Themes
1 Atonement, guilt and regret
- As is evident from the novel’s title, atonement and regret are the chief concerns of the text, and of its narrator, Briony.
- Many characters exhibit regret and a sense of guilt – Lola and Paul Marshall, both at least as guilty as Briony, do not.
- Cecilia does not exhibit regret as she is comfortable that she has done the right thing; Robbie deals well with regret.
- The sincerity of Briony’s regret is potentially undermined by the fact that outside of her fiction she never actually sought or apologised to Cecilia.
2 War and conflict
- War is crucial to the novel, overshadowing even Part One, despite its being set in a country house in 1935. For example in Jack Tallis’s war department’s calculations for predicted casualties.
- Very different attitudes to conflict are exhibited in the novel, from Robbie’s disillusioned stoicism, Emily Tallis’s indifference, and Paul Marshall seeing it as a business opportunity.
- The most important conflicts within the narrative are arguably internal ones, the central example of which is Briony’s struggle with guilt and need to atone.
- Atonement’s attitude to the Second World War is anything but idealised, being primarily filtered through Robbie’s horrific experiences.
3 Love and romance
- Atonement is a tragedy, but also a romance, with the former only coming to light in the late revelation that Briony’s narrative is idealised invention.
- Love is a powerful, ‘elemental’ (p. 264) force in Atonement: it sustains Robbie through prison and the war, and allows Cecilia to forsake her own family.
- Love is present in many forms in the novel: the romantic sexual love of Cecilia and Robbie, the lust of Paul Marshall, and the ‘self-love’ (p. 147) of Briony.
- Romance literature is key to the novel, from the lovers’ early remarks on Pamela, to the code used in their letters, and Briony’s enthusiasm for melodrama.
4 Truth
- The concept of truth is naturally at the centre of a novel in which the pivotal act involves the bearing of false witness.
- The form of the text deliberately draws attention to the relative truth of the narrative, and closes with the rhetorical question – ‘But what really happened?’ (p. 371).
- Briony’s fault as a child is an inability or disinclination to separate fact from fiction, taking her misinformed readings of events as simple truth.
- In trying to make her false claim against Robbie a ‘perfectly honest’ one, Briony resorts to technicality and ‘common sense’ (p. 169).
5 Reading, writing and authorship
- By using the device of a narrator who is also author, McEwan explores the power of authorship and the act of writing.
- The tragic lovers Cecilia and Robbie are both more sophisticated readers than Briony, and more experienced in life, and Robbie is both an aspiring poet and a letter writer.
- Literary allusions and works are evoked regularly, and the letter Cyril Connolly sends Briony in Part Two is an explicit discussion of writing as art.
- The limitations of authorship – and thus the effectiveness of Briony’s method of atoning – is undermined by her acknowledgement of her narrative’s untruth and futility.
Copyright © York Press, 2017