Book Review: Atonement - Ian McEwan

'Atonement' is set in the England of the '30s and the War years. There is talk of a war in the Continent but it is peripheral to the scheme of things for a country girl.

Briony, just out of childhood, still a child, is writing a play for her elder brother who is coming back home from the city. The big country house is populated by her mother who absents herself from the daily chores to nurse a recurring headache, an elder sister just back from Cambridge, luxuriating in her borrowed ideals of liberation but thrust with the care of the house, stifled by the country life but unsure of her life ahead.

Briony chances upon something which to her child's mind she imagines to be sinister. Her playwright's mind provides her with an ironclad story as she banishes any lingering doubts that she might be in the wrong. With her unwavering words she indicts a man, a childhood friend with whom her sister had just started exploring the first timid steps of a love.

It is only later when England is in the middle of the War and Briony is past her childhood years that doubts creep in. She starts to see the incident as what it was - a fabrication of her own mind. A wrong which she has to atone for.

The author captures the feel of the times. The description of the early years is a series of sepia tinted pictures, languid sunshine filtering through the leaves, reflecting off the ripples of a lake, lazy days spent smoking secretly on the tumble of freshly washed linen.

The silence in the house was complete - no voices or footfalls downstairs, no murmurs from the plumbing; in the space between one of the open sash windows a trapped fly had abandoned its struggle, and outside, the liquid birdsong had evaporated in the heat.

The author also portrays the grim realities of a war ravaged continent. The turmoil and sense of desolation of an army on the retreat with yearnings for home and loved ones left behind. Of a people defeated and with little signs of salvation.

And in the midst of it all the sense of wrongdoing, the attempts at making amends, of atonement. And the love which withstands all this, the indictment and the all-prevading war.

They stared at each other in confusion, unable to speak, sensing that something delicately established might slip from them. That they were old friends who had shared a childhood was now a barrier - they were embarrassed before their former selves. Their friendship had become vague and even constrained in recent years, but it was still an old habit, and to break it now in order to become strangers on intimate terms required a clarity of purpose which had temporarily deserted them. For the moment, there seemed no way out with words.