the idea of impending catastrophe
because, as MacFarlane argues, the narrative patiently stays with
the long, hot summer day in 1935 until Briony commits her crime
(MacFarlane, 2001, p. 23).
This comes when Briony falsely accuses Robbie of raping her
cousin, Lola, and is the trigger for the events that follow. Atoning
for this sin becomes the ostensible purpose behind writing the
novel and the reason for the title. The exploration of the con-
sequences that ensue after one life-changing event is a common
feature in McEwan’s work and this has been memorably evoked in
Enduring Love, for example, when the freak accident involving the
hot-air balloon leads to an entanglement between the survivors. In
Atonement, Briony’s accusation and decision to stay firm to it are at

the centre as Part One leads the readers with deliberation to the
time she commits her crime.
Although a relatively low-profile writer, McEwan has occasion-
ally been brought into the media spotlight and asked to share his
own life-changing events with the reading public. The idea that
the pivotal, key scenes occur in his biography as well as his writing
has been noted by Bryan Appleyard in interview with him in ‘The
Ghost in My Family’. Appleyard also uses this opportunity to
discuss a connection between the life of the writer and his art. He
makes specific references to the time in 2002 when McEwan
discovered he had a full brother, David, who had been adopted in
1942. Their parents had him adopted in an attempt to cover up
their affair, as this was before the death of their mother’s first
husband in 1944. Appleyard also offers an uncanny understanding
of McEwan in his explanation of the discovery of his brother.
‘McEwan tells me the tale freely though hesitantly as if he is
struggling to turn it into one of his own stories. Yet I feel an eerie
sense that somehow his fiction has retrospectively created his life.
Whenever he is in the news for not strictly literary reasons, the
stories always seem to have a dark, McEwanish colouring’
(Appleyard, 2007).
There are always difficulties when making connections between
an author’s life and his or her fiction, primarily because there is the
danger of conflating the two and simplifying both narratives. As
this chapter is concerned with the novelist, though, it is necessary
to introduce some background details to McEwan’s life such as this
revelation about his brother. He has also been reported as being
involved in a lengthy divorce and custody battle with his first wife,
Penny Allen, and Kellaway points out that in the late 1990s the
news of the conflict between them overshadowed his writing
The Novelist 11
career: ‘For since McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 with
Amsterdam, the fight over the custody of his sons has earned him
even more publicity than his professional success’ (Kellaway,
2001). He was finally awarded custody after repeated visits to
court and, as Kellaway argues, it would have been understandable
if there had been no more novels. For one who is generally reluc-
tant to discuss his private life in the public arena, he is drawn out
in this interview to explain how he continued writing during and
after this period. His reasoning is simply that the division between
writing and the family has to be overcome, and Atonement is the
novel that came out of this period.
He has also stated that after having children he felt he could
not return to the same themes he used in The Child in Time. This
shift in interest may be a signifier of his change in perspective, or
a heightened sense of maturity; it is not necessarily an indication
of encroaching conservatism. In Saturday, for example, Henry
Perowne may be seen to reflect aspects of McEwan’s views about
the war in Iraq and is reactionary in his fear of attack from outside
forces, but he is not a mouthpiece for McEwan as, again, this is a
work of fiction.
Whatever the reasons for this move to a more secure or even
stifled world, John Banville’s review of Saturday is damning for
what he perceives as relative narrowness despite McEwan being
inspired by 9/11, and is nostalgic for the earlier McEwan incar-
nations that took perverse delight in the discomfort of others.
Banville has argued since in the documentary Being John Banville
(2008) that he was being critical of the fawning critics rather than
McEwan, but does say in the review that McEwan is showing ‘a
disturbing tendency towards mellowness’ of late and wonders if
the decision by Perowne’s son Theo to think small may also be the
‘motto’ of this work (Banville, 2005).
For McEwan fans this may seem harsh, but it remains a useful
balance against the at times unquestioning adoration, as is dem-
onstrated in Appleyard’s conclusion: ‘T. S. Eliot once said that the
great writer achieves the critical language in which he is to be
understood. That is precisely what McEwan has achieved. But in a
sense he has gone even further. For why does the story of David
carry such resonance and poignancy? Because his understanding of
our world, of what we take seriously, of what ultimately matters,
has infected us all. We are what McEwan’s mirror reflects, uncer-
tain creatures yearning for atonement’ (Appleyard, 2007).
To return to the McEwan biography, as well as the infamous
divorce case and the discovery of his brother, he was also the focus
of a controversy when plagiarism charges were aimed at him for
Atonement in 2006 for drawing on Lucilla Andrews’ No Time for
Romance (1977). Appleyard explains how each of these personal
stories has been regarded as newsworthy, and that the interest
shown is explicable because of his standing in the public realm
rather than being attempts to revile him: ‘It was a particularly
cretinous charge since McEwan had acknowledged Andrews in the
book and all novelists, particularly when writing historically, must
use some nonfiction sources. But the prominence given to all three
stories – the brother, the divorce and the plagiarism charge – are all
evidence of McEwan’s stature in the national imagination.
Increasingly he is seen as our national writer’ (Appleyard, 2007).
Although generalizing, this claim has some weight as McEwan still
resists demonization, despite the high profile, and still tends to be
understood through his fiction rather than his biography.
This charge of plagiarism brought other authors out in defence
of the practice of using contemporary documents to help sub-
stantiate historical novels. Nigel Reynolds in the Telegraph reports
how Margaret Atwood and Thomas Keneally are among those who
The Novelist 13
offered their support against the criticism and Thomas Pynchon

argued in favour of the necessity of being able to turn to other
artefacts: ‘Unless we were actually there we must turn to people
who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the encyclopaedia,
the internet, until, with luck at some point we can begin to make
things up on our own’ (Reynolds, 2006). This amounts to not just a
defence of the writing of historical novels, but also of the writing of
fiction, as this art blurs the boundaries between truth and lies, and
fact and fiction.
Literary influences, contexts and the writing process
On his arrival on the literary scene in the early 1970s, McEwan

came to be seen as part of a new generation of British novelists.
Along with writers such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Julian
Barnes, his emergence helped bring about a renaissance of sorts in
contemporary British fiction and this was later confirmed in his
inclusion on Granta’s prescient list of Best of Young British
Novelists in 1983. To assess these then-upcoming writers, it is of
use to look to what came before and see why these were con-
sidered such vibrant talents. Stephen Moss remarks how they were
viewed as comparatively bold and modern and argues that in this
period there was a ‘huge appetite for change’ (Moss, 2001). These
latest literary novelists that looked to contemporary Britain filled a
vacuum that was at least partially recognized by Granta. Robert
McCrum harks back to the 1970 Booker Prize winner (Bernice
Rubens) and shortlisted writers (Al Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, Iris
Murdoch and William Trevor) to make his point that at this time,
when McEwan was in his early 20s, ‘the house of English fiction
looked like a shabby, suburban Edwardian rectory’. McCrum also
shows how McEwan was part of the next generation to stake his
claim on this ‘house’: ‘Young Ian McEwan was well-placed to break
a few windows and establish squatters’ rights.’ He sees him as
being ‘well-placed’ at least partly because ‘he was both part of
post-imperial Britain, and outside it’ in the time he spent abroad
when his father was serving in the army and in his education
(McCrum, 2005, p. 5).
Moss argues how these writers have since become ‘the literary
old guard’, as there are few rivals appearing to succeed them:
‘Amis, Rushdie, McEwan and Barnes are our modern canon, but
the canonization has a singular contemporary feel: increasingly, we
know more about their lives, loves, fights – even their teeth – than
their work. They have become the Great Writers we have to read
about; reading what they write appears to be optional’ (Moss,
2001). It is also possible that their influence remains strong due to
merit as well as lack of opposition.
Although known as a novelist and, as Moss states, for some of
his biographical detail, McEwan has also inserted himself in the
public consciousness as one who is prepared to move beyond fic-
tion in his essays and articles. As well as having a background in
literature, he has also expressed an ongoing interest in science and
science writing. His research for several novels, including Saturday
and Amsterdam, makes this evident. When asked by David Lynn
about the writers he most admires, he refers to Creation (2006) by
the American biologist E. O. Wilson and explains that he sees this
as putting ‘a hand out across the divide’ between science and
religion. In this interview, he also eschews aspects of relativism in
postmodern criticism and says that plagiarists, when claiming
events that have happened to others as one’s own, should be
‘named and shamed’. He also warns against drifting away ‘in a
cloud of unknown relativism’ (Lynn, 2007).
The Novelist 15
In ‘A Parallel Tradition’, which is an expanded essay of a talk

given by McEwan at the London School of Economics to celebrate
the 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976),
he extrapolates on the pleasures it is possible to take in the reading
of science writing and its search for truth (McEwan, 2006a). This
sits at angles with the use of postmodern influences, and perhaps
demonstrates that he has reservations about being overwhelmed by
any particular movement or stance.
McEwan has also been vocal in expressing his views beyond
literature into politics and has broached the subject of terrorism.
In the more distant past, he also has been an opponent of the
nuclear arms race. By choosing to lay bare his views, he also found
controversy in 2008 when defending Martin Amis from criticisms
of being racist. In Corriere della Sera, McEwan entered the debate
to defend Amis most notably against the Guardian and said that he
despises ‘Islamism’ and argued in favour of Amis’s right to chal-
lenge fundamentalism (Cohen, 2008). Whatever one’s view of his
politics may be, and they are visibly Eurocentric in their concerns,
his outspokenness beyond the role of publicizing his novels means
that he belongs to the older tradition of the novelist prepared to
use his or her literary fame to publicly discuss contemporary pol-
itics. This has also been seen in his article ‘Only Love and Then
Oblivion’, which came out soon after the 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center. Here, he discusses empathy and attempts to ima-
gine the experience of being on board one of the hijacked planes:
‘Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at
the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and is
the beginning of morality’ (McEwan, 2001c).
Just as a shift in his writing is traceable, so the influences on his
work have varied in intensity during the course of his professional
writing career. His early style, for example, is often regarded as
being indebted to existentialist thinking in that it takes a thematic

distance from traditional morality. As a literary novel that relishes
the pleasure in being self-aware about its fictionality, Atonement also
reveals its many influences. The epigraph, which is taken from
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), is an ironic declaration to
the reader to be wary of the literary imagination and is also a taster
of how in the writing of it, McEwan called it ‘my Jane Austen
novel, my country house novel, my one-hot-day novel’ (Kellaway,
2001). The Jane Austen references at first sit lightly, especially
considering his earlier novels, but this is also an apt label. The
country house setting, the subtle challenge to class difference and
above all the ironic depiction of the dangers of the literary ima-
gination confirm this tag.
As if in confirmation of this, McEwan explains the influence of
nineteenth-century writings on his work in an interview with
Lynn. While indicating how Atonement could not have been written
‘without all the experiments in fiction and reflections on point of
view’ and, by default, the movements of modernism and post-
modernism, he argues how we also should not turn away from ‘the
notion of character’ and how the nineteenth century ‘formalized’
this. He refers to Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens and
Gustave Flaubert as examples of earlier authors who have taught us
to expect to look into the minds of others (Lynn, 2007).
In ‘Ian McEwan: Contemporary Realism and the Novel of
Ideas’, Judith Seaboyer claims that his novels demonstrate both
aspects of reformist politics and strongly observed details of its
contemporary subjects. She uses this template to compare his work
to that of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf respectively (Seaboyer,
2005, p. 23). She marks a shift in his work from The Comfort of
Strangers onwards as she sees this as his first ‘novel of ideas’. She
considers this to be a gothic text that looks into the psychology of
The Novelist 17
fear as well as marking his ‘transitional shift towards a traditional

realism in which the private sphere is not only mirrored in that of
the public but is a way of addressing broader social issues’ (Sea-
boyer, 2005, p. 24). She finishes this chapter by arguing that his
use of realism in later novels, including Atonement, continues to
make the readers puzzle over how to live the ethical life: ‘As we
have seen, McEwan’s realism holds up a nicely polished mirror to
show us reality, but with Atonement he allows us to experience the
ethics of writing and reading that reality’ (Seaboyer, 2005, p. 32).
As McEwan has said, it is no longer possible to trust the
omniscient point of view, and a bridge between here and the
nineteenth-century novel is found in Woolf ’s work and, as Sea-
boyer stresses, it is possible to point to the influence she has on his
writing. It is most evident in Atonement when she looms over
Briony’s decision to become a recognized writer as she matures.
Woolf is also openly referred to in Briony’s reading of The Waves
(1931) and in the short story she sends to Horizon. With more
subtlety, echoes of Woolf ’s style appear in Chapter 6 of Part One
when Emily Tallis lies in bed with a migraine as she listens to the
movements in the house.
The engagement with postmodernism is apparent in the deci-
sion to remove the possibility of closure in the final section and in
the way it is highlighted throughout that this is a work of fiction.
Closure is refused in that the first version of Robbie and Cecilia
being united in Part Three is undermined by Briony in ‘London,
1999’. Briony also emphasizes here how this is a work of fiction,
and consequently drags the readers out of the realist dream and
reminds them that the author is deciding the outcomes. By
highlighting its fictionality in this way, Atonement becomes another
novel that exposes the role of the novelist while challenging
readers’ expectations.
Comparisons may be made with works such as The French

Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles in that this played with
and deconstructed the format of the realist nineteenth-century
novel to the point that the readers were left to choose which
ending they preferred. Geoff Dyer’s review argues that there is a
further overlap between the two: ‘While John Fowles was working
on The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he reminded himself that this was
not a book that one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write but,
perhaps, one that they had failed to write. A similar impulse
underwrites Atonement. It is less about a novelist harking nostalgi-
cally back to the consoling uncertainties of the past than it is about
creatively extending and hauling a defining part of the British
literary tradition up to and into the twenty-first century’ (Dyer,
2001).
By revealing its fictionality with subtlety in Part One and
unremittingly in ‘London, 1999’, the nod to postmodernism is
made. The layering of numerous intertexts and references to other
works is also an aspect of this as echoes of other novels reverberate.
This is exemplified by Kellaway when she describes Briony as
belonging to ‘one of a select band of children’ in literary history:
‘Like Maisie in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew or Leo in L. P.
Hartley’s The Go-Between, Briony is a child who becomes implicated
in an adult sexual relationship she does not understand’ (Kellaway,
2001).
Largely because of the Dunkirk section, which is Part Two, and
the descriptions of the treatment of the wounded in Part Three,
this novel also belongs to the genre of war literature. It feeds the
appetite for stories of war that have been returned to inter-
mittently by British authors in the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries, as with the First World War-inspired Birdsong (1993)
by Sebastian Faulks and the Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker. More
The Novelist 19
specifically, the Second World War is the backdrop for Spies (2002)
by Michael Frayn, which also draws on an adult’s perspective of
childhood.
Knowledge of the craft of writing also underpins McEwan’s
success and apart from the many distinct literary intertexts that he
uses and the in-depth research he undertakes, his imagination,
needless to say, also plays a part in his success. In his interview
with Lynn, he explains his practice of writing and the pleasure he
takes in unexpected ideas that come through in the process:
‘Sometimes I have to trick myself into doing things. But I do see
writing, the actual physical matter of writing, as an act of imagi-
nation. And the best days, the best mornings are the ones in which
forcing down a sentence may generate a surprise. A combination of
ideas, or simply a noun meeting an adjective that suddenly gives
me pleasure. Whole characters have sometimes emerged for
me simply out of a sentence’ (Lynn, 2007). He refers to the un-
planned appearance of Nettle and Mace in Part Two of Atonement as
an example of this.
The esteem held for McEwan’s writing is seen repeatedly in the
high sales figures and mainly positive reviews, and for now he is
one of the remaining darlings of his generation of promising new
talent of the 1970s and 1980s. He has secured this position as the
focus of his work has moved over the decades from the brutal to
the disquieting. This has come about while he continues to
demonstrate the same penchant for menace that appeared in his
first collection of short stories.
. 2
The Novel
A tonement has come to be regarded as one of McEwan’s

finest works and is tentatively seen as a modern classic, but such
terms are easy to say and less easy to qualify. This chapter analyses
the structure, main themes and characterization, to unravel its
complexity and to explore the reasons behind its popularity. The
use of metaphors and narrative devices are similarly examined so
that his technical skill can be discussed in more detail. In addition,
references are made to its literary quality and this includes an
appreciation of the influences of realism, modernism and
postmodernism.
When taking an overview of how the novel holds together, the
tone and style become all the more significant in that the narrative
refuses to fully draw the reader in. This effect climaxes in ‘Lon-
don, 1999’, but as Colm Tóibı́n argues in his review of On Chesil
Beach, both this and Atonement deliberately hold the reader at bay:
‘The writing also shares the almost stilted diction of McEwan’s
novel Atonement, a diction used with immense care to create
distance and irony, without creating too much of either. It is like

putting just enough air in a hot air balloon to allow it to fly, making
sure, however, that it can land as well’ (Tóibı́n, 2007, p. 29). The
allusion to the hot-air balloon brings Enduring Love into the frame
of reference while also outlining a now consistent technique of
being able to keep the attention of the readers, as it also refuses to
be a populist text. As well as finding a convergence with other
McEwan works, Atonement also stands apart from them as the
telling of the story is made as imperative as the story that is being
told. This has the familiar trademarks, in the use of the pivotal
moment, distancing techniques and the build-up of menace, but it
may be differentiated from its predecessors and many other con-
temporary novels for its assured grace.
Structure and content
At first glance, this has a simple structure of three main sections

and a conclusion of sorts in the shorter fourth part (‘London,
1999’). On the surface, these first three sections may be labelled as
covering one hot day in 1935 in the Tallis country home, a close-up
of the retreat of the Allied soldiers at Dunkirk, and then an
exploration of the duties involved in wartime nursing. The final
shift to 1999 gives the novel a span of over 60 years, but the main
narrative revolves around the Second World War and the years
before it. As a whole, this is ambitious in its breadth and has an
intricacy that belies its first reading.
It is not revealed until the end of Part Three that this novel has
been written by Briony, as is made evident with her initials B. T.
and the date 1999. With this news, it follows that all that has been
read before must be re-assessed, as we are now led to believe that
The Novel 23
it has been influenced by Briony’s perspective. It is also explained

in ‘London, 1999’ that this is her attempt to atone for lying about
Robbie raping Lola and has unified the lovers – Cecilia and Robbie
– in fiction only, and so it is not until the second reading that one
is able to recognize fully how central Briony is to the way the
narrative has unfolded. This information must, therefore, be
remembered in any analysis of this work. Part One is a relatively
slower-paced realist narrative that shifts from the point of view of
one character to another as it leads up to the moment when Robbie
is arrested for a crime he did not commit. It is only in hindsight,
after Briony’s revelation that this is her work, that the apparently
distant third person of Part One is seen to be crafted from her
subjective perspective. This is also when we understand that she
has assumed the perspectives of others while claiming to make
reparations for the sin of lying.
Just as Tóibı́n highlights the connection between this and other
McEwan novels, Claire Messud points out the resemblance
between Atonement and Black Dogs as the latter is also ‘a tale told in
retrospect, and convolutedly, through the intermediary of the
narrator, Jeremy, son-in-law of the Tremaines’ (Messud, 2002). In
Atonement, though, the discovery that Briony has been ordering
events is one that entirely challenges the readers’ understanding of
what has come before.
Through Briony, McEwan alerts the readers to not trust the
author (be that him or Briony) as well as warning of the dangers of
the literary imagination. The following reference is one of the most
significant of the novel, as it forces the readers to recall that we are
reading a fiction, and is a remarkable use of irony if we remember
the surprise is delivered by a fictional character: ‘It is only in this
last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a
South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts
were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would
be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect
means, that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on 1
June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year
by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground Station’ (p.
370). It is also ironic that Briony claims to not see the purpose of
revealing that Robbie died at Dunkirk and Cecilia at Balham, but
does so anyway, and it seems as though she cannot resist a final
manipulation of the readers’ expectations.
Part One
The long summer’s day in 1935 that constitutes Part One, which is
divided into 14 chapters, is an exercise in explanation of and, at
times, a subtle excuse for Briony’s actions. In retrospect, the clues
that this is her work are set out for us, as when it is reiterated how
at just 13 she has a precocious love of writing and order. As stated,
it includes familiar aspects of other work by McEwan in that the
slow pace allows the underlying menace to develop as the scenes
shift between the points of view of different characters as Briony is
seen to imagine them. This is mainly brought about by the
movement between the perspectives of these characters as they
view the same scene and, because of this, Part One has the effect
of grinding slowly towards Robbie’s arrest. This inhabiting of the
minds of the different characters also exemplifies McEwan’s pro-
fessed interest in the use of characterization in nineteenth-century
novels and in how such works give the readers the opportunity to
enter the minds of the principal figures (Lynn, 2007). He endows
Briony the writer with the same ability that he admires, and uses
his version of Cyril Connolly to teach her to avoid leaning so
heavily on modernist techniques (in the guise of Woolf) (p. 312).
A comparison between chapters 2 and 3 exemplifies this use of
The Novel 25
shifting point of view. Cecilia and Briony are used respectively to

reveal their separate interpretations of what happens when Cecilia
and Robbie are at the fountain together and struggle over the vase.
From the vantage point of the window, Briony imagines he is
proposing to Cecilia and then sees him raise his hand and under-
stands this to mean he is ordering her to obey him. She comes to
recognize that this is not a fairytale and has instead glimpsed the
adult world, but overriding all these emotions is the desire to
write.
The atmosphere of developing tension should be evident to
readers familiar with McEwan’s other novels as this has been his
stock-in-trade. For the newcomers, it may be initially less easy to
spot, but occurs in the deliberately slow pace and in the stream of
references to the heat of this long day. The heat wave is described
as oppressive and cloying, and is made central in Chapter 9, for
example, when Emily tells Betty to prepare a salad instead of the
roast she had previously requested. Betty’s reaction embodies her
frustration with the temperature as well as with her employer. The
pressure that is emphasized by the weather is also apparent in
Emily’s thoughts as she tries to avoid having a migraine in Chapter
6: ‘She thought of the vast heat that rose above the house and
park, and lay across the Home Counties like smoke, suffocating
the farms and towns, and she thought of the baking railway tracks
that were bringing Leon and his friend, and the roasting black-
roofed carriage in which they would sit by an open window’ (p. 64).
This lengthy first section also allows for space to be given to
observe and critique the landscape of a pre-war, upper middle-class
England on a microscale. The range in class differences between
the servants, their families and the Tallises are elemental to the
plot as these allow for tensions to be expressed. The snobbery
imbued in the characterization of Emily and Leon in particular
means that the contrast between the hierarchies is sharpened. The

supposed grandeur of the country home, which is as flawed as the
family who owns it, is, therefore, an apt background for decon-
structing the privileged status of the upper middle classes. The
clenched relationship between the different family members such
as Cecilia and Emily, and the reported strain between Emily and
Hermione also symbolize how the harmony between the Tallises is
only superficial.
The barely disguised annoyance between the gathered family
members and associates is introduced in the scene in the kitchen
and culminates at the evening meal. This unrest may be read as
a figurative reference to the political climate of the period as well
as a means for pointing out how dysfunctional this group is. The
prospect of war hangs over them and is made specific in Paul
Marshall’s allusions to the profits he will make with his chocolate
bars, and in Jack Tallis’s work for ‘Eventuality Planning’ at the
Home Office (p. 122).
This ominous view of the future is dismissed by Emily when
she comes across horrifying figures that estimate the huge loss of
life if war occurs. This is not only typical of the way she maintains
her feminine passivity by evading problems, but is also repre-
sentative of a laissez-faire attitude to the growing threat of fascism
in mainland Europe at this time. Philip Tew notes how Emily sees
this predicted massive loss of lives of up to five million in the
threatened war, and how she readily dismisses this as ‘a form of
self-aggrandisement’ (Tew, 2004, pp. 149–50). This ability to deny
unpleasantness, let alone the prospect of genocide, is in keeping
with her characterization, and is also written of as a definable
quality in others of her ilk. Tew contrasts her view in 1935 with
Robbie’s experiences in Dunkirk: ‘The historical reference
cumulatively indicates two kinds of Britain, one before the
The Novel 27
cataclysms, personal and public, one afterward. Thus McEwan

conveys something of the almost anachronistic quality and emo-
tional ill-preparedness of this upper middle-class in an imperial
period that it felt might well be an ongoing heyday’ (Tew, 2004, p.
169).
Part One ends with the arrest of Robbie and at last the tension
of the day reaches a climax. By finishing with this scene, the idyll is
forever exposed as being unreal. It also marks the end of an era of
relative innocence as Grace Turner shouts ‘Liars!’ as the police car
drives Robbie away (p. 187). When she first stops the car, her
outrage is described as the ‘final confrontation’ and undermines
what would have been a ‘seamless day’ for Briony (p. 186). Grace’s
actions disrupt her romanticized view of what has been happening,
as she records that she had been thinking that Cecilia was
watching the car ‘tranquilly’ as it took Robbie away (p. 186). This
romantic interpretation is enhanced by Briony when it is noted
that she ‘knew she had never loved her sister more than now’ (p.
186). Grace’s anger gives a contrast to this perspective and also
emphasizes Briony’s naivety.
Part Two
The lack of chapter divisions in Part Two adds to the disorder of
the situation being evoked and enhances the eventual chaos of
Robbie’s thoughts. This disorder is made all the more apparent
because it differs so sharply from the way Part One is organized.
Part Two moves abruptly to what transpires to be the war and
more specifically the Dunkirk retreat. The break from the past is
described as ‘savage’ by McEwan, and a different tone and style are
used to reflect this dislocation from what has gone before with a
sense of immediacy (DVD, 2008). The disruption of the daydream
at the country house, where the superficial has been seen to
dominate, is first introduced with Grace’s anger at the arrest of her

son and is ultimately shattered by this shift to the war. There is a
lack of initial exposition and it is not until the third page into this
section that ‘he’ is finally introduced as Robbie Turner (and is
known as Turner from then on). It begins as Robbie, Nettle and
Mace try to find their way back to the coast to return to England
and the readers are plunged into their environment: ‘There were
horrors enough, but it was the unexpected detail that threw him
and afterwards would not let him go’ (p. 191). His disorientation is
matched by the readers as he then looks for his map, wonders
where it is and eventually realizes it has been in his left hand for
over an hour: ‘He had prised it from the fingers of a captain in the
West Kents lying in a ditch outside – outside where?’ (p. 191). The
information about why he is there and how he is still in touch with
Cecilia is only leaked out gradually and is related via his memories
and the letters she sends him.
Looked at as a whole, this Part shows the fragmentation of
civilization and the gradual breakdown of Robbie as he attempts to
survive his wound in order to return home. It is described how he
finds himself ‘in the grip of illogical certainties’, as the infection
takes hold and those around him lose sense of what is happening.
His hallucinatory state is mirrored by what he sees at Bray Dunes
when, for example, a lieutenant demands that Nettle tie up his
laces even though chaos surrounds them as the area is now the
‘terminus’ for the ‘rout’ (p. 247).
As the end of Part Two approaches, Robbie’s hallucinations
become more vivid and he is increasingly less coherent. Prior to
this, his memories were distinct from the present, but as he comes
closer to death his regrets overwhelm him: ‘Invisible baggage. He
must go back and get the boy from the tree. He had done it before.
He had gone back where no one else was and found the boys under
The Novel 29
a tree and carried Pierrot on his shoulders and Jackson in his arms,
across the park’ (p. 262). He thinks of the boy left behind as ‘more
unfinished business’ and wants to go back to the field and ‘ask the
Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their
deaths. For one can assume too much sometimes, in fits of con-
ceited self-blame’ (p. 263). His self-recriminations mix with self-
justification as he goes on to think how this ‘lady’ might say that he
carried the twins but not ‘us’ and also that he is ‘not guilty’ (p.
263). Yet again, the guilt that he has been tarnished with because
of Briony’s lie is also seen to infect his thoughts.
His point of view of the time when he was arrested is also given
and how Cecilia had said, ‘I’ll wait for you. Come back’ (p. 265).
This memory of her words haunts this passage and they re-appear
in Part Three when she tells Robbie to ‘come back’ as he argues
with Briony (p. 343). The words signify the bond between them
and emphasize her faith in him despite his arrest. They also epi-
tomize their romantic love for each other as formulated by Briony.
Part Three
This section is dominated by descriptions of Briony’s training to be
a nurse and continues in the third person. It explains how the
period of strictures and calm is abruptly altered with the arrival of
the Dunkirk wounded. There are no chapter divisions here either,
which again contrasts with Part One. The narrative avoids bringing
Robbie in as one of the injured men as may have been expected,
and this expectation is heightened in the film adaptation when
Briony mistakenly believes she has seen him outside the hospital.
Instead, the dying and wounded are given their own role to con-
demn the violence of war and are not used to simply move the
story on to a simplistic conclusion.
This is also the first time that the adult Briony is given warmer
aspects to her character as she follows the orders of the formidable

