critical essays on atonement

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The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Published in a special issue on the topic of guilt, this analysis of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001) looks at the ethical problems that emerge from Briony’s narrative. It focuses especially on the problem of the relationship between the form and content of a secret, and the way that this transforms the act of testimony into a problematic discourse.

Related Papers

Omar M Abdullah

Ian McEwan is one of the modernist writers who utilises new and uncommon ways of narrating. We find him dealing with history, wars and social themes, all knitted together in a manoeuvring way. The unreliable narrator, a technique he employs, is an innovation first seen in the modern era in Wayne C. Booth’s ‘The Rhetoric of Fiction’ in 1961. McEwan’s employment of this technique is an issue needing further analysis. In ‘Atonement’, his character Briony, who is still a child, narrates parts of the novel but her narration is questioned, for she might not be truthful or honest. Her being unreliable adds much to the novel and affects the fates of her sister Cecelia and the latter’s lover, Robbie. It is not only a matter of telling the story, it also interferes in the discourse of the action and propels the events in a different direction. As a result, it seems dubious to give the role of talking to a character (Briony) to narrate and cope with events, and so her telling is questioned to a certain extent because the events she narrates are deceitful on the one hand, while on the other, she is too young and hard to be trusted. The present paper attempts to read ‘Atonement’ from a new perspective and show what is meant by an unreliable narrator and how this technique is employed. How significant is the technique in terms of recounting the events in a piece of fiction? This paper illustrates the significance of the aforementioned technique, which adds new understanding to the reading of McEwan’s ‘Atonement’.

Rethinking Narrative Identity: Persona and perspective

kim worthington

Atonement: A Journey Into Briony's Mind and Her Quest for Absolution

Liliana Santos

"Has the character Briony actually managed to achieve atonement in Ian McEwan's most recognized novel? This is a question that many may ask themselves at the end of the novel. However, this particular question brings to light other fundamental doubts: Exactly which type of atonement has the protagonist been trying to achieve? Even if she has not been able to achieve it, is it not enough to have tried? And to what extent does she really have to atone, considering that her bad deed was done when she was still a child? This essay will attempt to respond to those questions. Starting with a brief analysis on the definition of atonement, followed by examples of the protagonist's attempts to atone, and an examination on whether those attempts were valid or not. To wrap up, there will be an examination regarding the extent to which Briony should be held accountable. This last point seems crucial in order to understand the previous arguments from an objective and neutral point of view." *This paper is an essay submitted in May 2022 regarding the subject of English C2 Academic Writing.

Linda Buckley

The epigraph to Atonement is taken from the story of Catherine Morland, a fictional heroine who lives in a realm of fantasy driven largely by romantic novels. In Northanger Abbey, Catherine falsely draws conclusions about the Tilney family, particularly surrounding its patriarch, the General, and what she assumes is the suspicious death of his wife. Catherine’s flights of fancy earn her the criticism delivered in McEwan’s epigraph, but she is brought to an understanding of the dangers of living in a world of novelistic fantasy before she can do irreparable harm. On the surface, the story of Catherine sets the stage for that of Briony Tallis. It serves as a warning to the reader that Briony’s observations cannot be trusted. However, beyond the obvious connection to Briony’s character, it implies a deeper exploration and challenge to McEwan’s fellow novelists about the nature and impact of the art itself.

Frontiers of Narrative Studies

James Phelan

This essay is a sequel to “Narrative theory, 1966–2006: A narrative,” Chapter 8 of the 2006 edition of

Ana-Karina Schneider

THINK INDIA (Quarterly Journal)

Dr. M. Mary Jayanthi

The amount of criticism which overshadows Freudian concepts has never reduced the relevance it carries in the assessment of human inscape. It successfully explains the reasons behind the complexities of human behaviour. Ian McEwan, who is known for his vivid, picturesque, and striking narrative style, is a prodigy in exploring the human psyche. His prestigious work Atonement remarkably stands out in its portrayal of the interior realms and unpredictable workings of the socially conscious. This paper attempts a detailed study of the behavioural patterns of the characters and the role of the unconscious in controlling them. This study concludes that, though humans are the victims of the unconscious trauma, a positive sublimation can unquestionably save individuals and make them fit for society.

Roczniki Humanistyczne

Tomasz Dobrogoszcz

Philobiblon

Alex Ciorogar

The present paper is committed to the topic of time and narrative. We will firstly draw a contextualizing outline, emphasizing the conditions which brought about the postmodern shift, followed by a cursory survey concerning the cultural aspects of postmodernism. In the second part of the paper, we will review some of the major works in the field of time and narrative. In the last part, we will finally investigate a postmodern British novel (Ian McEwan's Atonement) by using structuralist and phenomenological instruments of analysis.

José Giorgana

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Ian McEwan's Atonement . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Atonement: Introduction

Atonement: plot summary, atonement: detailed summary & analysis, atonement: themes, atonement: quotes, atonement: characters, atonement: symbols, atonement: theme wheel, brief biography of ian mcewan.

Historical Context of Atonement

Other books related to atonement.

• Full Title: Atonement
• When Written: 2001
• Where Written: London, England
• When Published: 2001
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: Historical fiction
• Setting: England and France; before, during, and after World War II
• Climax: Briony Tallis’s false testimony, condemning Robbie Turner for the rape of Lola Quincey
• Antagonist: Paul Marshall
• Point of View: Limited 3rd person

Extra Credit for Atonement

Stranger than fiction. Family drama isn’t restricted to Ian McEwan’s novels. As a grown man, McEwan learned that he has a living, long-lost brother: a bricklayer named David Sharp. Sharp was conceived in an affair between McEwan’s parents, while McEwan’s mother was married to another man, and was given up for adoption in 1942.

Success on the silver screen. McEwan’s novels have been adapted to films at least seven times, including the 2007 movie version of Atonement that starred Keira Knightley as Cecilia Tallis and James McAvoy as Robbie Turner.

Atonement Ian McEwan

Atonement essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Atonement by Ian McEwan.

Atonement Material

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Atonement Essays

Reading is not always believing anonymous 12th grade.

Set in in England during the developments of World War II, Atonement is a multi-dimensional historical narrative that combines the ideas of fantasy versus fiction with love and war. As 13-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the romance between her...

Woolf and McEwan: How the Modern Became Postmodern Nicholas Orluk

Ian McEwan’s Atonement draws inspiration from and alludes to a vast number of 20th century modernist authors and works, both stylistically and thematically. For a novel to be considered a successful culmination to the reading of a large body of...

Decoding the Coda in Atonement Justin Caleb Walters College

In Ian McEwan’s award winning novel Atonement young Briony Tallis must try and make amends for her wrongdoings toward her older sister Cecelia and her love interest, Robbie. At the end of the novel, the short, twenty-page coda entitled “London,...

Landscape and Growing Up in Atonement and The Go-Between Isabelle Agerbak 11th Grade

Both Briony Tallis, of Atonement, and Leo Colston, of The Go-Between, spend significant periods of their adolescence in large country homes, both of which are surrounded by large estates. Hartley and McEwan use the landscapes which are present...

The Dangers of the Imagination in Atonement Taylor C Benson College

In Atonement, Ian McEwan suggests the dangers of confusing our fantasies with reality; that we have become so accustomed to choosing to see what we wish to see rather than reality and this leads to destruction in our lives. Our refusal to accept...

Parallel Experiences Shape Atonement Emma Goodwin College

In a very meta fashion, Atonement repeatedly places emphasis and raises questions about the significance and the role of the writer in literature. By eventually revealing that Briony has been the one penning the story all along, readers are left...

No Atonement for Me Joshua Kumar 12th Grade

“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High”-Psalms 82:6

It is an impossible task for an author not to project his or her own private biases onto a page. Theistic writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were...

McCarthy versus McEwan: Minimalistic and Excessive Narrative Styles Rebekka A. Strom College

British novelist Ian McEwan’s masterpiece Atonement can be appropriately compared to American writer Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men with the common denominating theme of intense experience—its opportunities and its ramifications....

