I can’t technically join the masses in saying Atonement is Ian McEwan’s masterpiece, being the only novel of his that I’ve read. But I happily join them in singing its praises as a masterful piece of literature. McEwan’s prose is spellbindingly beautiful and the novel is rich with the metaphors and biting social commentary that make a novel so enjoyable to the student of literature. Simply put, Atonement is McEwan’s aptitude for emoting through language on full display and is my equivalent of the captivating firework show in Taylor’s Swift’s ‘Sparks Fly’. Telling the story of a writer completely dominated by her desire to create and control all the narratives around her, it is also McEwan’s letter to the imagination. The novel’s ending might complicate whether that letter is one of love or if it is the poison-pen type but given he has made a career out of imagining and doing it wonderfully, I’ll settle for the former. 

I first read Atonement at sixteen in the second year of my A-Levels, nursing a five-year-old desire to study English Literature at university and the beginnings of a longing to write anything at all for the rest of my life. I did go on to study English Literature at university, and, now twenty-three, do write recreationally. We read the book as a crime novel so naturally, the classroom discussions following the revelation of that ending turned to the crime committed against us the readers — the dual crime of being manipulated into a false hope and approving an undeserved acquittal (if you view Briony unfavourably by the end of the novel). I loved reading and studying the novel equally; I loved McEwan introducing me to words I’d never heard of before (‘veracity’ and ‘verisimilitude’ were very quick to leave my mouth whenever the occasion presented itself in the years following 2017), reading sentences that just couldn’t be over and over again, and really, really disliking Briony with the rest of the class, and the world it seems. 

With Atonement, I felt that excitement that comes when you read an opening paragraph and know you’re going to fixate on a book for a very long time after you’re done with it, and the subsequent obsession of thinking every image evoked is magic itself and you simply won’t be told otherwise. It probably wouldn’t be incorrect to say that Atonement was my equivalent of a girlhood romance, having taken me through almost all of the firsts that a winsome boy my age might have. I was able to move on from my obsession with the novel just enough to prepare for my exams and live a life that wasn’t all about the word verisimilitude, but in the same way George Orwell knew he would one day have to resign himself to writing, I knew that one day I would have to settle myself into a hobbit-hole of my making, cup of tea in hand, and return to Atonement. So I sat my exams, worked a few jobs during my gap year and then laughed and cried my way through university, coming to womanhood with Renaissance satires and revenge tragedies, obscure Old and Middle English poems about hares, and ‘world’ literature from maybe two countries that weren’t European, with Atonement always in the back of my mind. 

When I started rereading the novel this summer, I was struck by how much more pronounced the representations of writing and the imagination were to me now than they had been six years ago. At sixteen I wasn’t ignorant of the reality that Atonement is as much a novel about writing and authorship as it is a redemption and love story, but at the time I had written little more than some short stories that kind teachers had encouraged and some scribbles of poems here and there, instead choosing to spend the bulk of my time thinking about ‘seriously’ writing and lamenting the fact that I didn’t know how it could be done. As such, the aspects of the novel concerned with writing registered to me in an academic way only. Finding the answer to the Briony question — that is, whether Briony was lying to us or telling us the truth with her final chapter — preoccupied me most. Now, as a reader who also writes, my attention is more on the craft of writing as displayed through and by the novel, which incidentally cannot be divorced from the Briony question.

If the imagination is an expression of a person’s interiority as it is often understood to be, it is fascinating that we come away from Atonement actually knowing nothing about Briony Tallis, our narrator. In a journal article published in 2017, Huw Marsh expands the discourse on Atonement’s narrative unreliability to, quite radically, argue for the plausibility of Robbie’s guilt, and that Briony’s self-professed desire to exonerate him through the novel is not necessarily an end to the questions of truth, narrativity, and unreliability raised by the revelation at the end of Part 3 but a continuation of them. I am less concerned about the question of who between Robbie and Paul Marshall is the truly guilty party in the novel’s central crime, if it is either one of them. What I do find compelling is Marsh’s basis for introducing this alternative reading, which is his observation that the prevailing readings of the novel, which privilege Briony’s admission in the final chapter as fact finally demarcated from fiction, are ill-founded. He correctly identifies that such readings reveal more about our reading practices than the truth itself, writing:

that Briony is taken at her word even after the metanarrative reveal at the novel’s conclusion is a function not simply of the greater credulity ascribed to the mature, worldly Briony, but also of the ways in which narratives and narrators are read and interpreted.¹

Indeed, there is no real reason why after being made aware of Briony’s unreliability —by herself, crucially — we should be inclined to accept ‘London 1999’, the novel’s final chapter in which she reveals her involvement in Atonement’s events and her authorship of the novel, as any more reliable than the account that precedes it. In actuality, the idea that we can take ‘London, 1999’ at face value seems in opposition to what the novel itself shows. 

