My first step was to ask google for something suitable by way of illustration, to find that the top results for a search for 'atonement' were dominated by the film of that name. But it seemed to me more appropriate to go back to something earlier, as I imagine McEwan did at some point during the writing of the book, or at least at the time he was choosing the title. He may not have dug deeper than the OED, but I offer the second half of Chapter 16 of Leviticus, lifted from reference 4, the original atonement, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in a translation which is perhaps a little earlier than that of 2004 from Robert Alter, the most recent on my shelf. But in a form more convenient to snip.
All of which has led me to ponder about the value of the ritual atonement there enjoined on us, with that of Briony Tallis, not the only person in the story with something to atone for, but the one in which the book takes the most interest, taking a rather different form.
Once again the book has no contents page. But it is arranged in three parts plus a short coda. Part 1, the deed, starting page 3. Scenes of country life with people of the better sort. Part 2, what becomes of the victim of the deed, starting page 191. Scenes from the retreat leading up to the Dunkirk evacuation. We leave the victim damaged but alive (while in the film I think he dies at this point). Part 3, the atonement, starting page 269. Scenes of nurse training and hospital life in the early days of the war. The coming together again of the three main characters, leaving them alive and well. Coda, starting page 353. A coda in which the perpetrator of the deed, by now an old, established and successful writer, is sentenced to death by vascular dementia. With the writing all getting a bit tied up in knots at this point, with speculations about what sort of a book the perpetrator can or should write by way of atonement. With the body of the present book being a stab at what she might have written. A process sometimes described as disappearing up one's own orifice.
The army parts of part 2 and the hospital parts of part 3 look to have been lovingly researched and crafted, with the period colour in large part, at least for me, eclipsing what is supposed to be the main story line. Something of the same fascination with matters medical as we had in 'Saturday' (see reference 2). A rather morbid fascination to my mind, a fascination which makes one feel rather uncomfortable, in rather the same way that the similarly morbid fascination that Hirst exhibits with his cutting up of bodies does. More healthy, or at least more interesting to me, is the 'Lord of the Flies' angle, the interest in how order in a very orderly institution like a modern army, can break down at the limit. An angle which crops up in a very similar context in another book which I happened to be reading at about the same time, Rambaud's 'Il neigeait' (see reference 5), on which I shall report still further in due course.
But I remain impressed by the last part of part 1, where McEwan tries to breathe some life into the deed. Why would Briony have cooked up this terrible accusation, why would she have persisted through the subsequent trial and how did she come to be believed? Pages which should perhaps be required reading for those involved in questioning young people making accusations about crimes of sex or violence.
Impressed despite the fact that the real perpetrator of the assault in question is more or less lost from view, and ends up marrying his victim in what seems a rather contrived twist of the plot. What had he been thinking about all those years when Briony's victim was in prison, the subject of a miscarriage of justice? I associate to the way that we so often these days seem to be more interested in the police, blaming the police more than the perpetrators of the crimes they investigate.
I close with the thought that father confessors, therapists and social workers have an important role in cases such as these, where someone wants to atone for something really bad, some time after the something happened. Intervention from people of that sort might have produced a better outcome than that Briony managed on a DIY basis.
I associate now to the 'amende honorable', deployed by the French certainly up to the end of the 17th century, a sort of public humiliation & sacred expiation, often enacted/inflicted immediately before temporal punishment. See for example, Madame de Sévigné on the subject of Madame de Brinvilliers, in her letter to her daughter of 17th July, 1676, a letter which is supplemented by a substantial note, at least in the Pléiade edition. An account which differs a little from that in wikipedia and which includes the thought that the decapitated body having been burnt and the ashes having been thrown to the winds, that they were all now breathing in essence of Brinvilliers. Sorting out the two versions is left as an exercise to the keener reader.
Oddly, having finished the book a couple of weeks or so now, I am having great difficulty reading any more of it now, whereas usually I quite happy to skim through a book once again, after I have read it. Or read the first few chapters again. Perhaps my interest has been zapped by the tiresome twist in the coda.
Reference 1: Atonement: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/it-is-forbidden-to-blow.html.
Reference 2: Saturday: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/a-tale-of-london-life.html.
Reference 3: McEwan: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/thoughts-of-and-prompted-by-mcewan.html.
Reference 4: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/.
Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/twittering.html.
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