The Meanings of Atonement Anonymous 12th Grade

“I put it all there as a matter of historical record… We will all only exist as my inventions. No one will care what events and which individuals were misinterpreted to make a novel… How can a novelist achieve atonement when… she is also God? In...

Compare the ways in which the authors of two texts (Lantana and Atonement) use minor characters to emphasise ideas. Anonymous 12th Grade

Ray Lawrence’s film Lantana and Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement share several key ideas that can be conveyed to the audience in similar ways. The guilt of betrayal, differences in class and the idea of love are all explored in depth by both author...

A Comparison of Atonement and Lantana Anonymous 12th Grade

Through their respective texts, Atonement and Lantana, authors Ian McEwan and Ray Lawrence expertly convey the ideas of betrayal, atonement, loss and class. Within Atonement, McEwan employs stylistic features repetition, motif, symbolism and...

How do McEwan and Hartley use acting or theatre in ‘Atonement’ and ‘The Go-Between’? Anonymous 12th Grade

Theater and acting fundamentally allow people to become something else- to transcend the bounds of their identities and present, or be presented with, a different reality. The process of writing, a theme particularly prominent in ‘Atonement’, is...

Art and Empathy: An Analysis of Saturday and Atonement Anonymous College

In Atonement , McEwan reveals in the final section, ‘London, 1999,’ that the previous narrative had been a novel written by the character Briony, creating a metafictional lens and calling into question all the previous events the reader had assumed...

'In Crime Writing There Are Always Victims": Pinkie versus Rosie, and Briony versus Robbie Callum Madle 12th Grade

Throughout crime fiction such as ‘Atonement’ and ‘Brighton Rock’, unwitting characters fall to the machinations that antagonists - even immature antagonists - set for them. While some might argue that the characters in Graham Greene’s novel ‘...

The Trials of Robbie and Cecilia: Intertextuality in 'Atonement,' from Shakespeare to Richardson Amy Hale 11th Grade

Woven throughout Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ are intertextual references, used to not only enrich the reader’s experience but to present the love affair between Robbie and Cecilia as indeed, all too familiar, classic and timeless in its...

Robbie's Resentment Lena Geller College

Though Robbie Turner knows he is innocent of his purported crime, this knowledge hardly relieves his inner turmoil. Much of his time spent fighting in the war is also spent fighting with himself; he is unable to escape the constant fantasies of...

The Unattainability of Truth Emily King 12th Grade

Truth is a universal theme that has been the fascination of people since the dawn of time. It is the underlying, almost primal reason that urges mankind to progress; a noble quest for knowledge, and an uneasiness that the essence of truth will...

Jealousy and the destructive nature of love in Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’, Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, and Ian McEwen’s ‘Atonement’. Summer Jade Dolan 12th Grade

Compare and contrast the representation of jealousy and the destructive nature of love in Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’, Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, and Ian McEwen’s ‘Atonement’.

When comparing themes of jealousy and the destructive nature of love...

'Saint Maybe' and 'Atonement': Childhood, Compensation, and Characters' Fates Caitlyn Nicole Weinstein 12th Grade

What does atonement mean to you? Each individual person will have to make up for something they have done at some point in their lifetime. Are you seeking atonement to be free from the burden of your sin in your everyday life? Maybe, you are...

How Duffy and McEwan Use Characteristic Postmodern Techniques in "Love Poems" and "Atonement"? Flora Leather 12th Grade

In both McEwan’s Atonement and many of Carol Ann Duffy’s love poems, the use of postmodernist devices such as self-reflexivity and intertextuality aid in the exploration of their ideas and the pertinence of questions their work raises. James Wood...

The Conflict Accompanying the Weight of Her Words: A New Critical Analysis of Atonement Madeleine Proulx College

New Criticism is a theory focused on the human experience. It guides the reader to examine conflict and tensions within a literary work, which emulate the complexity of the human condition. Ambiguity within texts allows for different...

'The Past' in The Kite Runner and Atonement Anonymous 12th Grade

One of the main ideas explored in both The Kite Runner , a novel by Khaled Hosseini, and Atonement , a film directed by Joe Wright, is the everlasting presence of the past in the lives of the protagonists, both of whom make a mistake in their...

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‘This novel had everything’: an oral history of Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Critical acclaim, record sales and a film starring Keira Knightley made Atonement a publishing phenomenon. From its origins as a sci-fi story to the elaborate creation of its iconic cover, the behind-the-scenes story is no less gripping. Here, in the year of its 20th anniversary and publisher Jonathan Cape's centenary, we tell the full story of the book that changed British fiction.

Ian McEwan was 50 when he embarked upon the notebook “doodles” that would become Atonement , an age that he reckons “is around about the peak, for a novelist”. While he was hardly an unknown – his previous novel, Amsterdam , won the Booker Prize – McEwan’s eighth novel is arguably his most famous (and, he’s admitted at times, his favourite). It has sold 1.5 million copies in the UK alone and been published in 42 languages. It carries quite a mantelpiece of gongs – The Whitbread, the Critics Circle and the Boeke Prize among them. When adapted to film in 2007, it earned six Oscar nominations and galvanised the careers of Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. Playing McEwan’s unforgettable protagonist Bryony Tallis confirmed 12-year-old Saoirse Ronan’s talent as prodigious.

And yet, for all those glittering accolades, Atonement ’s legacy runs deeper than just turning its author into a household name. When McEwan started publishing fiction in the Seventies, he’d earned a Private Eye nickname of Ian Macabre: his novels were littered with unflinching and detailed accounts of grisly dismemberments, kidnappings and euthanasia pacts. But Atonement opened on a sweltering midsummer’s afternoon in an English country house as a girl on the cusp of adolescence tried, in vain, to stage a play for her brother’s long-awaited return. As The New York Times wrote at the time: “here is McEwan, at the helm of what looks suspiciously like the sort of English novel that English novelists stopped writing more than 30 years ago.”

As readers would discover, Atonement – fundamentally a love story with a devastating deceit at its heart – was also a feat of literary engineering. It unleashes its despair and unease like a dripping tap: gradually and unstoppable, until only deluge remains. A novel made of three separate stories, with a remarkable twist at the end, Atonement was that rare thing: a book devoured in literary circles that also sold by the thousand in supermarkets. Within four years of release, it was included on the OCR A Level exam syllabus for English Literature.

It also had its own remarkable story. Emerging from the ruins of a disregarded sci-fi short story, Atonement was filed rapidly and in parts, the novel’s crucial final section arriving only after production had already begun. Along the way, McEwan changed the title at the last minute, and the publishing house embarked on one of the largest photoshoots it had undertaken to take a risk on what became its most enduring cover. What resulted was a collision of publishing good fortune – and one of the greatest books of the 21st century. In the centenary year of publisher Jonathan Cape, and 20 years since it appeared in bookshelves, here’s how Atonement happened, according to the people who were there.  

In the late Nineties, Ian McEwan’s stock as a novelist was rising – and fast. Enduring Love , his 1997 novel, topped the bestseller charts. A year later, Amsterdam was released and won The Booker Prize.

Ian McEwan, author: Sometime round about 1997, I made some notes that were about the end of the century, and looking back and realising that there were errors we made – the two World Wars in particular, the Holocaust – that we could never correct; that we could try to correct but the effort would be protracted.

Dan Franklin, former Publishing Director, Jonathan Cape : He says he wrote the beginning of Chapter Two, and that was the beginning of the whole thing, and he wrote it somewhere weird, like Costa Rica or something, while he was on holiday two years before.

Ian: That didn’t lead to any actual fiction, but while away on holiday with my sons I had a couple of hours and found myself writing maybe a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs, about a young woman coming into a rather ornate, classical drawing room of a country house with some wild flowers that she had just picked, looking for a vase, and she was aware of a young man outside who was a gardener. She wants to see him and she doesn’t want to see him all at once.