Sister Drummond. In McEwan’s interview with John Sutherland,
Sutherland touches on the deathbed scene when Briony sits with
the dying Frenchman, Luc Cornet, and McEwan explains his
reasons for using this: ‘The central love story does not concern
Briony, it concerns her sister and another man. I felt that unless I
had some sort of eruption of feeling from Briony – I saw it as a love
scene, even though it’s a dying scene – there would be something
too unreliable about her account of love’ (Sutherland, 2002). He
also explains why he has her stand on Westminster Bridge and note
that her life is passing by in the hospital: ‘I knew that by the end of
this hospital section I would be jumping forward 50, 60 years, and I
needed a moment of softening in Briony at the time’ (Sutherland,
2002). By giving her this humanity, it becomes more likely that she
at least might be attempting to atone for her sin. Without this
‘softening’, there is the danger she would be construed as too
unbelievable and, therefore, not even ambiguous in her desire to
make amends.
Part Three also contains the key rejection letter from Cyril
Connolly of Horizon. This has already been referred to in Part Two
in a letter from Cecilia to Robbie where she adds ‘so at least
someone can see through her wretched fantasies’ (p. 212). The
reply from Connolly not only signifies Briony’s literary ambitions,
but is also a neon light for the readers to see that this is a fiction
moulded by a writer for another writer. After this is recorded,
Briony sets off on her fictional quest of seeing Robbie and Cecilia
to tell them she will clear his name and also witnesses the marriage
of Lola and Paul Marshall.
The Novel 31
‘London, 1999’
The final section set in 1999 is partly a conclusion, as final refer-
ences to Lola and Paul Marshall, Briony, Leon, Jackson and Pierrot
are given, as well as indications of their lives for the past 64 years.
This is also where the role of the author is examined in most
detail, and where Briony is allowed to be ‘pitiless’ in her telling of
the deaths of Cecilia and Robbie (p. 370).
The first-person narrator is used for the first time here, and it is
possible to interpret this as Briony asserting her position of
authority as she compares herself, as a novelist, to God. This is also
where the readers are given a more personal understanding of her
as she explains her recent diagnosis of vascular dementia and tells
how this has to be the final draft of the novel she has been
rewriting for years. The future outlook that she is given is bleak:
‘Loss of memory, short- and long-term, the disappearance of single
words – simple nouns might be the first to go – then language
itself, along with balance, and soon after, all motor control, and
finally the autonomous nervous system’ (p. 355).
By giving her a direct voice, this final part delineates how this is
both her last chance for finding atonement as well as introducing
the most unreliable of narrators to the unwitting reading public.
This short section is woven through with ambiguities as she moves
between gaining the sympathy of the readers and asserting her
power for the last time. It deconstructs all that has gone before
and because of this it is also the most crucial of sections.
The novel is completed with her return to the Tallis home,
which is now a golf course and hotel. Although it has been altered
considerably, the setting is used to frame the narrative and its
importance to events is signposted. The influence of the past on
the present is also reiterated as some of the survivors from 1935
finally watch a performance of The Trials of Arabella.
Themes
The literary imagination

From the epigraph onwards, Atonement signals ironically the dangers
of the literary imagination. As well as being an encrypted warning
against being drawn into the realist narrative of Part One, it is also
a playful and unsettling interpretation of how the fantasist, that is
the writer, has the power to order lives.
The narrative is threaded through with literary allusions, which,
depending on one’s point of view, add weight to the literariness or,
perhaps, bring it down with cleverness. Peter Kemp considers this
element to be a distinctive bonus: ‘Literary references interfuse
the book. One character reads Clarissa, Richardson’s tale of rape
and attempted amends. In a college production of Twelfth Night,
Robbie has played Malvolio, the man from below stairs whose
aspirations are cruelly thwarted.’ Kemp then points to the Jane
Austen epigraph from Northanger Abbey, which he describes as the
‘comedy of misplaced accusations that lead to shame’ as well as the
echoes of D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot ‘and the like’, and
regards all of this overt intertextuality as upholding the main
theme: the ‘dangers of the literary imagination’ (Kemp, 2001).
Finding agreement with Kemp, these repeated borrowings from
and references to literature are the foundation for making this a
dominant concern, and this is made apparent from the first page.
It begins with Briony introduced as the budding writer at the
age of 13 as she struggles to bring her play, The Trials of Arabella,
into production for her brother, Leon, on his return visit home. It
is often repeated that alongside this ambition to be a writer is a
desire for order, and this is made manifest in her attempts to take
charge of both the production of the play and wider events. These
two passions, for writing and order, are seen to combine with her
The Novel 33
imaginative powers as she goes on to regard Robbie as a ‘maniac’

after reading his sexually explicit note to Cecilia. Furthermore,
Briony is also depicted and, we are to believe, depicts herself here
as being caught between the two spheres of childhood and
adulthood, and her reaction to reading this note demonstrates this:
‘The very complexity of her feelings confirmed Briony in her view
that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling
from which her writing was bound to benefit’ (p. 113). The
temptation to use the material she has stumbled across, and to
later control what happens to her advantage, is revealed to be too
great to resist.
Her wish to leave fairy tales behind is evoked as an expression
of her maturity, but this is confounded by her inability to see
beyond the ordered binary view that is the mainstay of such fic-
tions. This restricted perspective also helps to explain why she
persists in seeing her sister as a heroine and Robbie as a villain in
Part One. It is telling that after considering the letter threatened
‘the order of the household’ (p. 114) she is inspired to write, but
can only come up with the line ‘there was an old lady who swal-
lowed a fly’ (p. 115). This faltering between what she would like to
write and what she is able to achieve symbolizes her childlike
struggle to order her thoughts, and this is referred to again in
Chapter 11 in Part One from Robbie’s perspective (as filtered
through the lens of Briony): ‘At this stage in her life Briony
inhabited an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and
adult worlds which she crossed and re-crossed unpredictably’
(p. 141). Her age and her ambition mean that contrary to her
externalized outrage she is as much of a threat to the order of the
household as she presumes Robbie to be.
Frank Kermode’s review reinforces this early version of Briony in
relation to the final outcome of the novel and he emphasizes the
way Atonement examines the role of the writer through her: ‘Briony’s
play, The Trials of Arabella, written for the house party, but for
various reasons not then performed, was the fantasy of a very young
writer enchanted by the idea that she could in a few pages create
a world complete with terrors and climaxes and a necessary sort
of knowingness. The entire novel is a grown-up version of this
achievement, a conflict or coalescence of truth and fantasy, a
novelist’s treatment of what is fantasised as fact’ (Kermode, 2001).
It becomes, then, a fiction that always remembers the child’s
ambition and tells the readers how she never relinquishes it. Her
dangerous imagination, which has led to the vilification of Robbie,
becomes the necessary drama of the plot. In this light, the role of
the imagination is central to the writing and, consequently, places
doubts over the claim that this is a work of atonement.
This doubt about Briony’s authenticity, in her professed aim to
atone for her sin, is made more secure on a close reading of
‘London, 1999’. This may be interpreted as a first-person narrated
slice of ambivalence when the novelist is described as omnipotent
and the readers are jolted out of the apparently realist security of
the earlier sections: ‘The problem these fifty-nine years has been
this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her abso-
lute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one,
no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled
with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her
imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for
God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an
impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was
all’ (p. 371). In this quotation, Briony simultaneously pleads
for understanding while flaunting the privilege she has attached to
her role.
Judith Seaboyer argues that the narrative has an ethical element
The Novel 35
in that there is this warning of the dangers of control and imagi-

nation implicit in Briony’s account, but the chance that the readers
may be drawn into believing this most unreliable of narrators
means that it maintains an ambivalent edge: ‘The process of being
drawn into Briony’s/McEwan’s doubled narrative is a little like the
process of being seduced by the attractions of Milton’s Satan, and
thus, as Stanley Fish has argued, experiencing in small the
seduction and fall of humanity.’ That is, Briony may be claiming to
attempt to atone for her sin against Robbie, but she may also be
accused of ‘colonising’ him for the sake of her writing (Seaboyer,
2005, p. 32). Atonement leaves these possible readings open for the
readers as though to reaffirm the threat of control that has been
referred to throughout.
Writing a novel
There is a crossover between the themes of the dangerous literary
imagination and the art of the novel, as both are concerned with
the process of writing. This is because the process of writing, and
novel-writing specifically, is inscribed in the self-reflexiveness of
the narrative. This is after all a novel that the readers are led to
believe is written by a successful novelist (Briony) at the end of
her career.
Robert MacFarlane considers the way Atonement ‘examines its
own novelistic mechanisms’ as one of its greatest strengths, as it
avoids the weakness of other contemporary novels when there has
been only ‘authorial gesturing’ towards the concept of representing
the past with language: ‘In Atonement, however, McEwan focuses on
the way in which we create the future by making it fit templates of
the past; how the forms into which the imagination is shaped by
fiction are applied to life. It is in this way, he suggests, that lit-
erature can make things happen, and not always for the good’
(MacFarlane, 2001, p. 23). To this end, McEwan’s use of struc-

turalist and poststructuralist thinking is an influence on the nar-
rative to make this a twenty-first-century country house novel
rather than a rewrite of a work by Jane Austen. This is because the
possibility that language shapes us, rather than the liberal huma-
nist belief that we control language, is made apparent in the way
words have shaped the narratives of Robbie, Briony, Cecilia and
McEwan. Briony and other novelists may have been endowed with
greater powers, but they are still limited by the language system
they are born into. Bearing this in mind, Briony’s claim to be akin
with God is translated as pompous as well as enervating, as her
power as a writer is restricted by the available tool of language.
When interpreted as a fiction about fiction and the act of
writing, the rejection letter from Cyril Connolly underscores these
themes. Dominic Head regards Atonement as McEwan’s ‘most
extended deliberation on the form of the novel, and the inherited
tradition of modern (especially English) fiction and criticism.
Austen, James, Forster, Woolf, Lawrence, Rosamund Lehmann,
Elizabeth Bowen and F. R. Leavis are some of the touchstones in a
treatment that is sometimes ironic, but serious in its intention.’ As
Head goes on to argue, the rejection letter acts as a ‘locus’ for the
theme of the tradition of novel-writing as it foregrounds the con-
text within which Briony begins her writing career and also gives
a Connolly-inspired perspective of the twentieth-century novel
(Head, 2007, pp. 156–7). As Kermode argues, this letter also
introduces parody, and points to the merging between the realities
of fiction and non-fiction: ‘It is funny because although it sounds
rather like him, Connolly would never have written such a letter; it
lives, like the book as a whole, on that borderline between fantasy
and fact that is indeed the territory of fiction’ (Kermode, 2001).
Her rejected novella, Two Figures by a Fountain, is praised by
The Novel 37
Connolly for having caught ‘something unique and unexplained’,

but it is also criticized for owing too much to ‘the techniques of
Mrs Woolf ’ and to modernism. This novella is familiar as it is an
earlier draft of her reading of Cecilia and Robbie tussling at the
fountain over the vase, and the advice has been followed in this
last version as Connolly advises that ‘development is required’ (p.
312). He also suggests that ‘the backbone of a story’ is needed, and
asks that she creates ‘some tension’ (p. 314).
If distance is taken from Briony’s role as creator, such advice
may be expected if a more developed plot is desired, but this is
also a playful ironic twist on McEwan’s part as he asks the readers
to have distance from the ‘backbone’ of the story while he reminds
us again that this is a novel we are reading. Briony’s creation of
tension comes when she accuses Robbie of the crime he did not
commit, and in terms of the chronology of the story she has already
done as Connolly suggests at the age of 13. As a piece of fiction,
the drama is created by the author as he or she writes, and the
argument returns once more to the claim that the novelist is
omnipotent. Because of this, Briony is seen to perform the role of
God she has aspired to and this is a reminder of both the control of
the author and the process of writing. Without the tension caused
by accusing Robbie, there would be no sin to atone for and, in turn,
no novel.
As tempting as it is to take Connolly’s letter as a mandate on
writing a novel, it is not adhered to by Briony or McEwan when the
author is asked to be disengaged from war and politics: ‘Since
artists are politically impotent, they must use this time to develop
at deeper emotional levels. Your work, your war work, is to culti-
vate your talent, and go in the direction it demands. Warfare, as we
remarked, is the enemy of creative activity’ (p. 315). As this and
other works by McEwan (such as Saturday) testify, he refuses to
separate his art from the outside world and this has resonated in
his fiction and non-fiction throughout his career as a writer. His
concern with politics, morality and the ethical treatment of others
have been long-standing themes in his work and he has challenged
the aesthetic line of thinking that it is possible to separate art from
the society it comes out of. In Atonement, this is made acute in parts
Two and Three most notably, but also in the underlying conflicts of
the 1935 of Part One. Warfare is made central to the entirety of
this ‘creative activity’ as the main protagonists are seen to live
through fear and separation as well as being the means to decon-
struct class barriers.
War
Although Part One might be described as the Jane Austen novel
McEwan had never previously written, Part Two resists any such
containment as it begins abruptly in the chaotic events sur-
rounding the Dunkirk retreat. In Part One, the sense of the
impending war is alluded to in the work of Jack Tallis and Paul
Marshall and figuratively in the rising tensions in the house, but it
is in Part Two that the narrative switches altogether to embrace
the full disparity between the then and now of peace and war.
Further to this, the urgency of the tone emphasizes the situation of
panic and this is made particularly clear in relation to the pre-
ceding section.
McEwan’s desire to be faithful in this reconstruction of the
retreat and of the care taken for the injured and dying has an
ethical dimension that depends on veracity according to the detail
that still remains from this period. This perhaps explains his
extensive use of Lucilla Andrews’ No Time For Romance in Part
Three, but this loyalty to the past also lends the narrative a
believability that is steeped in a tradition of realism and even
The Novel 39
naturalism. The political impotency of the writer, as claimed by

