‘She would rewrite the past’ : Briony as narrator-manipulator in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Abstract

Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement1 is mainly concerned with the protagonist Briony Tallis’s efforts to atone for a crime she committed in 1935 as a young teenager. This crime was that of bearing false witness. Briony’s mendacious testimony condemns an upright young man – Robbie Turner, son of the Tallises’ charwoman – to public ignominy and a long prison sentence for rape. Briony also separates her older sister Cecilia from Robbie, whom the young woman is secretly in love with. Both the lovers die in the Second World War, leaving behind a Briony racked with guilt, hoping to find a way to atone for the harm she has done them. After much soul-searching she decides that the best way in which she can atone for her crime is through the medium of her chosen vocation – that of fiction. Like McEwan himself, in fact, Briony Tallis is a writer. Shortly after the lovers’ deaths, she determines to write a novel which will constitute her ‘atonement’ (p. 349). Briony’s ‘atonement novel’, the reader discovers in the coda (pp. 351–72) is, in effect, the novel he holds in his hands. This paper sets out to assess Briony’s success in atoning for her crime by means of the novel Atonement. The main point it seeks to make is that, far from representing an adequate atonement for a serious crime, Atonement is yet another of this devious character’s diversionary ploys.