Dan: And you have the sense that he had something.

Ian: When I got to the end of that, I didn’t do anything about it but I knew that I probably started something.

Dan: There’s a thing with Ian’s books; I published many, many books with him. At a certain point they just got faster and faster.

Ian: So the Booker was 98. Was that Enduring Love ? No, it was Amsterdam . I was already writing this when the Booker happened.

Peter Straus, Ian McEwan’s current literary agent: At that point there was a momentum, and quite rightly, for Ian who was writing these extraordinary, brilliantly crafted books. There was this excitement and expectation of what would come next.

What would become the second chapter of Atonement was, briefly, a science fiction short story, which McEwan abandoned.

Ian: I came back about 18 months later, rejected everything about it, realised I was now back with my earlier note of coming to the end of a century, and that the actual moment I described – with wildflowers in the vase – was pre-War. And at that point I was liberated. I suddenly rewrote that chapter in a completely different way, it then became the second chapter of the book as published. I wrote another chapter that I knew would proceed it, which was about that young woman’s younger sister, Briony.

Peter: I think he was concerned that this was a mad idea: the narration, the way it was constructed, that the critics would not like it.

Ian: Pretty early on I had the structure, which was three novellas and a coda, that’s what I thought of it. One portion, about 65,000 words, was set in 1935. Then it was 1940, and then it brings us to the very end of the century, 1999, at which point the reader becomes aware that they’ve been reading a novel by its principal character. And it ends with Briony’s initials. And then we go into the coda which is related by the first person, in the present.

Peter: He said, "Oh god, I thought, a Second World War Book, they’re never going to buy that".

Ian: I remember, when I was still writing it but coming towards the end, I said to Dan: "I know you want a new book from me, but just warning you, this book is very much a book for writers. It’s a book about the imagination and what it means, what the power of the imagination is and what the power of writers is. And if you can sell 15,000 copies in hardback I’d be delighted." And Dan said, "Oh, ok, fine." And when he read it he said, "You’re completely nuts. It’s got all the ingredients, not only of a literary book, but it presses three buttons for a popular book". I said, "Well, what buttons?"

Dan: I don’t know how you put it into words but it was just that instinctive thing. It had so many elements. Even looking at it completely cynically: it had The Go-Between in the first part, it had fantastic war material, and then it had this amazing meta-physical trickery at the end. So you were kind of getting everything. And so lucidly and so brilliantly that we were simply purring.

Ian: I said, “oh, well, that’s why I’m not a publisher”. I had no idea.

Roger Bratchell, Marketing Director: This novel had everything: the sultry pre-war setting, the war, the twist. It was Ian in excelsis.

Atonement was produced very quickly – McEwan filed at the start of the year, just months before its September publication.

Suzanne Dean, Creative Director, Vintage: Dan gave me a manuscript, one of those ones that were printed out on the black-and-white printer. Dan had said, “We’re going to be publishing this, you better start reading it now”. I think it wasn’t a whole manuscript at that point, Ian was still writing it.

Roger: Dan would announce at some stage "there's a new Ian due. He's sending it to me some time soon." About a week later it would arrive, fully formed, perfect in every way. It would be your 'job' to read it over the weekend. The excitement with this book was palpable.

Ian: I gave Dan the first three chapters, but I was still writing the coda. And I hadn’t told him, or if I had told him he’d forgotten, but I had to go and give a talk on the other side of the world, on Vancouver Island. I was racing to finish this last 8,000 words, and I had just got it, late at night, before catching my plane the next morning. I couriered it round to Dan from Oxford.

Pascal Cariss, copy editor: I remember that publisher’s cliché about there being a real buzz in-house about a manuscript was, in this case, absolutely true. Everybody picked up on the whisper that this was a very powerful and dramatic story. Everybody wanted to get their hands on a copy and read it as soon as possible.

Ian: The book had already circulated among Cape people. And they’d all read it, thinking they had the whole thing, and were happy with it. They had no idea there was more! They’d already said, “We love it, it’s marvellous, the way it finishes." And I said, no, no, there’s more, it’s on its way to you. I began to think, when I was on the plane, well, they might not like this development, where everything that’s happened turns out not to have happened.

Roger: There was always a signature twist. So you read it looking out for "the moment". 

Ian: Fortunately, they liked it even more.

Roger: There was a kind of hushed awe when people had read the typescript – we just knew this was going to be huge. 

The team worked quickly on the novel’s production, putting it through edits and copyedits. Meanwhile, Suzanne, Dan and Ian set to work on Atonement ’s cover .

Suzanne: It was my second year in the job. I hadn’t worked on a hardback with Ian, and this was obviously a big title. I remember that excitement in-house, the absolute, “oh-my-god this is just amazing”. And the speed of working like that with such a huge project.

Ian: My first thought was, “We’d quite like a picture of this girl, lying on her stomach on the library.”

Suzanne: Dan had told me after I’d started reading it that Ian wanted a photograph of a girl reading in the library. That was my brief. It’s a period piece, and so we started off by trying to find original photographs from the right time, with the right kind of look. There was absolutely nothing out there. I searched all the libraries. Which then made us think, “Ok, this means a photoshoot.”

Dan:  I was very heavily involved in the cover in a way that I’m usually not.

Suzanne: Dan came along because it was such a big shoot, he wouldn’t normally.

Dan: We had this vision of what the cover art should be, which was of Briony lying on the floor in a old-fashioned library with wood panelling walls, reading a book. We then did a lot of searching for a country house, with a library, with wood-panelled walls, that we could use for a photoshoot. We found this house, I think it was near St Albans.

Suzanne: I remember we all got into this huge minibus, went off to the other side of the M25, somewhere like Milton Keynes. To this incredible country house.

Chris Frazer-Smith, photographer: It’s near Hemel Hempstead, it’s called Gaddesden Place.

Suzanne: I think this photoshoot was the equivalent to almost like a small movie. That’s what it felt like. I had never helped to organise a shoot as big as this – ever.

Chris: We had hair and makeup, we had two assistants, we had a guy running the lighting at my direction because we needed to light certain things… it wasn’t a very big crew.

Suzanne: We had to find the girl first and the girl had to have the right look. We had a shortlist, and once we had the girl approved, she was sized up for the clothes. We got the dress made because she had to have the right kind of dress, and it was quicker. It was expensive to do this but it proved worthwhile in the long run.

Chris: The model posing as Briony was very confident without being rude, and she took direction really well. And I think she found the whole notion of dressing up in a summer dress, having her hair done, all slightly amusing.

Suzanne: She came out wearing her white dress, she looked so the part, so immaculate, the period was right, everything was right.

Chris: It was 20 years ago so I was shooting film, and I was shooting slide film. We shot black and white each time, on medium format cameras. We shot at the garden at the back of the house; we shot shots of her standing, with her arms folded, looking really grumpy.

Suzanne: We spent the whole morning photographing loads of poses in the library, and then we went outside after lunch and she stood in the field and there’s some shots of her standing in long grass, which were ok. There wasn’t one that stood out among that. By that point, it was going to be the library that’s the best shot.

Suzanne: Then I saw the steps, and I thought, “I want the steps as well”. In the book, everything pivots on the moment in the steps by this bridge.

Chris: I said, "Let’s sit on the steps". Like all kids at that age, after a while she got bored and fidgety and that played into our hands really quite well. I would normally have waited for the cloud to cover the sun, but I thought, sod it, I’m just going to shoot – we’d probably been there a good seven hours by now, so we were wary that she wasn’t going to give us much more. She was literally saying to me, “Mister, have you taken the picture?”

Dan: The day was going on, and on, and on, and on. And the girl was getting crosser and crosser.

Suzanne: The sun was starting to set behind some trees, and she was starting to scribble with a stone on the floor.

Chris: The way she was sat on the steps, I could see it. I think I shot two rolls of black and white film on those steps, and I thought, “that’s great, there’s something really nice about that sequence of frames.