Through Briony’s multiple identities as character-narrator-author, Atonement embodies the capacity of fiction writing to both reveal and conceal truth. Thus, in Briony Tallis, we find the full scope of the possibilities of writing. Even as she seems to expose her own interiority through her writing, encouraging us to think this way through sentences such as “Self exposure was inevitable the moment the described a character’s weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself”, she is actually increasingly wriggling herself away from the grasp of our understanding.² Her characterisation of herself in Part 1 alone could be read as deliberately self-flagellative in the hope of coercing us to forgive her by demonstrating the appropriate amount of self-loathing, or, as some have read it, a mostly truthful account of her former character, motivated by the desire to make wrong right in the only way she feels capable. We might want to say the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but what McEwan does at the end of the novel explodes our ability to land anywhere at all concerning Briony’s character. 

At the same time I was studying Atonement, one of the books I read outside of my studies was Lolita, which also features an unreliable narrator-protagonist. Briony bears resemblance to Humbert Humbert in that (and really only in this way if you know the story of Lolita) she, too, is an adult retrospectively narrating a story in which she claims to take responsibility for the havoc wreaked by her actions. But where Humbert is knowable, Briony is not, a difference that seems to be largely due to the authors’ structuring of their novels. Humbert alerts us to his unreliability and his dubious morality at the beginning of the narrative when, after introducing his predilection for young girls with a fancy prose style, he says: ‘You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style’.³ So when he tells us that his new wife Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother — who was essentially the only barrier to his uninhibited abuse of Lolita (his only motivation for marrying Charlotte in the first place) — died in a car crash, the more cynical among us might find this to be a case of extreme bejewelling to history, and for good reason. Although there are many other details of Humbert’s narrative that we might look at with suspicion, because the novel is framed as a memoir from the start, we can generally accept that Humbert is attracted to girls and that his commitment to gratifying this desire cost Lolita her childhood. If nothing else, we can accept that Humbert is who he says he is. We can do no such thing with Briony because her claims come at the end of the novel. 

Marsh notes that people have found themselves able to be convinced by older Briony because, quoting Brian Richardson’s argument about the denarrated novel, although unreliability and metanarrativity as presented in Atonement will raise questions about the relationship between history and truth, ‘for many readers, the storyworld [will remain] stable’.⁴ Our insistence on the stability of Atonement’s storyworld is what allows us to affirm the reality of a Cecilia and Robbie in Briony’s life and a love snuffed out by her hand even if the novel’s minor details, such as the story behind Uncle Clem’s vase or the extent to which Emily Tallis was an absent mother, may be as questionable as Humbert having no involvement in Charlotte’s death. To affirm the major details is to also affirm that Briony Tallis is Briony Tallis in the first place, which we are prevented from doing as soon as McEwan exposes Briony’s narratorial involvement with the novel, at which point the storyworld is destabilised in its entirety. This calls into question every word that has flown from Briony’s Bakelite pens or typewriters in the years spent writing and rewriting the novel and Briony’s words about herself are not exempt from this. Recognition of this reveals that all of the novel’s details are minor details. It becomes possible, then, that our narrator is not the neglected daughter of a senior civil servant, did not enjoy a childhood of writing stories and staging plays in a deteriorating English country house, and has no freckled, ‘fluorescently’-coloured cousins to speak of. Briony Tallis could just as well be an unremarkable woman who struck it lucky in the publishing industry, or a man born to a working-class Scottish military father. In how he uses the metanarrative device, McEwan more than denies us the tools to distinguish the embellishments from the fabric — he obscures the fabric altogether. Though she seduces us into believing otherwise, it becomes impossible to locate Briony Tallis in her novel. 

When compared to her characterisation of her story’s other characters, Briony’s evasion of her own knowability becomes more apparent. In the chapters where Briony extensively inhabits the minds of Cecilia, her mother, and Robbie, McEwan provides us with vivid pictures of these characters in both subtle and clear-cut ways. Paul Marshall’s villainy, for example, is suggested by his rigidity in issues of class, reflected in his condescension towards the lower-class boys he went to university with in contrast to Cecilia and Leon’s own casual relationships with those ‘beneath them’. It is then confirmed by the nature of the dream he has about his younger sisters which establishes him as the novel’s sexual threat, particularly towards adolescent rather than adult females. But within the value system that Cecilia and Robbie hold to, which Briony for the rest of the novel presents herself as having adopted, Marshall is also marginalised in less obvious ways.