Atonement’s version of Cyril Connolly, is also made questionable as
the war and its outcome (of injured and killed soldiers) is attacked
for the waste that is incurred and is made graphic in the lengthy
tracking shot of the Dunkirk beaches in the adaptation.
By placing the snapshot of the Dunkirk retreat after the English
country house setting of Part One in the novel and film, there is an
attack on not only the carnage that comes with war, but also on the
hide-bound class system of middle England that is represented by
the Tallis family. The descriptions of this retreat refuse to justify a
blind patriotism, and also implicitly criticize the self-enclosed
bourgeois that fails to see the guilt of the privileged and wealthy as
represented by Paul Marshall. The theme of war encompasses
wider conflicts such as class difference, as the intolerance of dif-
ference is the reason why many of the Tallises are so quick to
assume Robbie is guilty of the crime he is accused of committing.
Guilt, forgiveness and atonement

Taking the lead from the title and Briony’s declaration that this
novel is her last attempt at atoning for her sin of lying, the related
themes of guilt, atonement and forgiveness are used ambiguously
as it is never made entirely certain whether she is atoning for her
sins or is using the sovereignty of the author, which she aligns with
God, to construct this ordered world. Because of this ambiguity,
guilt and the concept of atoning are written as problematic reac-
tions and outcomes to an immoral act. This is made more confused
(and interesting) by her young age at the time she commits her
crime.
Chapter 13 of Part One is significant with regard to these
themes, as Briony’s point of view as to why she failed to retract her
statement is expanded upon here. The figurative language of the
anxious bride-to-be is used when an explanation is offered for why

she never told the truth after the first lie, and is also sly a reminder
of her quasi-innocence: ‘She was like a bride-to-be who begins to
feel her sickening qualms as the day approaches, and dares not
speak her mind because so many preparations have been made on
her behalf ’ (p. 169). This apparent passivity is balanced somewhat
by the claim that she also ‘marched into the labyrinth of her own
construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to
please, to insist on making her own way back’ (p. 170). This swing
between guilt-filled explanations and justifications reinforces the
ambivalent edge to her supposed desire for atonement.
Her sense of guilt is depicted as fluctuating and this destabi-
lizes the simplistic binaries of guilt and innocence, forgiveness and
blame, and fact and fiction. For Melanie Klein, guilt is associated
with love when it is interpreted as making reparations for the debt
of guilt (Klein, 1937) and in Atonement, Briony’s declared love for
Cecilia and her medical prince, Robbie, drives her to unite them in
fiction, and is thus seen to make partial amends for her crime.
However, this is only ever partly possible as she has also been seen
to create the situation she goes on to write about.
Characters
The use of shifting perspectives between many of the central

characters in Part One means that the readers are given the
opportunity to learn about their thoughts through the filter of
Briony and this technique tallies with McEwan’s professed affec-
tion for what he sees as a trait of nineteenth-century novels (Lynn,
2007). The particular use of the shifting point of view also recalls
work by James and, occasionally, Woolf as he avoids being
The Novel 41
restricted by the influence of one author or movement. This

becomes clearer when one analyses the different ways that char-
acterization is developed and how characters are named.
This movement from one point of view to another lends a
richness to Part One, but although perspectives are given into the
various characters these are always imagined through the cipher of
Briony. The fictional voice within the fictional voice is a measure of
Briony’s supposed control as a writer and is also a means of dis-
tancing the readers from being enveloped fully by the realism on
offer.
As a novel that insists on making references to its own fictional
status as well as to the process of novel writing, it is unsurprising
that the construction of the characters is also hinted at. This is
exemplified in Messud’s explanation of how the naming of the
characters reminds us of their fictionality: ‘Then, too, there are the
characters’ names: Leon, Briony and Cecilia are overdone enough;
but what of the Quincy cousins, Lola, Jackson and Pierrot? We are
characters, these names announce. And this is a story’ (Messud,
2002). Further to this, Robbie’s comrades, the unlikely sounding
Nettle and Mace, should also be added to this list. Messud con-
tinues by arguing that this ‘frank playfulness’ allows McEwan to
‘follow his characters more honestly than ever before’ and says this
is most apparent in parts Two and Three: ‘They lead us not into
the psyches of the unhinged but into the psyches of ordinary
people in an unhinged time’ (Messud, 2002). More specifically, the
characterizations of Robbie in Part Two and Briony in Part Three
are determined by the way they react to the carnage he witnesses.
Briony
An understanding of the development of Briony is more difficult to
negotiate or conclude when compared to other characters as she is
at various times an adolescent who wishes to take centre-stage, an

unreliable narrator, an unreliable author and finally an old woman
suffused with guilt for the sin she committed over 60 years ago.
She is the cause of the tension that the novel depends on and is
also the means for reminding the readers that this is a work of
fiction. In Briony, McEwan has created a character that emphasizes
that the readers do not have to have empathy with her or identify
with her to enjoy the work. She is always ambiguous and is difficult
to believe in, given that her lie has given the novel its drama, and
so she may be regarded as a lesson in understanding ambivalence.
With her crucial role in the construction of the novel, the readers
are entrusted in making ethical decisions about atoning for sins
without being explicitly instructed by the author (McEwan) in
how to think.
The depiction of her(self) as a young girl swings between
noting her innocence and guilt. Chapter 13 begins dramatically as
the readers are told that, ‘within the half hour Briony would
commit her crime’, but the guilt is undercut immediately by self-
justification: ‘Conscious that she was sharing the night expanse
with a maniac, she kept close to the shadowed walls of the house at
first, and ducked low beneath the sills whenever she passed in
front of a lighted window’ (p. 156).
It is repeated in Part One that she loves the thought of keeping
secrets, but as an innocent child she has none to keep and her
desire for order is central to her characterization at this point. It
is also stated several times that her ambition to be an admired
writer is necessary for an understanding of her and the lie she goes
on to tell.
The news of her impending loss of memory in ‘London, 1999’
gives the novel yet another ironic manipulation and allows for some
pathos to be added to this ambivalent construction. Her diagnosis
The Novel 43
of vascular dementia means she will soon need ‘continuous care’ as

she will lose the ability to ‘to comprehend anything at all’ and she
explains ‘the process will be slow, but my brain, my mind, is closing
down’ (p. 354). Old age looks set to incapacitate her and this gives
her narrative a last dramatic touch. This is because within the
remit of the story the need to establish Robbie’s innocence is made
more urgent.
It is also through Briony that Part Three is able to document
the role of the nurses in treating the wounded soldiers on their
evacuation from Dunkirk and give a suggestion of how the war
at this stage threatened to infiltrate lives in Britain beyond
recognition: ‘The Germans had reached the Channel, the British
Army was in difficulties. It had all gone badly wrong in France,
though no one knew on what kind of scale. This foreboding, this
muted dread, was what she had sensed around her’ (p. 284). The
indictment of war is given a further boost after the description of
Robbie’s experiences, as Briony witnesses the suffering of the
dying and wounded men who were also at Dunkirk. This period
which is often regarded with patriotic fervour as the time of the
‘Dunkirk spirit’, of remaining stoic under siege, is undermined by
this version of history that remembers the pain those men
endured. Through Robbie and Briony, the results of war are made
specific.
Robbie
Robbie is the son of Grace and Ernest Turner, and after Ernest
disappeared she worked as the cleaner for the Tallises. Thanks to
Jack Tallis, Robbie was supported during his time at grammar
school, having won a scholarship, and after gaining a first at
Cambridge he is considering studying to be a doctor (in Part One).
He is working class, and the divide between him and the Tallises
is broached by the education he has received. However, the dif-

ferences between the two families are exposed once he is accused
of harming Lola. His guilt is unquestioned as Emily, Leon and Jack
prefer to accept Briony’s version over his and it is possible to see
him as being easy to sacrifice because of his class status.
From the beginning of Part Two, when he sees the ‘unexpected
detail’ of a leg in a tree, the wreckage of war is unflinchingly
referred to as the memories will not let him go (p. 191). This is
made plain when he later thinks how the scraps of cloth he has
seen nearby could have been from a child’s pyjamas. This thought
haunts him when he hallucinates and he thinks that he should
have returned for the boy.
His thoughts are also explored as he looks back at his time in
prison and reflects on how this episode has remained with him:
‘Being here, sheltering in a barn, with an army in rout, where a
child’s limb in a tree was something that ordinary men could
ignore, where a whole country, a whole civilisation was about to
fall, was better than being there, on a narrow bed under a dim
electric light, waiting for nothing’ (p. 202). With the war, he at
least has the ability to escape the blankness of prison, but his only
desire is to return to England and Cecilia.
He is depicted as enduring all the misery in heroic terms in that
he is an ordinary man, as Messud points out, and is caught up in
extraordinary circumstances while also trying to stay alive. The
narrative refuses to over-dramatize his reactions as though in
respect of those who were there as, incidentally, McEwan’s father
was. Joe Wright, the director of the film adaptation, argues con-
vincingly that the descriptions of Robbie’s saint-like sufferance
should be associated with Briony’s claim of atonement, as she
constructs him as the hero he was when he found the missing
twins and before he was arrested (DVD, 2008). This image of him
The Novel 45
is heightened when one considers how he touches his injury in Part

Two, because this has echoes of Caravaggio’s painting, Doubting
Thomas, where Thomas looks for proof of Christ’s resurrection by
probing his wound.
Cecilia
In Part One, Cecilia is depicted as being at an intermediary stage
of her life as she has drifted through the summer without quite
deciding what she wants to do next after leaving university.
Chapter 2 is useful for the descriptions it gives of her state of mind
earlier in the day before Robbie’s arrest as it explains her rest-
lessness: ‘She could not remain here, she knew she should make
plans, but she did nothing’ (p. 21). It is also related that nobody is
‘holding her back’ and yet she resists leaving not only as a form of
‘self-punishment’, but also because of a desire to be needed by the
family and because of half-formed thoughts of Robbie (pp. 21–22).
As with Robbie, she studied literature at Cambridge, but gained
a third in comparison to his first. However, because of the reg-
ulations against women students, this was not conferred on her.
Women did not receive this equal treatment at Cambridge until
1948.
She is also described in Part One as being disordered and this is
made to contrast with Briony’s more fastidious habits. She acts as
Briony’s counterpoint because she gives further emphasis to
Briony’s desire for order. Cecilia is also used as a counterpoint
when Briony makes the decision to follow her into the controlled
environment of nursing rather than university. This exemplifies
Briony’s self-flagellation wrapped up as atonement as well as an
unspoken adherence to her sister over the rest of the family.
After the close of Part One, Briony and Robbie dominate most
of the rest of the novel, with Cecilia being used at specific times as
Robbie’s lover and Briony’s unforgiving sister. Her letters to Rob-

bie are a useful device for holding the narrative together as they
explain what Briony has been doing for the past few years and they
also remind us of the literariness of this novel. This happens
ostensibly because Cecilia and Robbie draw on literary figures and
use them as codes to symbolize their love in order to bypass the
censor during his time in prison: ‘Tristan and Isolde, the Duke
Orsino and Olivia (and Malvolio too), Troilus and Criseyde, Mr
Knightly and Emma, Venus and Adonis, Turner and Tallis’ (p. 204).
This quotation affirms the literary status of the couple, with
tongue partially in cheek, and also reminds us that this is a love
story. As Briony admits in the last section, Robbie and Cecilia
belong in the realm of romantic lovers and she has made them
comply with the expectations that have been learned in the past.
As typifies romantic love, they are separated by obstacles, such as
the class system, then prison, then war, and still this does not deter
them; only death can divide them before unification is possible.
The Tallises
The distance from the reader that is maintained in Part One also
captures an identifiable representation of a 1930s English bour-
geoisie family as they suffer from the heat on a rare hot summer’s
day. Although Leon says it is acceptable to break the rules on a day
such as this, this idea is seen to be as insubstantial as he is always
implied to be. John Mullan points out the dramatic irony behind
his conversation, as Briony has already seen Robbie in the library
with Cecilia, which confirmed he was the maniac she had imagined
(Mullan, 2003c, p. 32). This remark by Leon also registers his lack
of perception. He is able to perform to the part of acting as the
social lubricant with ease, but as Cecilia argues in a letter to
Robbie, he and the rest of her family are to be condemned for their
The Novel 47
belief in Robbie’s guilt: ‘My mother never forgave you your first.
My father preferred to lose himself in his work. Leon turned out to
be a grinning, spineless idiot who went along with everyone else’
(p. 209). With the exception of Cecilia, the Tallis family are gra-
dually revealed to be as dysfunctional as they are stereotypically
English, and the swift movement from almost accepting Robbie as
a member of the family to believing in his guilt acts as a trope for
the antagonism displayed against the class outsider.
Because Part One culminates in Robbie’s arrest, the section as a
whole allows for a questioning of the pre-war superficial calm with
the use of characters such as Leon and Emily, and also makes use
of the backdrop of their opulent but crumbling home. On the
surface they appear to be enviable for their privileged existences,
but not far beneath they are seen to be as damaged and unoriginal
as the 40-year-old house that aspires to be thought of as
embodying centuries of tradition but is riddled with faults. We are
told how it was acquired by the grandfather who made his money
in locks and was intended to be a demonstration of his wealth.
This money has also allowed the Tallises to be raised into
the upper ranks of the class system, but the news that this is a
privilege only recently bought means that the readers are invited
to mock their position in the hierarchy that they embrace so
readily.
This deconstruction of the class system through characteriza-
tion is also in place in Chapter 6 of Part One when Emily lies in
bed aware of the movements in the house, but is too self-absorbed
and incapable to intervene in the status quo. Her migraine is the
vehicle and the metaphor to explain her distance from her chil-
dren, but this chapter also reveals the values associated with
maintaining her position as she mentally criticizes Cecilia for
wasting her time studying for a degree and hopes Leon will bring a
friend home one day for her to marry, ‘if three years at Girton had
not made her an impossible prospect’ (p. 64). Emily is drawn as
pragmatic in her Englishness and mediocrity as she puts up with
her husband’s affairs while making claims of genteel propriety. Her
relatively weak position as a married unskilled woman is tied to her
being ‘understanding’, as the scandal caused by her sister’s divorce
suggests is necessary, but she is also depicted as accepting of this:
‘She could send her tendrils into every room in the house, but she
could not send them into the future. She also knew that, ulti-
mately, it was her own peace of mind she strove for; self-interest
and kindness were best not separated’ (p. 71).
Although he is not a member of the family, Paul Marshall’s visit
to the house is predicated by his friendship with Leon and his
membership to the right set. His success and class mean he is
accepted and he is never suspected of harming Lola long after the
rape takes place. Cecilia and Robbie, for example, believe Danny
Hardman is the culprit. Marshall is drawn unsympathetically by an
older, recalcitrant Briony and it is elemental to her atonement that
she also reveals his guilt. His mismatched face is made much of
and the signs of his guilt, such as the scratch on his face and the
noises Emily hears upstairs, are set out with enough suggestion for
him to be suspected if not initially condemned.
In ‘London, 1999’, he and Lola are included in the narrative
most obviously because Briony has seen them. This gives her an
opening to describe how they appear in old age and how they have
remained untouchable and secretive since the day Lola was raped
in 1935. There is something of the caricature about these villains,
and the plural is used because Lola is included now by association,
and this is emphasized when Lola is compared to Cruella de Vil of
The Hundred and One Dalmations (1956) (p. 358). By describing the
influence these two still have, Briony exculpates herself somewhat
The Novel 49
as well, and gives the narrative closure as she ties up the loose ends
of what happened to some of the key characters.
The cousins from the north