Dan: There she was, sitting on the steps, and she is stamping one of her legs in fury, she just wanted to be out of there, and Suzanne and I were standing, watching this from behind his shoulder, looking at the scene.

Suzanne: I turned to look at Chris, and Dan was standing behind Chris and I was nodding, and he was going, “yeah”, and we had all had the same idea at the same time, because she was so natural. She wasn’t thinking about us, she was just thinking “I’m bored”. And you can see the way her head is on her hand, she’s leaning forward and her foot’s up, she’s just in a world of her own. And that’s the difference, that shot. It’s so perfect. And we knew, and everyone turned and looked at each other, and it was like a shiver, we just knew it was the shot. It was amazing.

Dan: I think it’s the only time it’s happened to me: literally, our hair stood on end for that one shot. One knew instantly that this was it. And that it was, it was gonna be one of the great covers.

Chris: And I said, "I think we’ve got it".

After the shoot, the photographs were whittled down to a select few. Their first showing was unlikely: at a publishing dinner for another Cape author.

Ian: My memory was of being at some dinner. Might have been Julian Barnes, might have been Martin Amis, I can’t remember.

Dan: If there was a dinner it would probably have been for Julian. I don’t think we gave a dinner for Martin in all my time at Cape. Parties, yes, but not dinners.

Ian: Dan and Suzanne produced an envelope containing four pictures.

Suzanne: I wasn’t there! Dan was and he presented it and the next day he came into my office and said, “You got four gold stars from everyone yesterday evening”. I was like, oh my god. Can you imagine? Showing all that work. But I was new, you know.

Dan : The way Suzanne works is extraordinary. With the big authors she will prepare different jackets, and she’ll print them all out and spread them out on the table and have the author come in and go through them.

Suzanne: I had the big yellow photography boxes under my arm, I remember putting it down and giving Ian the actual prints, those big wonderful prints.

Dan: She and I will be there, and we’ll know which one we want them to choose.

Suzanne: I think at that point we all really, really wanted the picture on the steps, but we were still trying to persuade him. We were showing him, like, “Look how wonderful the steps look! We could have that on the back of her slightly curled round, and on the front this one.”

Dan: He’ll almost certainly deny this, but we had quite a hard time selling it to Ian, who wasn’t sure. But we knew at once, and that’s quite rare that that happens.

Ian: I must have gone in. We all agreed that the one on the steps was the one.

Roger: Suzanne Dean's magnificent jacket – just a brilliant image to work with. Intriguing, redolent of a time and age that conveyed glamour and mystery, that stopped you in your tracks.

Peter:  The fact the jacket is still being used – what does that tell you? Twenty years on it’s still the jacket. It’s still good.

Work was nearing completion on the book’s publication when McEwan realised something needed to change - the title.

Dan: The major thing was that, when it came in, the novel was still called An Atonement .

Ian: I nearly always show my finished drafts to the historian Tim Garton-Ash. He phoned me about it, and he said, "I’ve got one thing I absolutely have to ask you to change, and I don’t want to ask you over the phone, I’m coming round to your house. Now."

Peter: I think Timothy Garton-Ash suggested he drop the “An”.

Ian: He lived just around the corner so he came round, and I don’t know if he went down on bended knee but he said, “Please change the title”. He said, “It’s clumsy on the tongue”. And I said, “Well, I just wanted to be a little modest about it.” And he said, “Don’t be. Please call it Atonement ”.

Dan: Ian rang up and said, “Change it”. Which is minor but incredibly significant.

Ian: I phoned Dan and said, has it gone to the printers yet? I must have already corrected the proof. And he said, “yes...” very warily. “What do you need to change?” I said, “The title is now Atonement , not An Atonement ”. And Dan said, “oh phew, thank God”.

Dan: You saw it at once, it was the right thing to do.

Ian: Dan hadn’t told me that he hadn’t liked it.

Roger: To add to the mystique of the book came the author's request to change the title from " An Atonement"  to Atonement . What could it mean? We were sent scurrying back to the book to look for meaning. Some of the printed typescripts might have had the original title – I can't remember, but they would have been collectable. Mine, unfortunately, went to a deserving bookseller. 

Atonement was published on 20 September 2001 and was nominated for the Booker Prize shortly afterwards.

Peter:  I think it was delivered in the summer. They didn’t do proofs, because there wasn’t time. That led to the excitement and buzz about the book.

Roger: We decided to produce bound typescripts as the book was perfect. This was before the days of social media, so it was a question of just getting people to read it.

Ian: There certainly was a launch party. You’ll have to ask Dan.

Dan: I can’t even remember where the launch party was.

Ian: Cape gave so many good parties. The nature of launch parties is that they breed a kind of amnesia – if you can remember it, it was no good.

Peter: There was excitement. There was excitement that Ian had written another book, the minute he had written it people wanted to share their excitement and their joy.

Dan: I remember the reviews were amazing and everything was wonderful.

Ian: There were some lovely reviews. Most of us, novelists, are used to publishing a book and you get a good kicking somewhere and you get praise somewhere else and you just have to take it all in the run of things and the mix of things. This, for once, had a kind of unanimity.

Peter: It came out in the autumn and dominated the lists, dominated the Booker and while it didn’t win, it was certainly the book.

Roger: I can't actually remember publication day, but I remember the reviews and the sales. I remember the gnashing of teeth when it didn't win the Booker.

Before long, conversations were underway about an adaptation. Atonement  the film starred Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, and forged Saoirse Ronan’s career. It went on to be nominated for six Oscars, win one, and take more than £84 million at the box office.

Tim Bevan, film producer, Working Title: I encountered Atonement  around 2002; quite early on because it was successful and there was already a race for the film rights to it. The two director / scriptwriter combinaitons being discussed were Richard Eyre and Christopher Hampton, and Tom Stoppard and John Madden. And Richard and his team came to us, basically, to back it. I think [producer] Robert Fox was also part of that group.

Ian: I made a decision in around 1996 to stay away from screenplays, and that’s why, when Christopher Hampton was mentioned, I was delighted.

Stephen Durbridge, Ian’s film agent: It’s very easy to ring a film producer up and go, “I’ve got this wonderful McEwan novel, would you like to read it?” They tend to jump at it, really. But here, Robert Fox was one of the very early people to read it and he then went and talked to Working Title.

Tim: So we commissioned a script. We knew it was going to be a tricky one, because it has literary conceit at its heart. How are you going to make it interesting as a film?

Stephen: It was a difficult film to make because it was a pretty serious subject and it didn’t have obvious commercial appeal – it wasn’t a thriller or a comedy. I think there was a lot of tussles over the budget level and so on and so forth.

Ian: All these initial conversations were about the difficulty of translating this idea of whether things happened or didn’t happen, onto film.

Tim: We really scrutinised how to make this literary trick work cinematically. Into the mix came Anthony Minghella. He sat with Joe [Wright, director] and he said, “I’m not going to write anything here but I’m going to intellectually make you answer every question that I’m going to put to you about the story and script”. Anthony had done The English Patient , so in terms of literary adaptation he was one of the best in the world. It was absolutely Christopher’s script, but it absolutely needed that input from Anthony for the idea to emerge.

Stephen:  I went to a screening of it very early on and there were a number of industry people there and the distributors. And I asked, "What are all those cards on the table?” And there was the release date of the movie in about 15, 16 territories. And I thought to myself, "Yes, we’ve got this right".

Tim:  The thing is, great novels, it’s pretty nerve-wracking turning them into films because the literary audience have a great vision of what that might be. I remember showing Eric [Fellner, producer] the movie and he came out and said, “Don’t change a frame.” That never happens.

Ian:  When you’ve got a film that had quite a strong commercial budget, you can be pretty sure that the novel is going to be wrecked. And in this case I think it was very, very sensitively handled. I think Joe did an amazing job. He’s a very gifted director.

Tim:  I never knew whether Ian liked the movie or not to be honest with you. He sort of went with it. And he sold a lot of books off the back of it.

