SPL Reads!

Avid Readers, our brand new book club, met Thursday night to tease out the complexities of Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement, over Italian cream cake (YUM!) and fresh fruit. We had a great group! There was a lot to say about the novel – if you hadn’t read it, as a group, we really recommend it.

Atonement begins during a sweltering summer day in the English countryside in the 1930s, where the Tallis family is gathering. The oldest child, Leon, is returning home to visit, and the youngest, Briony, is feverishly preparing a play to welcome him. Cecilia, the middle child, is at home, struggling with ennui and bad test scores, not to mention her complicated emotions toward Robbie Turner, the son of the Tallis’s cleaning lady whose education is being funded by the elusive Jack Tallis. Jack spends as much time away from home as possible, while his wife Emily suffers from debilitating migraines that render her incapable of running the household. Emily’s sister Hermoine is undergoing a divorce, and her three children, Lola, Pierrot, and Jackson.

The novel sprawls forth from this innocuous premise, and Ewan’s languid, highly descriptive, and deceptively genteel prose gradually builds to a shocking event. Briony finds Lola being raped, and in confusion and under the spell of her own vital fantasy world, accuses the wrong man, shattering the lives of Robbie Turner and her older sister Cecilia, and condemning herself to a lifetime quest for atonement for her horrible lie.

One of our members was particularly familiar with McEwan’s work, and mentioned how skilled the author is at building a carefully constructed house of cards. If the vase had not broken… if the play had been produced according to Briony’s wishes… if the twins had not run away… if Robbie had chosen to search for them in a group instead of alone… The pace of the first half of the novel is a very slow one, but even the most insignificant details gain a ghastly importance by the time McEwan sets his final domino in place.

During the first phase of the book, McEwan returns again and again to the nature of writing and the writer. Briony is thirteen years old, and wildly imaginative. She is a fairly prolific writer at this point, having churned out numerous short stories. However, when she witnesses an incident at the fountain which is beyond her comprehension, it prods her to take the next step in her development as a writer:

“She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have” (38).

In this passage, McEwan clearly telegraphs his intentions for the novel, which will shift between the perspectives of Briony, Cecilia, and Robbie, showing how drastically different a single event can seem when filtered through three separate minds.

The ambiguous ending of the book gave some of us a little bit of trouble (if you haven’t finished the book, please stop reading here!). McEwan returns to the nature of writing by revealing that Briony herself has been writing the story all along, and chose to end the narrative by allowing herself to apologize to Cecilia and Robbie, who have been reunited after World War II. In the characters’ reality, though, Briony tells us that Cecilia and Robbie never saw each other again – Robbie died of his wounds in the war, and Cecilia was killed in the bombing of London. Furthermore, Briony never had a chance to tell her sister that she was truly sorry. A few of us were highly disappointed by such an incredibly grim ending – after all, we’d been suffering with the separated lovers for hundreds of pages, and, just like Briony the author, felt like we needed them to be together in the end.

For Briony, rewriting the ending of the story seems to be the only available method for achieving atonement, and affirms the power of art:

How could that constitute an ending? What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that, except in the services of bleakest realism? . . . I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy . . . then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.”

This passage reminded one reader of The Life of Pi, which also concludes with an ambiguous duality, and invites the reader to believe the version of the story he or she prefers. It’s a very interesting comparison, and if you enjoyed the metafictional twist McEwan throws out in Atonement, you might want to take a look at The Life of Pi.

We also discussed issues of class and gender in the book, particularly as evidenced in the character of Cecilia. Even before her liason with the son of the family’s maid, Cecilia was engaged in an almost open rebellion against her family’s expectations. She smoked in public (absolutely forbidden for a young lady), attended college (an activity her mother viewed as quite worthless), and daydreamed about leaving home in pursuit of some sort of adventure. Her acceptance of Robbie was an even bolder move, particularly in light of the letter that brought them together. Robbie intended the letter to be an apology for his vaguely rude behavior at the fountain, and broke down and scrawled a sexually explicit message on the bottom of the page. He rewrote the draft (without the obscene addition), but unfortunately had the wrong version delivered to Cecilia.

The letter Cecilia (and regrettably, Briony) read contains the word that many find to be the most offensive in the English language. After pages and pages of McEwan’s genteel, descriptive writing, that word positively explodes off the page, shocking the reader almost as badly as it does Briony. And yet, it seems to be the first honest statement made thus far – all of the characters are living in a delusional state, ignoring real problems (not the least of which is the impending World War II) and clinging to simpler fantasies. Perhaps it is the uncensored honesty in Robbie’s statement that captures Cecilia’s heart, rather than its literal content.

All in all, we very much enjoyed grappling with the complicated issues raised in the novel! We also took a look at a preview for the film version, which is scheduled for a December release in the US - click here to see trailers, clips, release information, and more. We’re excited to see it – judging from the trailer, it seems like the movie will be extremely faithful to the book.

 If there’s anything about Atonement that really struck you, please leave a comment and let us know about it! We’ll be reading Unburnable by Marie-Elena John for our next meeting on October 4th, and I’ll post some background information about it next week. Until then, happy reading, and thanks for the fantastic discussion!