Lola, Jackson and Pierrot are introduced as the ‘cousins from the
north’ in Chapter 1 of Part One, as Briony considers the production
of her play. They are immediately cast as outsiders and antag-
onistic to her love of order, because their arrival at the house has
threatened to disrupt proceedings (p. 8). This is later seen to
occur more vigorously when the twins go missing and Lola is raped,
but before these events the twins are described as at first reluctant
to perform in the play and Lola is characterized as being even more
precocious than Briony. They are the catalysts for the main action
that leads to Robbie’s arrest and are barely realized beyond Brio-
ny’s child-like perception of them.
They are also the children of divorcing parents and their
embarrassment with this situation is a means to re-enact the
stigma associated with family breakdown in this period. This
stigma is also the implied reason why Jack and Emily are still
married even though their relationship is no longer fulfilling or
happy.
The servants
Atonement is concerned primarily with the Tallis family and Robbie,
rather than the servants, and so it is understandable that these
play only minor roles. The most notable one is Grace, as she is
Robbie’s mother, and her inclusion adds to the development of his
characterization. Her position as cleaner is a sign of her social
status and signifies the gulf between Robbie’s and Cecilia’s par-
ents. She was given patronage by Jack Tallis after her husband
deserted her, and Robbie has also benefited from this in that he
received a university education that would have otherwise been

impossible given the period and his class. When the Tallises are
quick to believe in Robbie’s guilt, however, it is possible to see that
this was always a kindness that could be revoked and the accep-
tance of Grace and her son is seen to have been based on whim
rather than loyalty.
Danny Hardman is another minor character, but is of interest
because he adds some mystery to the events of Part One. Earlier in
the day, Robbie notices him leering at Lola and he is used as a red
herring to distract Robbie and Cecilia, if not the readers, from the
truth. Like Robbie, he also becomes a scapegoat for the actions of
Paul Marshall. In Briony’s fictional account of her meeting with
Robbie and Cecilia in Part Three, she explains that Danny was not
guilty of the crime as they had supposed. Their belief that he had
been the culprit (rather than Marshall) suggests once more that
the hierarchical class system allows those in the higher reaches to
be seen as blameless despite the evidence.
Metaphors and symbolic language
The vase
The vase, which Cecilia and Robbie struggle over at the fountain,
is elemental to the plot, as Briony’s imaginative misunderstanding
of this scene feeds into her castigation of him later. Its importance
is later indicated in the way she uses this scene in the story she
sends to Connolly.
It serves the symbolic purpose of signposting the family’s pre-
tensions, yet its journey to the Tallis home is almost as convoluted
as the return of the heirloom watch that belongs to Butch in Pulp
Fiction (1994). It is a gift from when Uncle Clem served in the First
The Novel 51
World War and is valued for this rather than its heritage; it also acts
as a connection between Robbie and Cecilia.
The damage it undergoes is also of further relevance to the
novel. Kermode notes the triangular pieces that break off into the
fountain and says in an aside how ‘triangles form a leitmotif for
readers to puzzle over’, and also explains that the breakage reso-
nates later: ‘The wounded vase will later meet an even worse fate,
and this premonitory damage echoes what happens to other fragile
objects highly valued but easily ruined, such as Cecilia’s virginity,
and indeed life itself ’ (Kermode, 2001). Emily informs Briony in a
letter in Part Three of its final outcome: ‘Wretched Betty dropped
Uncle Clem’s vase carrying it down and it shattered on the steps.
She said the pieces had simply come away in her hand, but that
was hardly to be believed’ (p. 279). In its last fall, the vase
becomes a metaphor for the tenuous hold we have on objects and
each other. In addition, Emily’s disbelief at Betty’s explanation is
in keeping with her disregard for the lower orders that she has
demonstrated on other occasions.
The Tallis house

Despite initially appearing to exude grandeur and upper-class
status, the Tallis house is revealed to be less than both these
claims: ‘Morning sunlight, or any light, could not conceal the
ugliness of the Tallis home – barely forty years old, bright orange
brick, squat, lead-paned baronial Gothic, to be condemned one day
in an article by Pevsner, or one of his team, as a tragedy of wasted
chances, and by a younger writer of the modern school as
‘‘charmless to a fault’’’ (p. 19).
Metaphorically, it represents the family’s push for respectability
in that it was bought by Cecilia’s grandfather who made his fortune
‘with a series of patents on padlocks, bolts, latches and hasps’,
having grown up over an ironmonger’s shop (p. 19). With this new
money, he bought the family the shell of status that his descen-
dents have taken for granted, but its faults reflect the sham of the
class-ridden society. That is, the house appears to be of a superior
quality, but when one looks more closely it becomes apparent that
it does not deserve the merit it expects. Through this repre-
sentation of the house, then, it is possible to see a figurative
criticism of class bias.
Because it was paid for with the money grandfather made on
locks and bolts, it also represents the centrality of secrecy to this
novel.1 Atonement begins with an explanation of Briony’s ‘passion for
secrets’ and, although at this point she does not have any, she goes
on to keep the falsity of her accusation quiet (p. 5). Similarly, Lola
also never mentions the truth about the identity of her attacker,
and her marriage to Paul Marshall tells us she never will.
The house is returned to in ‘London, 1999’ and is now known as
Tilney’s Hotel. Its rebranding signifies the post-war change in
times for the Tallis family while also indicating how the wider
society has become more leisure-fixated. The name Tilney is also a
reference back to the epigraph, as the Tilney family appear in
Northanger Abbey.
Water
The use of water as a motif in the film version of Atonement is
discussed more fully in ‘Performance and Adaptation’, but it is also
relevant to analyse its usage in the novel here. The artificial lake
and fountain add to the image of surface upper middle-class status.
Again, it is only the appearance of belonging that is signposted,
because the lake is artificial and the fountain has the half-scale
1
Thanks must go to Dr Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce for this insight.
The Novel 53
reproduction of Bernini’s Triton. To add to this emphasis on fakery,

the Triton is described as such: ‘The muscular figure, squatting so
comfortably on his shell, could blow through his conch a jet only
two inches high, the pressure was so feeble, and water fell back
over his head, down his stone locks and along the groove of his
powerful spine, leaving a glistening dark green stain’ (p. 18). Both
the lake and fountain represent the ambition of the family, though,
even if the desired effect is not achieved. It is telling that when
Briony visits her former home for the last time for her birthday
treat, the lake has disappeared along with the island temple and
the island is necessarily no longer an island. The land is now used
as a golf course and the lake is not needed, and metaphorically it is
seen to be as redundant as the class aspirations of the Tallis family.
Water also symbolizes union, as it is at the fountain where
Cecilia and Robbie are first seen to come together, and safety. This
latter point is made in Part Two when Robbie forces himself to
reach the sea despite his injury.
The Army Amo bar

Paul Marshall is set to make a fortune with this new chocolate bar
when, as he hopes, a war will come about if ‘Mr Hitler did not pipe
down’ (p. 50). Bearing in mind this is said in 1935, the bar
represents how for some the possibility of profiting from war is
of more interest than brokering for peace or challenging fascism
on moral grounds. Because of this, Marshall’s lack of scruples
are reflected in his desire for its success, and his boasts to Cecilia
and Robbie enhance his anti-hero status: ‘... there was even a
chance that the bar could be part of the standard-issue ration pack;
in that case, if there were to be a general conscription, a further
five factories would be needed ...’ (p. 50).
He also uses the bar as a means to talk to the children and when
it is discovered that he is the one who goes on to rape Lola, the

Army Amo may be interpreted as a poisoned chalice. As with its
creator, it appears to be innocent but it is not and never has been.
Narrative devices
Point of view
As stated previously, the use of the shifting point of view in Part
One allows the third-person narrator to give the perspectives of
various characters as the day unfolds. This device allows for a
distance to be maintained as Briony purports to interpret the
opinions of others in her version of her atonement. This has the
intended effect of giving the readers glimpses into the con-
sciousness and emotions of characters and is, then, a useful means
for the development of characterization.
Unreliable narrator
The unreliable narrator is a literary device that has been employed
in works such as The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James and
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë. This is when a first-
person narrator is used and the subjective responses and inter-
pretations of this character are revealed. This means that the
narration is permeated with ambiguity, as, again, the narrator is
deemed unreliable.
The unreliable narrator is used in ‘London, 1999’ as the novel
shifts finally to Briony’s first-person account. It is possible to see
that the device is being used playfully, because Briony’s earlier lie
about Robbie and her explanation of how the novelist is compar-
able to God already mean that she is clearly difficult to trust. This
exaggerates the subjectivity of her narration, which is always going
The Novel 55
to be biased anyway as it is in the first person, and means that

the titular claim of ‘atonement’ should be interpreted with
caution.
Letters
Letters are used as a means to uphold the authentic strain of both
parts Two and Three, as Briony coaxes the readers into believing
this is the truth that is being laid out. They are also useful for
explaining the perspectives of characters such as Cecilia. Rather
than simply recounting the past, this format gives the views of the
writer as is true to the spirit of the novel (especially Part One)
where the narrative switches between the perspectives of the main
characters. These letters allow for a first-person insight into the
thoughts of a character and thereby give another aspect of their
consciousness.
These letters also act as a further textual layer embedded in a
narrative that is already self-conscious about using words to give
order to the past. It is telling that it is a letter from Robbie to
Cecilia – which refers to her ‘cunt’ – that initially condemns
Robbie from Briony’s immature point of view. Because it is the
wrong letter, and the worst of Freudian slips, his arrest that eve-
ning is made all the more poignant.
Briony’s faith in the written word may be seen to also extend to
her old age as she depends on letters for documentary evidence in
the shaping of her narrative. This is made definite in ‘London,
1999’ when she refers to the assistance she has had from old Mr
Nettle and the Imperial War Museum. Furthermore, the letter
from Connolly is included as another supposed touch of realism.
The revelation
Briony’s late revelation that she is the author, and that Robbie died
at Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed at Balham station are examined
by Mullan in ‘Beyond Fiction’ and described as an aspect of the
metanarrative (a narrative about the narrative). In this article, he
also clarifies the distinction between metafiction and metanarra-
tive to explain more fully how McEwan has drawn the reader into a
complex web of self-reflexivity: ‘Metafiction is persistently self-
referential, like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller,
which, from its first sentence, makes a story of how reader and
writer conspire to make a story. McEwan’s metanarrative, however,
is a revelation withheld. Some readers have felt cheated by it, like
viewers of Dallas who were suddenly shown by desperate script-
writers that the traumatic events of many previous episodes were
just Pam Ewing’s ‘‘dream’’.’ He also describes the metanarrative as
the short final section ‘that accounts for its existence’ (Mullan,
2003d, p. 32). The disappointment that doubtless accompanies
the news that we are asked to believe this has been Briony’s
creation all along may be contrasted with how this alters the
interpretation of the novel for the better as yet another layer of
meaning has been added.
The use of a metanarrative and metafiction need not be seen as
mutually exclusive as Mullan implies, though. Atonement is not
overly literal in the way it demonstrates that this is a fiction about
fiction, but its repeated allusions to the novel-writing process and
to the dangers of the literary imagination, let alone the many self-
conscious literary references, mean that from the epigraph onwards
this novel hints to the readers this is a novel. It is perhaps down to
the skill of the writer that this is done implicitly enough for the
first-time reader to feel as cheated by the metanarrative as Dallas
fans were by Pam Ewing’s dream.
The Novel 57
In his interview with David Lynn, McEwan explains the readers

were let off lightly with the ‘tricksey’ elements, as he wrote but
discarded an ‘About the Author’ section that was devoted to Briony.
This told of how he imagined her career, which ‘dipped for a while,
but then in the sixties she was taken up by Virago press and her
novel The Ducking Stool was made into a film with Julie Christie’.
He was also going to have her death as July 2001 when he finished
writing it, but thought he should set the readers ‘down on terra
firma’ instead (Lynn, 2007).
The moral dilemma of fictionalizing the truth
As a historical novel that uses the Second World War as a context,