Ian:  It delivered an enormous number of readers off the back of the film. So that was a whole new experience for me, to be in dump bins in supermarkets.

Dan:  I loved it. I re-watched it at some point during lockdown and still loved it. 

Roger:  The film was the icing on the cake.

Stephen:  Did one go into it thinking, oh god, if we sell the rights here is someone going to win an Oscar? No. But when your breath is taken away by something as it was when one first saw that film, then you start thinking about that. 

Twenty years on, and Atonement has sold more than 1.5 million copies in the UK alone. It’s true legacy, however, is difficult to measure in sales figures.

Dan: Atonement was absolutely the turning point. Until then, Ian had this reputation for being dark, because of his early books and short stories. But this wasn’t like that. Atonement was like, somehow, the sun had come out. And it did. It certainly changed his critical reputation and it changed him as a prospect for the book trade.

Peter: There are very few books that enter the public cultural consciousness and become totemic. Atonement is one of them.

Suzanne: It’s what you call an iconic cover. There are some that are so entwined with the book and that really is the definition of iconic. What a lucky person I am to have been there, to work on that. That’s one of the most incredible experiences since I’ve been there, all those years.

Ian:  I don’t know what it would be like to have an Atonement every time you publish but it’s not a given to literary writers. Most of us have a book. There’s always a degree of serendipity about starting a novel and I seem to have had buckets of it with Atonement .

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Atonement — Themes And Literary Techniques In Atonement By Ian McEwan

Themes and Literary Techniques in Atonement by Ian Mcewan

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English Literature - Atonement (Essay 1)

1,486 words, candidate number 5635

By analysing two passages from Atonement , consider ways in which McEwan presents the transition between the child and adult world

The prime method by which McEwan presents the transition between the child and adult world in Atonement  is through specific focus on the behaviour and motivations of one character, Briony Tallis. Taking a psychological and personal approach, McEwan addresses the complexities of adolescence, “the ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds” , and the various archetypal effects, usually of a sexual nature, that affect a child with little or no experience of adult life. Briony, it would seem, is a character trapped in a bubble, who requires the intervention of internal and external forces in order to break into the world of adulthood. The two passages selected specifically show the distinction – or, indeed, lack of – between child and adult Briony, her coming to being and her realisation of the ‘crime’ “for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone” .

Part One mainly concerns McEwan developing a prevailing aura of obscurity and anticipation, with young Briony having intercepted a vulgar letter that she believes confirms Robbie Turner as a ‘maniac’. The Part focuses on two differing viewpoints; those of Briony and the rest of the world; dropping her in solitude. The paradox is that while Briony is attempting to pursue adulthood and convince herself of her maturity – “the day had proved to her that she was not a child”  – she “had to prove herself worthy of it” , accordingly reverting to a juvenile mindset. This absurd attitude is put into practice during her encounter with Lola Quincey (pages 118-19). The passage exposes the “controlling demon”  that governs Briony’s behaviour; the transition between the child and adult world being presented by McEwan as one of malevolence and possibly even antagonistic drive. It also depicts a transition from trust in words to that of action – this also portraying conflicting attributes of children and adults; maybe even regression.

This is a preview of the whole essay

A prominent motif throughout Atonement is the ‘power’ of language, and how something as modest and seemingly insignificant as a word can alter a whole course of events. McEwan’s focus on this theme possibly arose from the effects of his own childhood; his mother’s “ particular, timorous relationship with language ”   reciprocally influencing his own views purveyed through Atonement .  Indeed, one might say that Briony’s confidence in the power of language is intrinsically a juvenile concept – e.g. the value of learning to read at an early age – and the fact that this belief is still present in the final part of the novel, with her plan for atonement – “as long as there is a single copy…then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love”   – implies that it is one feature of her youthful mentality which hasn’t experienced transition.

Turning back to the passage, having shown Lola the letter “the effect [on Briony] was gratifying” , giving further grounds to the idea of a malevolent transition. It hints that she believes she has completed a stage in her strive for maturity. She has enforced her intentions on the real world as well as the world of authorship, granting her a glimpse into adulthood.

Brian Finney asserts that McEwan “remains fascinated with the forbidden and the taboo, which he continues to describe with non-judgmental precision” . Looking further into the passage, the word ‘cunt’ striking Briony as a premise for rape accusation, epitomises her immaturity and drastic misinterpretation of taboo language. One can deduce that her intention is to develop a greater feeling of responsibility; her thoughts are nonetheless reflected by the adults condemning Robbie later in the novel. When Briony “spelled it out for her, backwards”  it gives the image of a children’s word game, McEwan’s emphasis on ‘backwards’ allowing greater insight into the maintained misguided thoughts of Briony, her trust of the power of language and the ridiculous conclusions drawn from the word. She possibly feels that she has conformed to society’s rules by exposing a potential danger, this again bringing us back to her frame of mind – does the ‘controlling demon’; her precocious, insular, attention-seeking traits lead her to prioritise them? Parallels can be drawn with another of McEwan’s works, The Cement Garden , by which his characters experience a growing – somewhat Freudian – sex drive in their state of transition. Is Briony contrastingly trying to repress her adolescent sexual urges? Could these said urges be for Robbie?

It can also be questioned whether Briony’s intentions lie predominantly with the view to portraying her ‘adulthood’ instead of actually growing up. “The desire to share a secret and show the older girl that she too had worldly experiences”  gives the reader two things; one being that McEwan makes specific reference to Lola as ‘the older girl’, most probably to prove Briony’s aspirations and potential mannerisms. Ironically, Lola’s confidence in Briony’s accusation of Robbie, for whatever reason, displays a somewhat immature mindset in Lola. The quote also amplifies her misguidance – Briony, in relative terms, does not have ‘worldly experiences’, and “guiding Lola to the basin”  does not particularly show or affect whether she does or does not. Another interesting line, “they’re just little kids” , continues to hint that Briony is anticipating, or is at least trying to portray, this impending change, presenting herself as a responsible adult, disconnected from childhood, in front of a girl who she might even aspire to be like.

Moving on, the second passage (pages 341-2) concerns Briony’s visit to Cecilia – a whole five years after her ‘crime’. This scene was, however, entirely constructed by the “writer-director”  Briony in her formulation of Parts One, Two and Three – it never took place. Atonement , being a post-modern novel, works by means of metanarrative. It is “time-honoured”   and constructed with a temporally interlaced storyline; Mullan believing that “some readers have felt cheated by it”  (a “crude melodrama” )   alluding to the emotive effect that McEwan’s catharsis evokes.

With regards to the text, were the reader to take the scene where Briony witnesses the death of a young soldier in the hospital – that “seem[ed] to catapult her at last out of her destructive self-interest”  – to be the catalyst behind her visit to Cecilia, it suggests – bearing in mind that the ‘flat scene’ is a construction – that the childhood vices of a diminished sense of pain and suffering (which ultimately condemned Robbie) remained and were not recognised until years later when she was writing the novel. Has she grown up at all by this stage? The ‘flat scene’, despite presenting an initial contrast from the first passage, implicitly provides evidence that her transition has been stunted.

Her inevitable apprehension is compounded by Robbie’s glaring presence in the room – “she was watching from far away.”  He is an old “demon”  in Briony’s life. A degraded, sullen character physically showing her the result of her actions – sunken cheeks and a little moustache providing an odious, even childlike image. “When he raised his voice she jumped”  likening him to a dominant adult – a school teacher or parent – with vocal influence over a small child. Robbie’s direct question “what’s made you so certain now?”  is answered by Briony with “growing up” , McEwan’s use of a succinct response effectively depicting Briony’s feeling of urgency and apprehension, “a child anticipating a beating” . Briony is vulnerable; the longevity of time hasn’t protected her from being reprimanded. Interestingly it is “strange, that for all her guilt, she should feel the need to withstand him. It was that, or be annihilated”  – the transition hasn’t provided Briony with adult virtues of resoluteness and confidence. One might also suggest that she is continuing to behold Robbie as this violent, repulsive attacker that her child self condemned. The subtext is clear – Briony’s transition has been delayed.

