COMMENTARY: Atonement (2007)

20250905

The following are thoughts and reactions I had while reading Atonement (2007) by Ian McEwan. They do not reflect my overall post-reading opinion of the work. For self-study purposes, there may also be extensive summaries of the plot in these notes. In short…

⚠️ MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD ⚠️

Part 1: 175pp/13ch, Part 2: 71pp, Part 3: 77pp, Epilogue: 18pp

P1C1 (2024) - Briony is 13, wrote a play. Mom loves it. Recently divorced aunt brings 9yo twin boys and 15yo daughter, Lola, to her house. Briony casts them. Lola hijacks Briony’s intent to cast herself as the star. Briony attempts to wrestle power back as director.
P1C1 (2025) - rereading from the start after not touching this from a year ago. Don’t know if I’m paying more attention this time around as this was at the tail end of a period of novels, or it was during a unsettling period of my life (after losing a major retainer and landing Client A), but picking up on a lot more of what McEwan is laying down in terms of Briony’s interiority.
(2024) - Not sure I love the distant third. Feels like some wry, smarty pants narrator… which is part and parcel of a lot of literary novels which I get. The Corrections definitely was like this.
P1C2 (2024) - Cecilia is home from finals. She wants a cigarette but is avoiding Robbie, a servant’s son who’s gardening and in her way. There’s a fountain that’s a replica of Bernini’s Triton in Piazza Barberini but the water is weak. There’s a vase that Uncle Clem got from the war as a gift from evacuating a small town west of Verdun. Eventually she does end up talking to Robbie, he’s being weird about the money Cecilia’s father spends on his education, he’s been acting weird and extra respectful around the house, and now he’s offering to help with the vase and Cecilia doesn’t want any of that, they struggle, it breaks and falls into the fountain.
P1C2 (2025) - yeah, I was definitely skimming or not fully letting the narrative sink in last year. Or my understanding of arcs were missing altogether, but mcewan’s psychological and relationship dynamics are just fantastic.
p1c3 (2024) - Jackson pees his pants and now Briony’s rehearsal plans are ruined. Lola is being condescending, maybe. Briony contemplates the emotional interior of people and wished she wrote a story instead of putting on a play. Spies on Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain last chapter but with zero context.
(2024) Ok. Cool. Inciting incident and two POVs that will cause decades of misunderstanding in place. Let’s go.
(2025) ok. It wasn’t a misunderstanding so much as Briony gonna make shit up. But also… I see what McEwan is doing here. Clever. The characters in the book are each adding their POV.
P1C4 (2024) - Cecilia sees Briony upset, runs away. Leon and friend Paul Marshall arrives. Talks to Robbie. Then Cecilia greets them. They’re talking and Paul is monologuing so Cecilia tries to play “the look” a game Leon and her played as kids. But then they have a row about Leon inviting Robbie to dinner. Then they make up.
(2025) ok this takes place in 1935… so we’re four years out from the war. Paul Marshall will get rich and marry someone here (Cecilia or Lola). Robbie Turner or Leon Tallis will get drafted and one of them will die. Or the twins? Wait no. They’re eight, so they can’t go to war. Briony becomes a successful author as per the flash forward from the narrator.
(2024) “nothing’s happening” but the tension and the drama and the momentum here is so much more than what I’m getting out of A Master of Djinn…
P1C5 (2024) - Lola left with twin brothers in nursery. Pierrot says the d-word. (Divorce) Paul Marshall comes in. New person. Who’s this? Lola and Paul kinda flirt (save himself from faux pas about parents, lie about hamlet, compliment her trousers, offers chocolate if they can guess his job)
OK, we’re out of the 2024 notes. Moving forward, all notes are from the 2025 read
P1C6 - ok, wow. The dimensionalization of Emily and how she’s chronically in pain, but hyper aware and anxious and planning everything. That was masterful in interiority.
P1C8 - I mean, plot-wise, I totally knew that was going to happen the moment he wrote that letter, but the way McEwan dragged it out just made it so much tastier. Him having a casual conversation with him mom, reflecting on EVERYTHING the Tallis’s invested into his life, then him daydreaming about his entire future and how he’d live a rich full life with a rich full library and cabinet of curiosities, and McEwan doing the “years later he would reflect on this moment” bit, and then taking the time to really breathe in the moment and scenery before he handed off the letter to Briony. Just… deliciously awful and suspenseful and evil and well paced.
P1C9 - ah. I get it now. She’s the middle child who runs interference for everyone. I should’ve seen that before. As for the letter… I kinda knew Briony would read it… but now I’m wondering if she altered it by ripping off the bottom part? Or did Robbie catch up?
P1C10 - So did she alter it? Or just hand it to Cee as is? And did McEwan just insert a Robbie/Cee scene that was not hinted at in the Cee chapter last chapter?
P1C11 - oh. Oooooh. OH! Ok. That was surprisingly unexpected for me. Not a fallout at all.
P1C12 - uh…. What an astonishing way to raise stakes on just two boys running away. So much heavy foreshadowing.
End of P1 - ugh. I hate this. The growing disgust and repulsion at Briony. McEwan drew it out so well. This terrifying downward spiral as Robbie takes forever to show up and Briony keeps lying to the police.
P2/pg.212. Took me a while before I realized there weren’t no chapters for me to stop at.
P2. Ok. Dunkirk. Interesting. But also… 71 pages set on one or two days? Maybe three? But then again. That’s the play here right? Even though part one was multiple chapters… it was still the length of a single day. Of course, we had multiple POVs to break it up. I don’t know yet. I need to reflect. My initial impression is that I’m not amused, but I’m don’t dislike it either. The flashbacks were what I looked forward to. The present day action was typical warfare stuff. I don’t know.
P3/pg.296 It’s near the end of the book and while I logically thought about this, it wasn’t until a few pages ago that I started realizing… huh. McEwan could pull an extremely tragic and sad ending on me. I think emotionally, I thought, of course we’re getting a happy ending for both Robbie and Cecily. But why are we in Briony’s POV right now and not Cee? Why is Briony going through such immense guilt and hell? Maybe they’re kept separated. Maybe he dies. Maybe the atonement is simply what she’s going through and there are no happy endings. Maybe he kills off Robbie, Cee, or both of them.
P3/pg.306 - JFC. Wtf.
End of P3. That was one hell of an ending. And to cut it off with uncertainty before a sixty year time jump.
Epilogue - Finished the novel last night and sat on posting this. Thought about it a lot as I drifted off to bed, thought about it a lot while I was working out this morning. The most salient comment at first was, well, there were two. First was the literariness of the structure. The first three parts were “written” by Briony Tallis, and the epilogue was in first person. Briony survives, the other two didn’t. And she kept it from the audience/reader until the end with justification based on her philosophy of what fiction should and shouldn’t be. I liked this play on who wrote what and why. Personally, I “picked up on” as in noticed that a thousand-pound bomb was kinda weird, but didn’t really register why, but once it was revealed why this was in Briony’s manuscript (and left in because 77yo Brionoy don’t give a fuck about accuracy for that), it was an interesting call back moment for me. But secondly and most importantly… Briony… she doesn’t really fucking change does she? At thirteen, her head was filled with Manichaean simplicity and commits her crime based on childish understanding, all in service of a story/narrative. It’s about her getting attention. And then at the climatic confession… even then, she’s thrilled and delighted by throwing in that revelation. That she brought new information to the table. So as contrite as she is, she still seeks that “hey, look at me, I’m interesting”. And then to end the novel with her getting the adulation of four generations of family. I hated her as much as Robbie did in those final chapters of Part One. And while Part Three – well that’s problematic. Anyone who has to go through what she does in Part Three is someone you’re immediately sympathetic toward. It’s war. It’s gruesome. We are all helpless and the best we can do is help where we can even if we’re incapable of it. That’s a narrative tool that would win any character over, no matter how repulsive they were previously (e.g. see Churchill. Of course, post-war they wanted to lionize him but not actually have anything to do with him. Shove the effective asshole under the rug. He did the job, let us go back to our decorum and gentlemenly backstabbing please).
What about the dementia? The fact that all these stories would fade in her head and what she wrote will last? That was an interesting theme too. Of course, her final message is what resonates. She is God in this scenario. She wrote the story. How does God atone for his sins? God can’t. Therefore, Briony the God cannot truly atone either. But maybe… this is also her way of dealing with the guilt that R&C ultimately only had a few months together and it is her fault. We’ll never know if they had a happy marriage or not, or lived happily ever after. I read on Wikipedia that in the film, they give lovers an “alternate what-if reality” scene a la La La Land. Effective narrative tool. Here’s the what could’ve been, but can never be.
The bookend with the play she wrote when she was thirteen was also frustratingly effective emotionally. Frustrating in that I welled up but felt bad for doing so for her when I logically dislike her. That’s actually very good on McEwan’s part. Playing with sympathies and how it can be manipulated.