Atonement has a relationship with the past that, simply put, means
it fictionalizes events that have occurred. His use of research in the
Imperial War Museum, of the stories his father told him and
Lucilla Andrews’ account have been referred to by him as narra-
tives that enabled him to come as close as he could to retrieving
the past.
His response to the charge of plagiarism, which is one most
writers would dread, came in the form of an explanation of how he
was partly inspired by his father’s stories of his time spent in the
war, which included being in the Dunkirk retreat. In ‘An Inspira-
tion, Yes. Did I Copy from Another Author? No’, he outlines how
his father’s experience of reaching the beaches to be evacuated
and his later stay in hospital were used in parts Two and Three:
‘When I came to write Atonement, my father’s stories, with auto-
matic ease, dictated the structure; after I finished the opening
section, set in 1935, Dunkirk would have to be followed by the
reconstruction of a 1940 hospital.’ He cites the specific instance of
when his father was shot in the legs and then ‘teamed up’ with
another man who had been injured in the arms, and between them
they managed to ride a motorcycle to reach the Dunkirk beaches
and finally safety (McEwan, 2006b). This account is used in Part
Two and helps to accentuate the desperate need for the allied
soldiers to reach the beaches in time.
He acknowledges his debt to Lucilla Andrews’ autobiography,
No Time for Romance, here and elsewhere (including in the
Acknowledgements page in Atonement) for the rich detail it gave
him of the nurses’ training and of how the arrival of the Dunkirk
wounded was coped with. He describes this as a ‘shared reality’
and, therefore, makes it explicit that he regards such contemporary
accounts as being in the public realm. In this article, he also
stresses his desire to be authentic and to act in good faith in his
account of the war: ‘In writing about wartime especially, it seems
like a form of respect for the suffering of a generation wrenched
from their ordinary lives to be conscripted into a nightmare’
(McEwan, 2006b).
It is ironic, of course, that the author of a novel such as Atone-
ment, which deconstructs the privileged status of the author while
also reinforcing it, should ask to be believed about his writing
practices. It is also relevant to remember that the ‘shared reality’
he draws upon is embroidered with his fictionalized version along
with stories he has heard in his childhood. Just like Briony, the
author has the power to order the narrative just as he or she
chooses.
Tim Gauthier explains the unsolvable difficulties for the con-
temporary writer that engages with history: ‘Like Byatt and a
number of other contemporary writers, McEwan exhibits a para-
doxical relationship with the past. He knows that it cannot be
known, but this does not prevent him from trying to know it. And
The Novel 59
the truths that are unearthed, whether they be the real truths of
the past or not, are not any less for that’ (Gauthier, 2006, p. 23).
Gauthier uses Black Dogs as the means to make this point, but it
also stands for later works such as Atonement as the past is evoked
with recognition of the influence of postmodernism as well as
demonstrating an abiding desire for truth.
Ideas associated with postmodernism expose the difficulty, if
not impossibility, of knowing the absolute truth, and this is
because postmodern thinking has destabilized the concept of
defining absolute meanings. It is a given that Atonement draws on
historical truths, or as close as McEwan is able to manage this, but
because he also draws on the influence of postmodernism in
‘London, 1999’ he asks the readers to adopt a position that both
accepts and refuses the absolute. Using a framework of Gayatori
Spivak’s for the purpose of this reading, it is possible to argue that
the novel offers a strategic essentialist understanding of truth and
demonstrates the ethical need to find it even if it is no longer an
absolute post-poststructuralist theory. This is a refashioning of
Spivak’s theory as it was originally used in the context of querying
the possibility of speaking as a subaltern, but is useful in this
instance for understanding how Atonement queries the division
between fact and fiction while also representing the devastation
caused by a lie. As seen in the first chapter, ‘Novelist’, McEwan
subscribes to the need for truth and questions the relativism of
postmodernism. It is also evident in Atonement that the relativity of
truth and lies is exposed via the use of Briony and her ambiguous
hold on her version of reality which is laid out as truth. By using a
strategically essentialist position in order to broach the subject of
ethical responsibility in a culture where absolute truth is dimin-
ished, McEwan manages to show that it is still worth searching for
and adhering to. Put more lucidly, despite the boundary between
fact and fiction becoming blurred as postmodern thinking ques-

tions the concept of one reality and one truth, McEwan uses
Briony’s lie and her ambivalent relationship to versions of truth to
demonstrate the necessity of ethics.
Conclusion
As Head argues, however, the ambiguous construction of Briony

and the reiteration of the themes of guilt and atonement mean
that the ethical and moral position of the novel may also be viewed
as murky: ‘The circularity of this guilt-atonement reveals a general
observation about the equivocation of novel-writing, shown to be
in an uneasy and shifting relationship to any construction of
morality’ (Head, 2008, p. 174). This uneasiness filters through, as
the readers become unsettled by Briony’s supposed final truth, and
with the greater understanding passed down from Plato that the
poets are liars.
The popular and critical success of Atonement has depended on
this ability to draw its readers in by telling them a story while at
the same time constantly reminding us that this is a fiction. The
development of character through the use of shifting point of view,
the organization of the structure and the multiple levels of
meaning that are broached in the themes all affirm McEwan’s
technical skill.
. 3
Critical Reception
R eviews of Atonement in the broadsheets and literary

journals were, with the odd exception, positive bordering on con-
gratulatory. At this point in his career, McEwan was a mainstay of
British fiction and had come to be regarded as a respected author
and one of the key writers of his generation. With this novel, he
impressed the fans and non-committed alike and it was quickly
spotted as his most compelling work to date. Robert MacFarlane’s
review for The Times Literary Supplement, for example, considers it to
be his ‘finest achievement’, as the dust jacket proclaims, and
supplements this by saying that although the publishers will always
try to sell their products, ‘in this case they are triumphantly right’
(MacFarlane, 2001, p. 23).
Despite the plaudits, McEwan continues to be cautious in his
expectations of the critics and it appears that this in turn influ-
ences his writing. When asked by David Lynn if he ever thinks
about the audience he is writing for, McEwan responded that
rather than having a reader in mind he has a ‘kind of being’ which
he imagines as his most undermining of reviewers: ‘I have a kind of

being, not really a reader, a kind of entity whose dominant dis-
position is utter scepticism. And this being wears a constant snarl,
and is always muttering ‘‘come off it, you’re never going to get
away with that’’, or ‘‘this is feeble’’. It’s all the hostile reviews or
reviewers that I’ve ever had in my life. And it’s quite a useful
being’ (Lynn, 2007). A perspective such as this shows not only his
guarded opinion of the critics, but also a welcome modesty con-
sidering his international reputation.
The flattering comments with regard to Atonement were not
restricted just to British-based reviews. Tom Shone in The New York
Times describes it as McEwan’s ‘most complete and compassionate
work to date’ (Shone, 2002) and Claire Messud goes further and
begins her review by comparing the reading of his prose to meeting
‘an extremely good-looking person’, as there is a ‘confusion of
expectations’. She goes on to explain that ‘good looks betoken
nothing certain about their possessor’, but Atonement meets the
expectations roused and she concludes with this elaborate praise:
‘We see at last that the beauty of the conjuring is indeed enough;
and that its meaning – in all its ambiguities – lies before us’
(Messud, 2002).
Such enthusiasm, even effusiveness may seem to be too
uncritical and too willing to fall in love with the English setting
perhaps, or with the surprise that Briony has directed the narrative
from the beginning. A closer examination of the book’s reception
demonstrates that it is the technical expertise that tends to
beguile the critics the most. Frank Kermode compares the writing
to that of Henry James, and not just because of the similarities
with What Maisie Knew: ‘Ian McEwan’s new novel, which strikes me
as easily his finest, has a frame that is properly hinged and jointed
and apt for the conduct of the ‘‘march of action’’, which James
described as ‘‘the only thing that really, for me at least, will produire
L’OEUVRE’’. Not quite how McEwan would put it, perhaps,
but still the substance of his method, especially if one adds a
keen technical interest in another Jamesian obsession, the point of
view’ (Kermode, 2001). The comparison with James’s technical
skill is given weight by the analysis that Kermode offers. He
explains his interpretation with reference to the ‘march of action’
and point of view and with regard to Atonement the interest in the
latter is most marked in the use of shifting perspectives in Part
One.
Just as Kermode draws parallels between McEwan and Henry
James, Geoff Dyer in the Guardian argues that there is parity
between McEwan, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, as each one
has demonstrated the ‘transformation’ of individuals. By placing
McEwan in such company both critics make a tacit request to have
him placed in the modern canon of authors. According to Dyer,
Woolf and Lawrence have helped to bring this transformation
about and McEwan has developed this: ‘McEwan uses his novel to
show how this subjective or interior transformation can now be
seen to have interacted with the larger march of twentieth-century
history’ (Dyer, 2001). The appeal of Atonement for Dyer rests in its
breadth rather than in what may be seen as its gimmicks (such as
Briony’s final revelation), and the main interest lies in its under-
standing of literature and in the way this is tied to the historical
process of change. By echoing the voices of other writers and
making their work new in his revitalized use of realism and mod-
ernism, McEwan is seen to have the capacity his prodigy Briony
has always hoped for. This reading by Dyer should not be under-
estimated as, although it attempts implicitly to predict the future
of the value of Atonement in ranking McEwan alongside such
accepted literary figures, and therefore runs the risk of being seen
as prematurely confident, this contemporary response is one that

has been echoed by many.
The emotional resonance of the narrative attracts Peter Kemp
in The Sunday Times and he applauds it for the various levels it
works on: ‘Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing
comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book.
Unshowy symmetries and patterns underlie its emotional force and
psychological compulsion.’ He also points to the effectiveness of
the theme of the dangers of the literary imagination, as many
critics have, and argues this is returned to persistently: ‘The
instinct for order (so important in the army, Robbie finds; so
beneficial in the hospital, Briony discovers) proves of more
ambiguous effect when the artistic temperament impinges on life’s
confusions’ (Kemp, 2001, p. 46). As Kemp points out, the desire
for order is seen to be threatened or undone by Briony, who per-
sonifies this dangerous literary imagination. It is also deeply ironic
that the urge to control events is connected to the way the action
spirals out of her reach.
Given the overwhelming praise of the majority of responses,
Anita Brookner’s review for The Spectator is illuminating because it
is one of the few negative ones. Her main criticism is that she
regards it as being unconvincing, but she also resents the change in
form and content when compared to his earlier works: ‘McEwan’s
novels are normally thrilling examinations of various nasty situa-
tions. Here his suave attempts to establish morbid feelings as
inspiration for a life’s work – and for that work to be crowned with
success – are unconvincing. Atonement is in itself a morbid proce-
dure. If it were more palliative penance could be embraced with
total confidence’ (Brookner, 2001). In relation to this point that it
is ‘unconvincing’, Brookner is also troubled by what she sees as
gaps in authenticity in that we are expected to believe in too many
improbable things, such as the Meissen vase being immersed in a

fountain that has a copy of Bernini’s Triton, and in the night being
too dark for Lola’s attacker to be seen. This line of argument that
‘authenticity is indeed a problem here’ is based on the perceived
need for believability, which one could argue is not necessarily a
prerequisite of so-called good fiction. In contrast with Brookner’s
interpretation, MacFarlane raptures over the early slow pace and
the way the narrative sets the scene: ‘Nobody comes, nobody goes.
McEwan continues to describe, with characteristic limpidity, the
house and the dynamics of its inhabitants. His patience is doubly
effective, for it generates not only an authentic environment in
which the tragedy can eventually unfurl, but also has an ever-
burgeoning sense of menace’ (MacFarlane, 2001, p. 23).
The questioning of the believability is also balanced by Ker-
mode’s point that this is (after all) a work of fiction. He also
reasons that this is a self-consciously fictional work and that the
letter purporting to be from Cyril Connolly, for example, is a
parody of his writing and is, like the novel, ‘on that borderline
between fantasy and fact that is indeed the territory of fiction’
(Kermode, 2001). This reference reiterates the way McEwan uses
the narrative to draw the readers into a realist landscape as he also
reminds them that it is a novel that they are reading.
Brookner raises her personal concerns with Atonement, as well as
pointing out that Briony seeks reparation rather than atonement,
but she seems to have overlooked the use of Briony as the novelist
and how we are led to believe that this is her version of events.
Brookner also interprets the ending as being ‘too lenient’ to Briony
as she is now ‘elderly and celebrated’ and should have told the
truth back in 1935. The unreliability of Briony as a witness has
been established on the night she falsely accuses Robbie, and as
the novelist she is in the position to shape the perspectives of the
characters as she chooses. If these aspects are not evaluated, then

the irony of Briony manipulating the readers as well as her family is
also missed. It is as though Brookner has forgotten this joke on the
readers, which in turn suggests that when Briony compares herself
favourably to God in ‘London, 1999’ this is taken only at face value.
Whereas Brookner is critical of the moral ambivalence exhibited
by Briony, Kemp interprets this as a central element of the novel:
‘Whatever equivocations linger around Briony’s behaviour, though,
there’s no doubt about McEwan’s superb achievement in this
book, which combines a magnificent display of the powers of
imagination with a probing exploration of them’ (Kemp, 2001, p.
46). Kermode is similarly praising of the edge that is maintained by
the ambivalence displayed through Briony. Critics generally sub-
scribe to the fair play rule of reviewers not revealing the end of the
novel under examination and, as he admits, this limits the over-
view they are able to give the readers. He goes on to point out,
nevertheless, that despite the title Briony does not achieve the
proposed aim and is grateful for this: ‘The title of the book seems
to suggest that Briony will do something by way of atonement, but
nothing quite fitting that description seems to occur’ (Kermode,
2001).
Conclusively, Atonement received the amount of attention one
would expect from a work by or associated with McEwan, but the
commendations for the book in particular returned consistently to
the claim that this is his most impressive work to date. The merit
is based on the technical skill of holding the separate sections
together, as well as the demonstrable literary quality that is
apparent in the comparisons with writers such as James and Woolf.
. 4
Novel’s Performance and

