“On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses something she does not understand and tells a lie that destroys her sister's life.”
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Atonement is Ian McEwan's 2001 novel, the Booker Prize-shortlisted historical literary fiction that established McEwan as the most carefully calibrated British novelist of his generation. The novel opens on the hot summer day in 1935 when thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, an aspiring novelist staging a play for her older brother's homecoming, witnesses a series of incidents involving her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner (the son of the family charwoman, recently down from Cambridge on a scholarship). Briony does not understand what she has seen. She fills in what she does not understand with the story she wants to be true. By the end of the day, she has told a lie that destroys Robbie's life.
What McEwan is doing is building a four-part novel (1935 country house, 1940 Dunkirk retreat, 1940 St Thomas Hospital wartime nursing, 1999 framing chapter) where each section refines and complicates the previous one. The 1935 country-house section is one of the most carefully observed period social-novel passages in contemporary British fiction; the 1940 Dunkirk section is the strongest war-prose McEwan has written; the 1999 framing chapter recontextualizes everything that came before in a way readers should not have spoiled for them. The novel asks one of the hardest questions contemporary literary fiction has attempted: what does it mean to make art out of a real harm you cannot undo.
Recommended as required contemporary British literary fiction reading, as the right McEwan entry point, and as one of the canonical novels of the twenty-first century. The 2007 Joe Wright film is excellent and rewards reading the book first. The Carole Boyd audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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