Conversely, taking into account her total precedence over this scene it is possible that Briony is imposing some kind of moral punishment on herself – possibly unjustly – through her trusted ‘word power’. Robbie deserves to antagonise Briony through the “hardness in his gaze”  and a raised voice; she is a masochist – the aforementioned repressed urges are seemingly taking effect.

Hence, McEwan’s presentation of the transition between the child and adult world, as shown by these two passages, is very abstract. Briony’s position as narrator means that the reader cannot determine a time scale on the results of the transition. Where we believe she has matured, McEwan imposes a ‘great turn’ on the reader in the final Part. This still does not mean that we cannot use it in effect; it merely shows her thoughts when writing the novel – a state of self-punishment. She is “the prime example of the way art shapes her life as much as she shapes that life into her art” . Having been a young girl with a restricted view of the world and a naïve mindset she has – albeit slowly – come to realise the consequences of her ‘crime’ and tried to amend them. The ‘worldly experiences’ have taken their toll and given Briony a chance to atone.

  Atonement p.141

 Back page, Atonement , Vintage Books, 2002

  Atonement p. 163

  Atonement  p. 163

  Atonement p. 5

 Ian McEwan, The Guardian , 13 October 2001

  Atonement p. 371

  Atonement  p. 119

 Brian Finney , Briony's Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan's Atonement , 2002  

  Atonement p. 119

  Atonement  p. 118

  Atonement p. 118

  Atonement  p. 12

 John Mullan, The Guardian , 19 March 2003

 David Wiegand, Stumbling into Fate: Accidents and choices trip up the characters in Ian McEwan’s new novel , 10 March 2002

  Atonement  p. 341

  Atonement  p. 167

  Atonement  p. 342

  Atonement p. 341

 Brian Finney , Briony's Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan's Atonement , 2002

Peer Reviews

Here's what a star student thought of this essay.

Quality of writing

This essay seems to reference every time they have quoted the book in a footnote. This is highly unnecessary at A-Level. Quotes which are from other critics or articles, such as Brian Finney, should be in footnotes. On this note, the inclusion of such critical interpretations is excellent here. Examiners will be looking at how you evaluate the reception of texts, looking at arguments which are weaker and those which are stronger. This essay does this well, and is a great example of not overloading on critics which are irrelevant. This essay has a strong introduction, but as mentioned above I feel the other paragraphs aren't focused enough on the question. Spelling, punctuation and grammar are fine.

Level of analysis

The analysis here is good. I would've liked to have seen more paragraphs like the one regarding the 'power' of language. This paragraph makes some perceptive comments about McEwan's technique, and I would note that mentioning metafiction would make this point more sophisticated. I like this paragraph as it focuses explicitly on a specific technique, whereas the other paragraphs don't have this sharp focus. Comments such as "Briony, in relative terms, does not have ‘worldly experiences’" are fine, but I feel as if the point ends there. If I were writing this essay, I would be discussing what effect this has upon the reader's perception of Briony's character, and why her narrative position affects this disposition. Examiners want to see why techniques are used, rather than simply stating they are there. There is a wide knowledge of the text shown here, but I feel as if this essay simply retells the plot sometimes. It is key at A-Level that you are explicit with how McEwan is shaping the story through his narrative, as you will not be credited for narrating the plot.

Response to question

This essay responds well to the question. The extracts chosen are great examples, as they offer plenty of techniques which can be analysed to build a strong and convincing argument. I would've liked to have seen some engagement with what the child and adult world consist of. An exploration of whether these worlds are bound by age, experience, or otherwise would be relevant here. Innocence and experience are phrases which are often used when discussing Atonement, and I feel this could've been used well in the argument. There is some discussion of why McEwan has presented this transition, but I feel this essay could've gone further to explore the effect this presentation has.

Document Details

• Word Count 1759
• Page Count 5
• Level AS and A Level
• Subject English

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Why the End of Atonement Is a Triumph for Unreliable Narrators

Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement opens with a description of what it’s like to invent a world. Briony Tallis, 13 years old and enthralled by the power of storytelling (“you had only to write it down and you could have the world”) has written a little play for her family. She’s also “designed the posters, programs, and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper.” Every aspect of production of the seven-page drama, “written by her in a two-day tempest of composition,” fiercely belongs to her, and McEwan hovers over her labors like God dictating the Genesis story.

It’s easy to forget the beginning of a novel that became famous, in part, for its tablecloth-pulling ending. But Atonement has the power to send you scurrying back to its first pages once you finish, ready to play whack-a-mole with its wiggly circularity. It’s a book about misinterpretations that McEwan expects to be misinterpreted until its very last pages, when we find out that the entire book we’ve just read is the sixth draft of a novel by a much-older, quite successful Briony, making her both the unreliable narrator and the unreliable author. In between is a plot borne of Austen and Richardson that sweeps through the long 19th century of realist sagas, wiggles into Modernism, and ends on a postmodern questioning of the worth of the novel itself. It’s a feat of pastiche that transcends pastiche: It preserves the intoxication of narrative fiction while admitting that it’s farce.

Critics and book buyers agreed it was a masterpiece. Atonement became one of the first additions to the 21st-century canon after its publication in the U.K. twenty years ago, with a quarter million copies going into print in the U.S. alone before it won the National Books Critics Circle Award in 2003. (When he handed in the Atonement manuscript, McEwan told me, he informed his editor they’d be “lucky to sell 10,000 copies … because it’s really a book for other writers about reading and writing.” His editor told him it would sell in huge numbers “because it’s got the three elements that make it a must: a country house, the Second World War, a love affair.” It’s now sold over 2 million copies worldwide.) Academics wrote papers about it with hazy titles like “The Rhetoric of Intermediality” and “Briony’s Being-For” and it was made into a 2007 movie starring period-piece queen Keira Knightley and directed by Joe Wright, fresh off his debut Pride & Prejudic e remake. And readers still gush — and whine — on book forums and reading sites about that witchy ending.

Briony’s revelation at the end that she’s reshaped this story to her whims turns her into a kind of god, master of all narratives and shaper of fates. Which leaves us her pawns, delighted little fools pulled along on a con. Atonement is, as the title asserts, Briony’s apology to the people whose lives she’s used to populate her story. But it’s also her masterpiece, proof that her regrets won’t stop her from plundering one last time. Its ending reminds readers that fiction without misrepresentation is impossible.

Atonement ’s first three parts are told from multiple points of view — including that of Briony, the youngest of three siblings. The first and longest section is set in 1935 over the course of one roasting hot day and night at the Tallis family’s grand country home in the Surrey Hills. Precocious Briony has a “passion for tidiness” of all kinds; the darling of the family, her writing has been praised and encouraged to excess. Her older sister Cecelia, a restless recent graduate of the ladies’ college at Cambridge, is working through a newfound sex-tinged awkwardness with Robbie Turner, their charlady’s son and her childhood playmate. Like any good mother and father in a coming-of-age novel, the Tallis parents are a scant presence.

When Briony sees Cecelia and Robbie arguing by the fountain under her bedroom window, she imagines their quarrel — which is really over a broken heirloom vase — into her own (mis)understanding of how narrative works: Cecelia is the victim, Robbie the dastardly villain. That evening, she’ll misunderstand twice more. First, she sneakily opens a letter from Robbie to Cecelia that ends with the line “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt.” She determines he’s a maniac, and later, when she walks in on them screwing in the family’s library, immediately assumes Robbie is raping her sister. Later, out searching the grounds for her visiting relatives, she makes out two figures in the tall grass, one “backing away from her and beginning to fade,” the other a frantic, disheveled Lola, her 15-year-old cousin. “In an instant, Briony understood completely,” McEwan writes. “She was nauseous with disgust and fear.” She isn’t sure, but tells Lola, “It was Robbie.” Lola never agrees with her, and the narrator hints that Briony is mistaken, but the police believe a child’s version of events, just as we eventually do. Robbie is wrongly branded a child rapist and hauled off.