Adaptation
I n terms of sales, Atonement is a national and international

bestseller and has been translated into a number of languages
including Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese. Its sales were increased
due to the tie-in publication with the release of the film version
and it has been the recipient of a number of awards. These include
the WH Smith Literary Prize, the National Book Critics’ Circle
Award, the Santiago Prize for the European Novel and the Los
Angeles Times Prize for Fiction.
McEwan already has a connection with the film industry, having
written screenplays, and some of his works have also been adapted
for film prior to Atonement (2007). These include The Comfort of
Strangers (1990), The Cement Garden (1993) and Enduring Love
(2004). As a measure of his kudos, the screenplay for the latter was
written by Harold Pinter. It is perhaps in keeping with the
popularity of the novel that Atonement the film has so far been the
most high-profile of his works to be adapted.
The Working Title Films adaptation of Atonement premiered at
the Venice Film Festival in September 2007 as part of an extensive

publicity drive. The reception from the critics may have been
mixed, but for a time it was the great British film of the year as it
was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 2008 and won a
Golden Globe and a BAFTA for Best Film. Reviews varied from
claiming it is ‘masterly’, by Philip French in the Observer, to pro-
posing it demonstrates how ‘pointless’ adaptations can be (A. O.
Scott, 2007).
In his review of the novel, Tom Shone sees the opening as
having the potential of being a Merchant Ivory production in the
future with its setting of the English country house and the cen-
trality of the Tallis family (Shone, 2002). As he goes on to concede,
this would never be possible given the material, but the film
version of Atonement (2007), directed by Joe Wright and adapted by
Christopher Hampton, capitalizes on its depiction of an upper
middle-class English family in the 1930s in these early pre-war
scenes. The elderly Briony is played by Vanessa Redgrave and her
inclusion, along with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, invites us
to see this as a British star vehicle for the international market.
The reception of the film
In comparison with the favourable book reviews, the adaptation to

film in 2007 had a more lukewarm reception. James Christopher
for The Times points out it was one of the ‘great hopes’ for British
cinema for that year, but thinks it fails to merit the attention it has
been given, particularly when the action moves from 1935 to the
Second World War: ‘The moment Robbie is jailed, the credibility of
Wright’s film starts coming apart. The story takes a rude melo-
dramatic knapsack off to war, and an older Briony (played by
Romola Garai) signs up as a nurse and tries to atone for her ghastly
sin’ (Christopher, 2007).
A similar criticism is made in The New York Times by Scott who
also regards it as becoming weaker as it moves away from the first
scenes of 1935. Scott argues that it is not that this is a ‘bad literary
adaptation’, but that it is instead ‘an almost classic example of how
pointless, how diminishing, the transmutation of literature into
film can be. The respect that Mr Wright and Mr Hampton show to
Mr McEwan is no doubt gratifying to him, but is fatal to their own
project’ (Scott, 2007). This loyalty to the novel has also meant that
the abrupt shift to the war has not translated to the screen as
would have been hoped. Visually, the separate sections have the
effect of making the film disjointed, and if a smoother movement
through time is required, the adaptation needs to steer away from
the novel more obviously.
Cosmo Landesman offers another negative perspective and
suggests this is a film that has nothing new to offer: ‘Irritatingly,
Atonement gives us the worst of two worlds stylistically: it exploits
the taste and nostalgia for 1930s and 1940s Hollywood melodrama,
yet it has an annoying postmodern knowingness to it. At its heart is
a concern with the unreliability of narrative, be it that of a 13-year-
old girl one hot summer’s day or that of British history. Thus, when
Robbie, who chooses the army instead of prison, winds up at
Dunkirk, waiting for evacuation, we see that episode in a different
light. Instead of a heroic exodus, we get a nightmarish vision of
horses being shot and men going crazy’ (Landesman, 2007). Both
the book and film elaborate on a version of the retreat that goes
against the traditional view that it was as Landesman claims ‘a
heroic exodus’, which has been the prevailing British ideology
since the Second World War. Robbie is constructed as a hero, but
no comfort in defeat is offered for the viewers or readers, as this
episode is captured as bloody and ultimately wasteful. By repre-

senting this significantly precarious moment in British history in
such a way – that is, not patriotically – McEwan and Wright will be
open for criticism (and especially from those who see such
depictions as disloyal). When the film is seen as a critique of
destruction, however, it is not so easy to condemn.
For a more positive account of the film, French in the Observer
considers the later sequences of the 1935 section as being handled
with ‘immense narrative verve’ and praises the process of adapta-
tion overall despite the occasional melodramatic touches: ‘What
the film brings to the book, apart from excellent performances, are
fine images and a powerful period atmosphere’ (French, 2007,
p. 18). It is also of note that whereas Scott and Landesman
question the use of the long tracking shot of the beaches at
Dunkirk, French regards this as one of the finest aspects of the
film: ‘There is a virtuoso long take, lasting five to six minutes, that
belongs beside long takes by Hitchcock, Welles, Jancso, Antonioni,
and Angelopoulos’ (French, 2007, p. 18). By promoting this par-
ticular shot, French makes the case for the artistic remit as well as
defending this deconstruction of the Dunkirk spirit.
Analysis
Negative criticisms levelled at the adaptation include the accu-

sation by Scott that it follows the novel too closely, yet super-
ficially, and describes it as being ‘piously rendered’ by Hampton
(Scott, 2007). His main dispute with the film comes at the
expense of a comparison with the novel: ‘Mr McEwan’s prose pulls
you in immediately and drags you through an intricate, unsettling
story, releasing you in a shaken wrung-out state. The film, after a
tantalizing start, sputters to a halt in a welter of grandiose imagery

and hurtling montage’ (Scott, 2007). An interpretation such as this
is in opposition to Brian McFarlane’s Novel to Film (1996), which
explains how ‘fidelity criticism’ has tended to favour novels over
films as it ‘depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering
up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘‘meaning’’ which
the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or
tampered with’ (McFarlane, 1996, p. 8). By questioning the pri-
macy of the novel, McFarlane enables an analysis of the adaptation
in its own right: ‘The stress on fidelity to the original undervalues
other aspects of the film’s intertextuality. By this, I mean those
non-literary, non-novelistic influences at work on any film, whether
or not it is based on a novel’ (McFarlane, 1996, p. 21). He follows
this up by explaining that the novel is just one element of the
film’s intertextuality and aspects such as the actors used, the
‘cultural climate’, the director’s influence and the ‘prevailing
parameters of cinematic practice’ should also be brought into the
evaluation (McFarlane, 1996, p. 22). Although he refutes a
straightforward hierarchy of a novel being preferred over the film,
he also adds that the adaptation does not stand alone either and
comparisons are inevitable if the book has been read before
viewing the film.
As a film that is concerned with the way a writer manipulates
narratives, it should be said that it is difficult to separate the
connectedness between this particular novel and film, even when
one takes McFarlane’s point into account about showing fair
recognition to adaptations. The opening credits and first scene
inform the viewers immediately of the role the writer takes in this
work, as a tap of keys from a typewriter spells out the title and the
opening scene of summer 1935. When the camera then shifts from
the nursery toys to focus on Briony typing her final version of The
Trials of Arabella, her youthful yet earnest ambition to be a writer is

imprinted on the screen. French interprets this opening as a wider
metaphor for the film and the novel: ‘Atonement begins with the
film’s title and its setting (the summer of 1935) loudly printed out
by a manual typewriter, thus implanting in our minds that what we
are about to experience is a literary work and indeed it is about
fiction itself, its purpose and its morality’ (French, 2007, p. 18).
The main score, which is composed by Dario Marienelli (and
who is the recipient of the only Academy Award for the film), also
includes the thread of the sound of typing to add urgency. This
occurs, for example, when Briony is searching for her mother to
show her this new venture as a playwright. In an otherwise con-
demnatory review, Scott interprets these early scenes in the
country house as relatively praiseworthy and makes reference to
the unifying effect of the typist at work: ‘This charged, hardly
unfamiliar atmosphere provides, in the first section of the film,
some decent, suspenseful fun, a rush of incident and implication.
Boxy cars rolling up the drive; whispers of scandal and family
secrets; coitus interruptus in the library, all set to the implacable
rhythm of typewriter keys’ (Scott, 2007). Because Robbie is also
shown sat typing his letter to Cecilia, in which he refers to her
‘cunt’ and which Briony goes on to see as proof that he is a sex
maniac on Lola’s prompting, the connection and difference
between Briony and Robbie is made graphic. Both have been
captured as authors, but it is Briony who takes and keeps control of
the plot.
As with the novel, her influence on the arrangements of events
in the 1935 section is explained with subtlety as it maintains a
similar shift between points of view, and this is done through the
replaying of key scenes. This is given most attention when Briony
looks through the window and sees Robbie and Cecilia at the
fountain. Her shock, which is based on misinterpretation, is

explained by the replay where the viewers hear the dialogue
between Robbie and Cecilia which Briony has been excluded from.
The clue remains that this is her story, though, as her appearance
at the window frames both versions of this narrative of the two
figures by the fountain.
The centrality of Briony and the theme of her dangerous literary
imagination are both maintained in the film and, as mentioned in
the bonus scenes, this is brought about visually by giving the three
different actors who play her at 13, as a young woman, and at the
age of 77, the same hairstyle of a bob and a noticeable facial
birthmark. Because it is unlikely that Briony’s hair has stayed the
same for over 60 years, this also has the effect of emphasizing that
this is a fiction that she, McEwan and Wright have created. As with
the novel, her final revelation acts as a conclusion and is allowed to
have the same unsettling impact as it undoes the reality that we
have already seen, of Robbie and Cecilia reunited in her flat. The
use of the visual medium is made relevant as Briony gives away the
secret that this is her refashioning of the story in an interview for
television with Anthony Minghella playing the part of interviewer.
As well as holding the narrative together with Briony and the
theme of writing, immersion in water is another recurring motif
and this is used to create a chain of signifiers that signal figurative
rebirths and the death of Cecilia. When Cecilia plunges into the
fountain to retrieve the broken pieces of the vase, and to
demonstrate her recently learned maturity to Robbie, and when
Robbie is viewed bathing and Cecilia drowns after the explosion at
the underground station, the film uses this element as an equalizer
and as a trope to deconstruct the apparently stable hierarchies of
class difference. Water washes away the sins, perhaps, but it is also
used to form a connection between the lovers. This is used most
effectively with the cut from Cecilia diving into the lake to Robbie
sitting up in the bath after being immersed.
It is also the means for heightening Robbie’s hallucinatory state
at Dunkirk, as well as emphasizing his and his mother’s virtue.
This comes when he imagines his mother has taken off his boots
and then washes his feet. The image of the mother showing love
for her son is overlaid with the idea that she and Robbie are above
reproach as the washing of feet also alludes to Jesus’ selfless
service.
Peter Childs regards the use of ‘water, mirrors, and the trans-
parency of barriers’ as a ‘series of identity motifs’ and also
demonstrates this with reference to the cut from Cecilia diving to
Robbie surfacing from the bath water (Childs, 2008, p. 151). As
stated, he points out that windows act as transparent barriers, and
this is made particularly significant when Briony watches Robbie
being taken away after being arrested. This barrier is also in place
when she watches him and Cecilia at the fountain.
One of the key features of the film is the long tracking shot of
the recreated chaos on the beach at Dunkirk as the Allies attempt
to make their escape. The uneven reception given to the film on
its release may be measured by critics’ views of this scene. Whereas
French regards this as evidence of ‘masterly’ cinematography,
others have been lukewarm at most in their appraisals. It lasts for
just over five minutes as the panorama includes fear and violence
and a moving Ferris wheel, and it is as though the film stands still
in time to encompass this landscape where horses are shot and
Bibles are burned so they will not fall into enemy hands.
Peter Bradshaw wonders in his review if this film will not be
populist enough to be as successful as he thinks it deserves to be:
‘There are moments – delirious, languorous, romantic moments –
when this film appears to have the lineaments of a classic. Yet
could it be that its epic, haunting story of tragic love in the Second
World War is too oblique and opaque, with too complex an enigma
at its heart, to press the right commercial buttons?’ (Bradshaw,
2007, p. 9). As Bradshaw suggests, whether it receives high box-
office sales or not, the quality of the adaptation will ensure it a
longevity of its own apart from its connection with the well-sold
novel.
. 5
Further Reading and

Discussion Questions
Introduction
As this is a contemporary novel, a programme of wider reading

could include texts that help with the study of novels, such as
Jeremy Hawthorn’s Studying the Novel (2005). Other texts such as
M. H. Abrams’ Glossary of Literary Terms (1999) are invaluable for
the comprehensive definitions they give of commonly used literary
terms as well as explanations of aspects of literary theory.
Because of the centrality of the Second World War in Atonement,
it may also be worth considering comparisons with other novels
and films that also have this as a dominant subject matter. Spies
(2002) by Michael Frayn is a notable example of a novel that is set
in this period and films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), which
focuses on the Normandy Landings, give a late twentieth-/early
twenty-first-century interpretation of this period. Dunkirk (1958),
which was directed by Leslie Norman and stars John Mills, depicts
the Dunkirk retreat and is, therefore, useful for a direct
comparative reading. Further to this, Mrs Miniver (1942) gives a

propagandist’s perspective of the effect of war in Home Counties
England. Finally, Casablanca (1942) is one of many ill-fated war
romances that have come to be thought of as classics.
With regard to the practice of adaptation, consider comparing
other notable novel-to-film works. In his review of the film
Atonement, Philip French points out the similarities with this and
two other novels that have also been adapted: The Go-Between by L.
P. Hartley and The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje
(French, 2007, p. 18). These may be good starting points when
making a comparative reading of the adaptation process.
In terms of the novel’s structure and influences, increasing
one’s familiarity with the work of writers such as Virginia Woolf,
Jane Austen and Henry James will mean that McEwan’s literary
allusions become more apparent. By following his reading, so to
speak, readers will be more open to the references he makes and to
the various styles he moulds as his own. The Waves, Northanger Abbey
and What Maisie Knew are the respective novels that make useful
starting points for this study.
For websites that give further information about the back-
ground to the Second World War and its origins, Spartacus Edu-
cational is a useful place to start and may be found at
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWbackground.htm. The histor-
ical context of the Second World War and particularly the eva-
cuation from Dunkirk is explained with first-hand accounts on the
BBC website. These narratives give the readers an insight into the
atmosphere and conditions of this time and may be found at
www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/categories/c54696/.
Discussion questions
1. When studying this or any other text, it is vital to take into