Muted Conflicts

This was a list of parallel notes I took the first time around in 2024 when I wanted to track dramatic conflict that was more emotionally driven.

Wanting to organize and put together something, but the people available to you are not interested and/or are forced to do it and/or are undermining you in passive aggressive ways. Or in slight and quick misunderstanding, allowing a wanted role or action to be usurped by someone and to have it slip uncontrollably.
Feeling obligated to stay due to some vague notion that you are needed and responsible for someone, or using this as an excuse to not pursue anything
Avoiding an awkward conversation with someone who you like but has been acting in unexpected weird ways that thwarts your intentions.
Having an awkward conversation with someone you used to be close with but grew apart due to growing up and recognizing a power dynamic that had always been there… or it had developed further or it had changed recently. So now someone is avoiding the other and or distancing themselves in awkward ways.
A parent or power who doesn’t think your pet project is something that deserves the resources it needs and/or completely dismisses it as inconsequential and employs your resources to other projects without consulting you at all
Not wanting someone’s help but they keep insisting and then the help they give ends up breaking things
Saying the wrong thing in front of people but picking up on it and saving yourself with social grace
Saying the thing that’s causing your relationship trouble when the two of you have been in denial about “the thing” for a long time now
Flirting. It’s always potent and tense. If not for the characters on the page, the reader.
To have chronic pain or migraines or whatever… but still being able to act if even passively being aware of all the going ons around you and planning what to do and how to execute.

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