Believe me friends, I do still read print! I just tend to zoom through audiobooks at increased speed while getting things done. This time, I turned to a novel that shows up on top {name your number} books of the last {name the number of years or centuries}. I have avoided reading Atonement, because the publisher blurb begins, “In Atonement, three children lose their innocence, as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935, and their lives are changed forever.” The three include Cecilia, who has just graduated from Cambridge with only a third and her thirteen year old sister Briony who has been writing since she could read and hold a writing instrument. They live a life of privilege on a country estate. Robbie is the third affected party, also a recent Cambridge graduate, but with a first. He plans to go to medical school. The girls’ father, Jack Tallis, has funded Robbie’s education since he was quite young. Their mother, Emily is persistently ill. The book opens at a time when the girls’ cousins, nine year old twin boys and their fifteen year old sister are staying with the family as their parents are divorcing. It is unbearably hot.
Atonement takes place in three parts. In the first, we are on the estate in 1935. After some interactions with his childhood friend, Cecilia that seem almost antagonistic, Robbie realizes it is in fact a strong attraction. Through an unexpected error, Briony believes he is dangerous to Cecilia and, when an opportunity presents itself, tells a lie that changes his and Cecilia’s futures. She is half convinced of its truth and it becomes important for a while for her to stick to it because admitting her wrongdoing is unbearable.
In the next section of the novel, Robbie is in the service in France, heading to Dunkirk on foot with a group of corporals as they prepare to leave the country. It is dangerous and many are on the same journey. Over and over, he is faced with moral choices about who to save and how to save them and how to account for his choices. Then, there’s Cecilia, who has become a nurse and is estranged from her family due to their support of Briony and the impact it had on Robbie. Briony, always an excellent student, has given up her place at Cambridge to become a nurse as well. She has come to understand what happened in 1935 and that she, alone can address the wrong she did. However, she cannot actually fix it. There are no reparations that will give back what was lost to Robbie and to Cecilia. She begins a more thoughtful way of being, continues with her writing and experiences the horrors of war in a hospital for gravely injured servicemen. She seems to be very alone in the world and very much focused on how to atone when it cannot change anything. Who is it for when we make amends if the amends can’t fix it?
At the end, it is 1999 and Briony gives us a kind of epilogue about a book she wrote but cannot publish. Acknowledging it will be the ultimate best she can do but it will likely not be published until all the players who knew about the lie and did nothing are dead. What is amazing about Atonement is that the theme, while very sad is not overwhelmingly hard to bear. Terrible tragedies happen and we experience them as strong people and I’m not sure why. McEwan’s writing puts us in the picture always, as if we are Robbie, we are Briony, we are Cecilia. More than any novel I’ve ever read, and that’s saying a lot, his ability to get us inside the heads of the players is unmatched. The scenes are set in memorable ways as if we lived them. The story of a broken vase. The story of a disrupted sexual encounter. The dinner. Twins running away. The lie. Boom! We are in France, seeking shelter at a farm owned by an addled woman. Then moving on as if in a movie of a pilgrimage helping here, ignoring there the suffering and lives being lost, bodies being destroyed. Then, to a hospital where the destroyed bodies arrive, dying so fast their names are forgotten while young nursing students only are required to work twelve hour shifts. And then, a person looking both back at this life and forward to something unwelcome and unexpected, but the book is written. It is written.
You could write spoilers about Atonement, which I have generally avoided doing, but you will find that it doesn’t matter what you know about it. It is itself an experience. It deserves its place in the best of the best category. Highly, highly recommend.
They Called me Bookworm 