account the significance of the title, and in this case the suggested
central importance of the concept of atoning for one’s sins.
Does Briony make amends for the lie she tells? Is atonement
ever possible for her? To be able to answer these questions, it is
first necessary to consider the definition, and implications, of
atonement and the difference between this and making repara-
tions as Anita Brookner suggests in her review (‘A Morbid
Procedure’).
2. Think of how McEwan explores the idea of the danger of the
literary imagination and find some quotations from the text to
support your points. Make references to instances in Part One
where Briony prefers order over chaos and how this contrasts with
Cecilia’s outlook. It is also useful to note the places where Briony’s
imagination reconstructs events so that they become true in the
narrative, such as when she lies about Robbie raping Lola.
3. Consider Briony’s final revelation, where she explains the
lovers did not meet and that this is her novel, and explain your
reactions to this. Did you feel cheated, and/or did this add to your
enjoyment? When answering this question, remember how this
news alters the interpretation of the novel.
4. How does the structure affect the meaning of the novel?
Examine and compare the style of the different main sections and
avoid just thinking about the content. It will be necessary to bear
in mind the different settings of parts One, Two and Three as well
as the use (and non-use) of chapter divisions. To answer this as
fully as possible, make note of how much of an impact the final
revelation has on the readers’ interpretation of the novel.
5. Find examples where Atonement refers to other works of literature
and discuss the influence these have on the narrative and your
understanding of it. References to work by Virginia Woolf, D. H.
Lawrence, Jane Austen, Henry James and T. S. Eliot have all been
spotted in reviews, as well as many others; explain how, if at all,
this literary signposting adds to the novel’s depth.
6. Truth and lies are placed in the foreground of the novel, as
when Briony lies about Robbie, and Cecilia and Robbie believe
they know the ‘truth’ that Danny Hardman raped Lola. This is also
a novel about secrets as Briony’s atonement is connected to
revealing the truth about what she did or did not see on the night
she accuses Robbie. Consider how these references to lies, secrets
and truth impinge on a reading of the novel and make it difficult to
believe if or when Briony is telling the truth. To make more of this
point, make references to ‘London, 1999’ and the use of the
unreliable narrator.
7. Think about the relevance of the epigraph in relation to the
rest of the novel. Remember that McEwan has called this his ‘Jane
Austen novel’, at least with regard to Part One, and compare the
way both Atonement and Northanger Abbey expound on how the lit-
erary imagination can manipulate narratives.
8. Compare the portrayal of war in the film and novel and
explain how Part Two (in the novel) differs in terms of form and
content to Part One (which is set in the Tallis country house in
1935). Think of the difficulties, if not impossibilities, of repre-
senting the past with good faith and explain if the novel is con-
vincing in its depictions of the Dunkirk retreat.
It is also useful to consider the role of nursing during the war
and in your analysis of Part Three consider the effect of this sec-
tion playing such a large role in the novel. Is it possible to see this
as balancing the narrative in that it gives space to the role of
women as well as men?
9. How does this work compare to other McEwan novels? Look

back to his earlier and later novels and note the similarities and
differences between them. If relevant, explain how Atonement
stands apart from the others.
10. Consider the way this work engages with morality and ethics
and what effect the ambiguity of Briony’s position as the supposed
author has on the narrative. When responding to this point, bear in
mind that it is not necessary for the readers to like or admire the
narrator (or the author) to be compelled by the writing.
Works by Ian McEwan
Novels
Amsterdam (1998), London: Jonathan Cape.
Atonement (2001a), London: Jonathan Cape.
Black Dogs (1992), London: Jonathan Cape.
The Cement Garden (1978), London: Jonathan Cape.
The Child in Time (1987), London: Jonathan Cape.
The Comfort of Strangers (1981), London: Jonathan Cape.
The Daydreamer (1994), London: Jonathan Cape.
Enduring Love (1997), London: Jonathan Cape.
The Innocent (1990), London: Jonathan Cape.
On Chesil Beach (2007), London: Cape.
Saturday (2005), London: Jonathan Cape.
Selected other works by Ian McEwan
Other Fiction
First Love, Last Rites (1975/1991), London: Jonathan Cape.
For You: The Libretto for Michael Berkeley’s Opera (2008), London: Vintage.
The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television (1981), London: Jonathan
Cape.
In Between the Sheets (1978), London: Jonathan Cape.
Or Shall We Die? (1983), London: Jonathan Cape.
The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985), London: Methuen.
Soursweet (1988), London: Faber.
Non-fiction
‘A Parallel Tradition’ (2006a), Guardian, 1 April.
‘An Inspiration, Yes. Did I Copy from Another Author? No’ (2006b),
Guardian, 27 November.
‘Beyond Belief ’ (2001b), Guardian, 12 September.
‘The Day of Judgement’ (2008), Guardian, 31 May.
‘How Could We Have Forgotten This Was Always Going to Happen?’
(2005), Guardian, 8 July.
‘Only Love and Then Oblivion’ (2001c), Guardian, 15 September.
Film
Atonement (2007) (2008 DVD), dir. Joe Wright.
Being John Banville (2008), dir. Charlie McCarthy.
Interviews with Ian McEwan

Appleyard, Bryan (2007), ‘The Ghost in My Family’, The Sunday Times, 25
March.
Deveney, Catherine (2005), ‘First Love, Last Writes’, New Scotsman, 30
January.
Gerard, Jasper (2005), ‘The Conversion of Mr Macabre’, The Sunday Times,
23 January.
Hamilton, Ian (1978), ‘Points of Departure’, The New Review, 5, 2, 9–21.
Kellaway, Kate (2001), ‘At Home with His Worries’, Observer, 16

September.
Lynn, David (2007), ‘A Conversation with Ian McEwan’, The Kenyon Review,
29, 3, 38–51.
Solomon, Deborah (2007), ‘A Sinner’s Tale’, The New York Times, 2
December.
Sutherland, John (2002), ‘Life Was Clearly Too Interesting in the War’,
Guardian, 3 January.
Selected works and criticisms

Andrews, Lucilla (1977), No Time For Romance: An Autobiographical Account of
a Few Moments in British and Personal History. London: Harrap.
Banville, John (2005), ‘A Day in the Life’, The New York Review of Books, 26
May.
Bradshaw, Peter (2007), ‘Atonement’, Guardian, 7 September, p. 9.
Brookner, Anita (2001), ‘A Morbid Procedure’, The Spectator, 15 September,
p. 44.
Calvino, Italo (1981), If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), trans. from
the Italian by William Weaver. London: Secker and Warburg.
Childs, Peter (2008), ‘Atonement: The Surface of Things’, Adaptation, 1, 2,
151–2.
— (2005) The Fiction of Ian McEwan. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Christopher, James (2007), ‘Atonement’, The Times, 29 August.
Cohen, Patricia (2008), ‘An Author Enters the Fray’, The New York Times, 24
June.
D’hoker, Elke (2006), ‘Confession and Atonement in Contemporary Fiction:
J. M. Coetzee, John Banville and Ian McEwan’, Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction, Fall, 48 1, 31–43.
Dyer, Geoff (2001), ‘Who’s Afraid of Influence?’, Guardian. 22 September.
Finney, Brian (2004), ‘Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of
Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Journal of Modern Literature, 27, 3,
Winter, 68–82.
French, Philip (2007), ‘Forgive Me, I Have Sinned’, Observer, 9 September,

pp. 18–19.
Gauthier, Tim S. (2006), Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations: A. S.
Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie. New York and London: Routledge.
Haffenden, John (1985), Novelists in Interview. New York and London:
Methuen.
Harold, James (2005), ‘Narrative Engagement with Atonement and The Blind
Assassin’, Philosophy and Literature, April. 29, 1, 130–45.
Head, Dominic (2007), Ian McEwan (Contemporary British Novelists). Man-
chester: Manchester University Press.
Hidalgo, Pilar (2005), ‘Memory and Storytelling in Ian McEwan’s Atone-
ment’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 46, 2, Winter, 82–91.
Ingersoll, Earl G. (2004), ‘Intertextuality in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between
and Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, July,
40, 3, 241–58.
Kakutani, Michiko (2002), ‘Books of the Times; and when she was bad she
was ...’ The New York Times, 7 March.
Kemp, Peter (2001), ‘Atonement by Ian McEwan’, The Sunday Times, 16
September.
Kermode, Frank (2001), ‘Point of View’, London Review of Books, 23, 19, 4
October.
Klein, Melanie (1937), ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’, in Melanie Klein and
Joan Riviere, Love, Hate and Reparation. London: Hogarth Press.
Lanchester, John (2002), ‘The Dangers of Innocence’, The New York Review
of Books, 49, 6, 11 April, pp. 24–6.
Landesman, Cosmo (2007), ‘Atonement – The Sunday Times Review’, The
Sunday Times, 9 September.
Lee, Hermione (2001), ‘If Your Memory Serves You Well ...’ Observer, 23
September.
Lyall, Sarah (1998), ‘Amsterdam by Ian McEwan Wins the Booker Prize’, The
New York Times, 28 October.
MacFarlane, Robert (2001), ‘A Version of Events’, The Times Literary Sup-
plement, 28 September, p. 23.
McCrum, Robert (2005), ‘The Story of His Life’, Observer, 23 January, p. 5.
McFarlane, Brian (1996), Novel to Film. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Malcolm, David (2002), Understanding Ian McEwan. South Carolina: Uni-

versity of South Carolina.
Messud, Claire (2002), ‘The Beauty of the Conjuring’, Atlantic Monthly,
289, 3, March, pp. 106–9.
Morrison, Jago (2003), Contemporary Fiction. London: Routledge.
Moss, Stephen (2001), ‘The Literary Old Guard’, Guardian, 6 August.
Mullan, John (2003a), ‘Between the Lines’, Guardian, 8 March, p. 31.
— (2003b), ‘Looking Forward to the Past’, Guardian, 15 March, p. 32.
— (2003c), ‘Turning up the Heat’, Guardian, 22 March, p. 32.
— (2003d), ‘Beyond Fiction’, Guardian, 29 March, p. 32.
Reynolds, Margaret and John Noakes (2002), Ian McEwan: The Essential
Guide. London: Vintage.
Reynolds, Nigel (2006), ‘The Borrowers: ‘‘Why McEwan is no Plagiarist’’ ’.
Telegraph, 7 December.
Rooney, Anne (2006), York Notes on ‘Atonement’. London: Longman/Prentice
Hall.
Ryan, Kiernan (1994), Ian McEwan. Plymouth: Northcote House.
Schemberg, Claudia (2004), Achieving ‘At-one-ment’. Berne: Peter Lang.
Scott, A. O. (2007), ‘Lies, Guilt, Stiff Upper Lips’, The New York Times, 7
December.
Seaboyer, Judith (2005), ‘Ian McEwan: Contemporary Realism and the
Novel of Ideas’, in James Acheson and Sarah C. E. Ross (eds), The
Contemporary British Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp.
23–34.
Shone, Tom (2002), ‘White Lies’, The New York Times, 10 March.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary
Nelson and Larry Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois.
Swan, Robert (ed.) (2006), AS/A-Level English Literature: ‘Atonement’.
London: Philip Allan.
Tew, Philip (2004), The Contemporary British Novel. London: Continuum.
Tóibı́n, Colm (2007), ‘Dissecting the Body’, London Review of Books, 29, 8,
26 April, pp. 28–9.
Websites concerned with McEwan’s work

www.ianmcewan.com, accessed 22 January 2009.
Mullan, John (2007), ‘Profile: atoning for past sins’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/
1/hi/magazine/6972320.stm, accessed 22 January 2009.
Kibble, Matthew (2000), ‘McEwan, Ian’, Literature Online Biography,
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_
ver=0.2&res_id=xri:lion&rft_id=xri:lion:ft:ref:BIO002803:0, accessed
22 January 2009.
Matthews, Sean (2002), ‘Ian McEwan’, British Council: Contemporary
Writers, www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth70, accessed
22 January 2009.
Websites for historical context

For more information about the background to the Second World War,
click on to Spartacus Educational at www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/
2WWbackground.htm, accessed 22 January 2009.
The BBC website has personal testimonies of men who were at the eva-
cuation at Dunkirk. These may be found at www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peoples
war/categories/c54696/, accessed 22 January 2009.
General literary studies

Abrams, M. H. (1999), A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edn). Texas:
Harcourt Brace College.
Hawthorn, Jeremy (2005), Studying the Novel (5th edn). London: Hodder
Arnold.

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I an McEwan has had a long and successful writing career

maintaining a distance from its subject matter. Over the decades,

himself, came from military families’, and is a former school of

morality this is a problematic debate, as there is the implication

children’s author and a member of the Official Commission on

More recent fiction

states in ‘The Ghost in My Family’ that his ‘heart sinks’ at what he

Atonement, Briony’s accusation and decision to stay firm to it are at

offered their support against the criticism and Thomas Pynchon

Literary influences, contexts and the writing process

On his arrival on the literary scene in the early 1970s, McEwan

In ‘A Parallel Tradition’, which is an expanded essay of a talk

being indebted to existentialist thinking in that it takes a thematic

fear as well as marking his ‘transitional shift towards a traditional

Comparisons may be made with works such as The French

A tonement has come to be regarded as one of McEwan’s

distance and irony, without creating too much of either. It is like

Structure and content

At first glance, this has a simple structure of three main sections

it has been influenced by Briony’s perspective. It is also explained

shifting point of view. Cecilia and Briony are used respectively to

means that the contrast between the hierarchies is sharpened. The

cataclysms, personal and public, one afterward. Thus McEwan

dominate, is first introduced with Grace’s anger at the arrest of her

aspects to her character as she follows the orders of the formidable

The literary imagination

imaginative powers as she goes on to regard Robbie as a ‘maniac’

in that there is this warning of the dangers of control and imagi-

(MacFarlane, 2001, p. 23). To this end, McEwan’s use of struc-

Connolly for having caught ‘something unique and unexplained’,

naturalism. The political impotency of the writer, as claimed by

Guilt, forgiveness and atonement

anxious bride-to-be is used when an explanation is offered for why

The use of shifting perspectives between many of the central

restricted by the influence of one author or movement. This

at various times an adolescent who wishes to take centre-stage, an

of vascular dementia means she will soon need ‘continuous care’ as

is broached by the education he has received. However, the dif-

is heightened when one considers how he touches his injury in Part

Robbie’s lover and Briony’s unforgiving sister. Her letters to Rob-

The cousins from the north

received a university education that would have otherwise been

Metaphors and symbolic language

The Tallis house

reproduction of Bernini’s Triton. To add to this emphasis on fakery,

The Army Amo bar

it is discovered that he is the one who goes on to rape Lola, the

to be biased anyway as it is in the first person, and means that

In his interview with David Lynn, McEwan explains the readers