The next two sections are set five years in the future, in 1940, as Europe steps into war. We first follow Robbie, released from prison to serve in the military, as he walks 25 miles toward the beach at Dunkirk, determined to return home to Cecelia despite the shrapnel lodged just below his heart. The next part returns to London, and to Briony, now 18, training as a war nurse and drafting “Two Figures by a Fountain,” a novella in impressions, based on the argument between Cecelia and Robbie that she saw from her bedroom window. Now wise to her own self-delusion and exhausted by guilt, she visits Cecelia to recant her accusation — and sees her sister reunited with Robbie, who insists that Briony do everything in her power to clear his name. Voilà, it’s the “atonement” readers expect.

Until now, a lovely, straightforward British wartime novel, full of wispy silk chiffon skirts and the buzz of the RAF — but then comes the coda. Leaping forward to 1999, we meet 77-year-old Briony as an established novelist, finishing up what will be her final manuscript: the novel we’ve just read, made of her memories, altered and reframed. She explains that Cecelia and Robbie really died in the Blitz and Dunkirk respectively. But “how could that constitute an ending?” Briony asks. “What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account?” Distance, and six full drafts, have allowed her to riff.

This post-postmodern one-two punch knocked readers on their asses. While even the most formidable reviewers adored Atonement ’s genius, calling it “a tour de force” and “a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama,” what criticism they did have was reserved for its last pages. James Wood, then ascendant at the New Republic , considered it “McEwan’s finest and most complex novel” while declaring the twist ending “unnecessary” and decrying its “neatness.” The Sunday Telegraph declared it “frustrating,” and Anita Brookner questioned its wisdom. Hermione Lee in the Guardian called it a “quite familiar fictional trick.” The general public is still at war with itself over how they feel. Last fall, the Washington Post reported on a reader-generated list of literature’s all-time most disappointing endings: Atonement was ranked second, just after Romeo and Juliet. “I was touched,” McEwan told me during a recent phone conversation, to be “right next to Shakespeare.”

“Over the years I’ve encountered many people who will be absolutely infuriated [by the ending],” he said with a little laugh. “But I can’t help feeling very flattered by that. Those are just the people I wanted to address, because they were heavily invested in the story.”

So while the “trick” at the end is the big reveal, the more rewarding aspect is the knowledge that hints about Atonement ’s meticulous construction are hidden along the way. On a first reading, McEwan’s breadcrumb trail is barely visible, but on the second, it’s practically Day-Glo. Perhaps overconfident, (or more indebted to postmodernism herself than she lets on) Briony repeatedly drops hints that she was even manufacturing this story as a child, and that it is shifting and changing even as she writes it from the perch of old age. Just after she witnesses the fountain scene, Briony writes, she knew “that whatever actually happened drew its significance from her published work and would not have been remembered without it.”

In the third section, as an 18-year-old writer, Briony receives a helpful rejection letter from real-life (as in, actually real-life) magazine editor Cyril Connolly. He praises “Two Figures by a Fountain,” as “arresting,” though her style “owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf.” He reminds her to think of her readers: “They retain a childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens.” Those last two phrases are diametrical, of course, which encapsulates the experiment of Atonement itself.

The ending isn’t a feather in the novel’s cap, tacked on unnecessarily as some critics lamented. It’s the novel’s reason for being. The little girl whose play once crumbled into a mire of familial infighting pulls off an incredible caper: She’s both offered a lengthy apology and finally written the ravishing novel that she once imagined, just minutes after watching that argument between Cecelia and Robbie by the fountain: “She sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself. She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite pen.” As for Robbie and Cecelia — still loved by her, still dead — she pats herself on the back for reviving them in her fiction, which she calls “a final act of kindness … I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me.”

Briony knows that her novel won’t be published until after her death or incapacitation; she won’t experience censure or scandal. Perhaps the most subversive thing about Atonement is that its narrator isn’t hobbled by the weight of her guilt. Instead, she’s victorious: “She was under no obligation to the truth, she had promised no one a chronicle.”

I asked McEwan if some bit of Briony is triumphant. “I would take the Jamesian view,” he demurred, “that she’s lived the examined life.”

One that’s been examined — and fiddled with — until it’s no longer a life. It’s a novel.

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Why I’ve come back around to substitutionary atonement

Sometimes sacrifice is an act of love..

I tried to explain atonement theology to my brother when we were both teenagers. I talked about sin, and I explained what I thought I understood from the Hebrew scriptures: “Only a sacrifice to God makes us right again,” I said. Then I plunged on with excitement about Jesus: “But instead of us having to pay that price ourselves, Jesus made the sacrifice instead. Once and for all. For all of our sins. Now, because of him, we’re right with God.”

I knew as the words were coming out of my mouth that they weren’t landing. I knew that I was missing something really important in how I had interpreted Jesus’ sacrifice. I felt dumber and dumber as Andrew, showing little to no interest in what I had just said, toppled my evangelical offering with a few disdainful words. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said, after he let me fizzle out. “God sounds really terrible. Why would God need sacrifice? And why would God’s son be the kind of sacrifice he wants?”

My brother’s response will sound familiar to many readers. He was articulating a conclusion at which many others have also arrived. As Andrew immediately saw, our casual Christian talk—and our passionate singing of some of our favorite barn burner hymns—makes it sound as if God is the ultimate abusive parent, unyielding in his divine scorecard that he will not allow to be settled in any way other than sacrifice, who then “sends his son” to pay the debt with blood and death.

Substitutionary atonement—the idea that Jesus died in our place or to pay the price of sin—may have been what my teenage self thought I knew about Jesus’ death, but I soon realized that there were many other options open to me for understanding the meaning of the cross. We can see in the cross God’s offer of faithful companionship, from which not even death can separate us. We can see in Jesus all of the brokenness of the world lifted up on that cross and hear Jesus’ words of forgiveness spoken over us all. We can emphasize that the story doesn’t end with Jesus’ death, that God responds by making the grave a pathway to life, that Jesus’ death and resurrection extend to us a share in God’s victory over hatred, fear, and death. We can reject substitutionary atonement in favor of other interpretations of the cross.

But does the mainline church reject it? At my church, my parishioners by and large speak with ease about how Jesus “paid the price for my sin.”

I have wondered why this is, why my parishioners embrace a teaching with which I and so many of my fellow church leaders have had so much trouble. Is it just an impressive example of indoctrination? Is this teaching so much a part of the music and words that are all over our Christian culture that people just absorb it by osmosis?

While this may be a factor, I have come to suspect that there is something else going on here, too. I have been exceedingly blessed in ministry by paying attention to the faith of my fellow Christians. One thing I have realized is that it means something to understand Jesus’ death as paying off one’s debt of sin. When I tried to explain to my brother why this matters, I did so as someone who felt passionately that it mattered to me , that Jesus’ death addressed the cost of my sin. The fact that I ­couldn’t adequately explain why it mattered led me to doubt that experience. But all across our congregations, I see people deeply, genuinely invested in this particular version of Christian teaching. This is connected in a real way to something that they know about sin, something that they know about their personal relationship with God, and—maybe most importantly—something that they know about the power of self-sacrificial love, which they have seen and experienced in their own lives.

We know from our own human experience that it costs something to absorb someone else’s debt. This can be considered in a very transactional way. A friend makes an error that costs me $2,000. I can go after that friend for the money, or I can forgive the error. If I choose to forgive it, that leaves me with $2,000 less in my bank account. I have to be willing to take on that loss in order to make the other person’s debt right. “To offer forgiveness,” writes theologian Justyn Terry, “is to be willing that something that was owed to me is owed to me no more. What I was entitled to get back, I relinquish, so that the debt of the other is now my loss. Their problem is now my problem, which is an act of substitution. That is the nature of forgiveness.”