When Cecilia returns from her task of gathering wildflowers for the guest room Paul Marshall will be staying in, we are told that “She spent some time making adjustments [to the flowers] to achieve a natural, chaotic look”.⁵ While the finished display of the flowers gestures towards realism, Cecilia’s desire to imitate nature, demonstrated by her exertion over the flowers to make them appear natural rather than allowing them to fall naturally, betrays her romanticist sensibilities. This finds its analogue, albeit in the inverse, in Robbie’s abandonment of his very self-consciously typewritten letters to her for the handwritten one that more honestly reveals his feelings towards her. Through this symbolic parallel between the two (one of many, including their similarly messy bedrooms and choice of degree – English Literature), Briony continues her establishment of Robbie and Cecilia’s appropriateness as a love match in spite of their class differences. By contrast, Cecilia considers that Paul Marshall might believe that the flowers had “simply been dropped in the vase in the same carefree spirit with which they had been picked”, failing to see the contrivance of the whole scene, which presents him as the shallow mind to Robbie’s own depth of thought.⁶ This is reinforced by Marshall’s attempt to garner the respect of fifteen year old Lola by declaring ‘To be or not to be’ when she mentions Hamlet, not because it has any significance to him, but explicitly because it is the only line he knows from a play he has neither read nor watched.⁷ The overwhelming implication about Marshall in these chapters, that seems to be proven by the rest of the narrative, is that he is a man obsessed with appearances, lacking the kind of character possessed by Cecilia and Robbie that would incline somebody to think twice about life’s mundanities. 

From the picture that the rest of the novel paints, we can conclude that Paul Marshall the war confectionary magnate represents a dishonest, self-serving masculinity that his implied rape of Lola and willingness to allow Robbie to be punished for is the ultimate expression of. On the other hand, Robbie, whose dreams of being a doctor are coloured by his romantic ideals as a literature student, can be said to possess a sensitive, humane masculinity that stands in opposition to the upper-middle class concerns of war-planning and womanising that the Tallis men and Paul Marshall embody. With these characters, Briony fulfils one of the traditional roles of the author which is to mediate our relationship to her novel’s characters, which is why we are able to glean anything about Cecilia, Robbie and Paul Marshall. But the implications of Briony’s identity as author-narrator on her own character, both in the story sense and in the sense of her inner self, unravel all of the conceptions we had been forming about her as we read. McEwan’s presentation of Briony in the novel is such that she evades identification and it is her writing, the very thing that is presented to us as the expression of her innermost self, that conceals her. 

Whether Briony Tallis as she presents herself is a sociopath or not is a question that will probably never die for fans of the book, and one that McEwan himself would seemingly answer no to. In an article published in 2015, he reveals that not only was Briony an afterthought to Cecilia and Robbie’s love story, in his imagination she was only ever an innocent, sharing that “When she wrongly accuses Robbie, she is guilty of a mistake rather than intentional mendacity. Her imagination has her in its grip”.⁸ This was fascinating to me because if it isn’t obvious nearly 3,000 words into this essay, I admire McEwan’s writing so getting a glimpse into the conception of arguably his most controversial character was enjoyable. It was also fascinating because the novel seems to have done something very different from what he had in mind. If McEwan says he always conceived of older Briony as a figure of genuine sorrow at the lives mislaid by her childhood mistake, I don’t doubt him. But McEwan’s saying this about Briony doesn’t necessarily mean that is the Briony we have, and I believe it isn’t. That isn’t to say that Briony’s accusation isn’t a mistake, but to say that with his own device, McEwan obliterates any chance of knowing what Briony’s motivations are for any of what she does in and with her novel. As I reflected on the article, my mind went to Roland Barthes’ most famous essay to conclude that Atonement seems to perfectly embody the less-than-straightforward relationship between author, text, reader, and meaning. 

At best, Briony Tallis is a morally ambiguous character. At worst, she is a narcissist of terrifying proportion. By design or not, McEwan doesn’t enable a character study of Briony in the way we’d maybe like, certainly not in the way Briony lavishes upon us all that is necessary to create a character study of Cecilia, Robbie, her cousins, and Paul Marshall, for example. Maybe frustratingly, all we learn about Briony through the novel is that what we have read are the words of a woman who tells us she is Briony Tallis. Truth or untruth are not necessarily of importance; Briony herself doesn’t deny this, while mind-bendingly still gesturing towards her own truthfulness at the end. While we learn much about ‘Briony Tallis’ the fiction writer who hovers over Atonement’s words like a god through the novel’s intertextual references and the stylistic choices revealing her influences and desires, Briony Tallis the person is no more knowable by a re-reading of Atonement than a first reading. We can’t tell the author from the narrator from the overgrown child, and all of this is achieved through a mind that has applied itself to writing.