Of course, we don’t owe God money. The walls that we put up in our relationship with God can happen for a whole lot of reasons, and the cost for God to bring those walls down and draw us close again can’t be boiled down to a mere number.

My parish suffered a terrible loss in 2018. Rob Fead, our beloved former rector, was killed by a reckless driver while out on his motorcycle on a Monday afternoon. The hurt and heartbreak across the churches where Rob had served were bottomless. And nobody was more devastated than Rob’s wife, Veronica. In an article in our local paper, she offered these anguished words: “I feel like, mostly, I have died and they forgot to bury me. My life without Rob is devoid of hope.”

And yet, when it came time for victim impact statements and the sentencing of the young man whose actions had killed Rob, Veronica asked for a sentence that didn’t involve jail time. “Rob was a man of mercy and compassion,” she said. She asked that the perpetrator “honor her husband’s memory by committing to helping others in his community” instead. Her words led to the prosecution and defense jointly requesting a conditional sentence—one served in the community—instead of a jail sentence. The defendant received a two-year conditional sentence.

Ethnographer Ella Deloria describes a community coming together to sentence a young murderer. Their sentence was carefully considered according to the resources of their collective Sioux wisdom. They could lock him up for the rest of his life or even seek capital punishment for his crime, and these options would be considered entirely just. Instead, they arrived at a different sentence. The young murderer would become a part of the family that had lost the son. Deloria quotes an elder from the victim’s community:

Smoke now with these your new relatives, for they have chosen to take you to themselves in place of one who is not here. It is their heart’s wish that henceforth you shall be one of them; you shall go out and come in without fear. Be confident that their love and compassion which were his are now yours forever!

“He had been trapped by loving kinship,” writes Deloria, “and you can be sure that he made an even better relative than many who are related by blood, because he had been bought at such a price.”

These examples describe the cost of forgiveness, which generally is not quantifiable. Our experience of sin rarely, if ever, involves a numerical debt; it involves a tearing of relationship, a breaking of the heart, a burden of anger and sadness and fear and powerlessness. The act of reaching out across the chasm of our broken hearts in order to make a torn relationship right again involves a significant cost.

And the impact of Veronica or the Sioux community channeling loss and anger and grief into actions of love and compassion is potentially life changing. It puts a halt to the endless rabbit holes of anger and retribution that we might be tempted to go down. It communicates to a person who has ruined not only the lives of others but probably their own life as well that they are still worthy of love, care, dignity, and a next chance. It allows the possibility of an outcome other than further ruin.

Sin means separation from God. The word refers to choices that individuals make to turn from God’s love. But it also refers to the more systemic brokenness of our human lives that leads us collectively to choose something less than God’s rule of love. Just as we know that forgiveness is costly, so also we know that human sin can invite, or even demand, sacrifice in response.

We know that those systems of injustice that most dramatically reveal the depth of our human brokenness are propagated by the enforced sacrifice of others. Through no choice of their own, sacrifice is demanded of sweatshop laborers, of developing countries bearing the ravages of wealthy nations’ carbon footprint, of minorities in North America incarcerated at disproportionately high rates as the visible scapegoat for our unwillingness to address poverty and systemic racism, of our Indigenous communities’ lives on reservations that don’t even provide the basic necessities of life while the rest of us live on their unceded lands. These sacrifices become so baked into our collective concept of business as usual that only repentance—hearing and heeding the call to look again and to turn toward another way—can begin to break those injustices.

We also know how individuals can choose to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of others. We know the courage with which Underground Railroad workers, Nazi resisters, and civil rights activists risked their lives in opposition to gross injustices. Malala Yousafzai took a bullet to the head to claim the right for women to be educated. All across our world, health-care workers and grocery store clerks put themselves in harm’s way to combat COVID-19 on our behalf and make sure we can eat. The recent Margaret Atwood book The Testaments details the dangerous work of one woman on the inside of a tyrannical regime to bring it down. And we continue to line up in droves to see the musical production of Les Misérables , in which a group of idealistic university students falls on the barricades of France. Even when they know that the people are not rising up to join their fight, they lay down their lives in the hope that “others will rise to take our place, until the earth is free!”

We know of parents, lovers, and friends who will choose to run into raging waters, dash into burning buildings, or jump in front of a bullet in order to save the life of one that they love.

In every instance, the sacrifice that is offered is done so ultimately because there is a price for human sin. Terror, death, injustice, and human frailty mark our human experience. The enforced sacrifice of others can be used to prop up that brokenness. And sometimes one willing act of sacrifice can reveal injustice, topple tyranny, and buy new life for others.

I’m convinced that the popularity of substitutionary atonement persists not because of indoctrination but because of experience. Our human lives are remarkably in tune with its basic premises, that God’s forgiveness comes at a cost and that one person’s willing sacrifice could address the price of sin.

Where the language that Christians use gets confused is when we imagine God as the demanding parent who is somehow satisfied by his son’s death. Anything that we say about atonement only makes sense in the context of what we also say about the Trinity. Jesus is not separate from God but part of the life of God. The suffering and death of Jesus are not something that God does to Jesus or even something God allows to happen to Jesus. Jesus’ suffering is God’s suffering. Jesus’ death is God’s death.

Our Christian understanding of the Trinity is also tied to Genesis 1, in which God creates humankind in God’s own image. The relationship at the heart of God is a relationship that is stamped onto our souls. This doesn’t just mean that we can understand on a very experiential level what Jesus’ sacrifice was all about. It means that we can participate in that sacrifice, too.

We know something, deep in our souls, about how we also have the capability stamped onto our very beings to be able to love in a way that bears the cost of human brokenness. In contrast to our instincts for self-promotion and self-preservation comes this senseless, breathtaking capacity for us to pour out our own lives for the sake of saving another’s life or making a new kind of world possible. We understand what Jesus did for us in part because that life of God already at work within us—our sharing in the image and likeness of God—allows us to recognize something of our own receiving of, and participating in, this kind of love.

Jesus died because he angered the powers of his day by refusing to accept that the dignity of and provision for any of God’s people could be discarded as simply the cost of doing business. Jesus died to lay bare the injustice of his world, the all too easy sin of assigning sacrifice to the poor so that the rich can flourish.

Jesus died as an act of love for his undeserving, perpetually confused friends. Jesus died for the people he served, because he would not be cowed from pursuing justice for them, even if it enraged the powerful of his day.

Jesus died for the powerful, to allow “those who think they see to become blind,” for those who sold their souls to the idol of power, who insisted with every fiber of their being that it was Jesus who was the problem, to be able to surrender their broken lives to God’s love, too.

Jesus died for worlds he couldn’t have imagined and for people he never knew. The onetime activity of God continues to matter, continues to be offered, because of the Holy Spirit. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ friendship and sacrifice continues to be extended to us.

All of those years ago, I tried to tell my brother why Jesus mattered to me, and I ended up amateurishly parroting back church doctrine instead. What I was really trying to express was an experience of truth that I couldn’t deny and couldn’t keep to myself.

I felt that telling catch in the back of my throat when I considered Jesus’ death as a deliberate offering in response to human sin. I understood in a very visceral way that this sacrificial act was in response to me, too—that my strivings and my failings and my personal emptiness all mattered, mattered consequentially and sacrificially and infinitely, to God. That God was reaching out to me in love, and even though I couldn’t see how to solve the emptiness or how to be enough, that there was a hand that was committed to clasping mine and never letting go, and there was the gift of life that was offered even though I would have never dared to ask.

Jesus died for me. Jesus is the embodiment of a personal relationship with God. The Holy Spirit’s power also means that Jesus’ death seeks me out in all of the places I get lost, stuck, or willfully off track. I come back to a teaching I so easily rejected because I actually know what this kind of love looks like. The image of God’s sacrificial love is written on my heart, too.

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title “When love looks like sacrifice.”

Martha Tatarnic

Martha Tatarnic is rector of St. George's Anglican Church in St. Catharines, Ontario, and author of  The Living Diet: A Christian Journey to Joyful Eating .

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