“What Laura said.”

Is that why? Thats a damn shame Laura and Pavlov’s Cat. The blog is poorer for it.

Well yes, except for most of them. eg:

The Comfort of Strangers
The Innocent
Black Dogs
Enduring Love
Amsterdam
Saturday
On Chesil Beach

Which are all in one way or another about adults discovering other adults do not always share the same frame of reference about mutual experiences that turn their sense of self worth around like a compass held directly over the geomagnetic North Pole.

You would do well to actually read the books you’re talking about.

I also have a lot to say about the film version of Atonement but I think I’ll wait until I have actually seen it.

Personally I feel Ian McEwan’s just a more laboured Grahame Greene with a brand name condom next to the black Amex card in his wallet.

I followed your steampunk link. Years ago, just after I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer, I picked up a copy of the Difference Engine in a book shop, scanned the blurb on the back and put it down again. So, in the end, the closest I got to the genre was this passage:

The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year’s tax return.

Smith’s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much for it.

I’m still intrigued by that.

I saw it last night. I also have not read the novel, but have read a few McKewen novels and think he is a bloody genius, so I found myself constantly second-guessing how he would have written different scences, which is not very fair to the movie makers.

My response was almost identical to yours, except I had little trouble with the fountain and vase scene.

On the fountain and Cecilia, I saw that as a very sexy scene. The beautiful and rich posh debutante dripping in water, her silk frock highlighting every contour of her clearly womanly body. Briony is fully aware of her own confusing position in the hormonal twilight zone between the children - her nephews - and her sophisticated smoking sister. Unlike Briony’s clumsy dive into the pond, Robbie did not - and did not need to - save her suave and calpable elder sister. Through Cecilia’s frock we could see her pubic hair, and presumably so could Briony.

Recall later that Briony instantly knew what “cunt” meant. This stunned me. I wondered how a 13 year old upper middle class Home Counties English lass would have encountered that word in the 1930s. I instantly saw an allusion to Lady Chatterly’s Lover with the “cunt” savvy gardner’s son, telling his bit of posh he wanted her “cunt.”

I agree with you on the perfectly vile Lola and Paul Marshall. Aristotle argued that a great tragedy rests on the believability and probability of the action. I think McKewen (or the film’s writers/producers) made an error in not tightening this bit. BUT, recall the shot we see when Briony shines the flashlight. We did not see his face, only his hairy ass. Now it strikes me that the investigating police would have extracted this detail from Briony, and the whole tragedy could have been averted by a simple dacking of all the males.

Once again, Briony is reminded of her hormonal Twilight Zone, where her near-aged cousin is clearly perceived as sufficiently “womanly” to attract the carnality of a perfect stranger male. Recall Lola drew maturity rank on Briony when she insisted on the lead role in the play. Later in a flirtatious scene between Lola and Paul, Lola refers to her brothers as “the children” when upbraiding Paul Marshall’s presumptuous commentary on their family. Though it is true that Briony was not in the room at the time. However, later Lola clearly also knew what “cunt” was when Briony took her into confidence about Robbie’s letter.

Given how reptilian and oleaginous Paul Marshall was drawn, I inferred he had married Lola deliberately because, as Cecilia bemoans when Briony visits Robbie and Cecilia at Balham, Lola could not be made to testify due to husband/wife privilege.

The ending was a disaster. The switch from the beautifully shot Dunkirk scenes and the earlier Room With A View bucolic beauty of that Summers day, to the gharish modern day television studio was a real turn off, the presence of the divine Lynn Redgrave notwithstanding.

3 Stars.

It occurs to me too that this story-within-a-story thing is as old as the hills

It’s at least as old as One Thousand and One Nights isn’t it. If you rewrote Nights and gave it a new setting people would call it postmodern.

On the topic of clever devices… I really enjoyed David Eggers memoir A.H.W.O.S.G but, now that I’ve read it, I don’t really want to see those tricks performed again.

Eggers decided to add a corrective appendix — ‘Mistakes We Knew We Were Making‘ — which was:

meant to illuminate the many factual and temporal fudgings necessary to keep this, or really any, work of nonfiction from dragging around in arcana and endless explanations of who was exactly where, and when, etc.

But later he realises that Mary McCarthy has beaten him to it.

If I’d studied Mary McCarthy or — even better, Laurence Sterne — when I was at uni I’d probably have been bored and irritated. But I hadn’t, so I was entertained.

I was curious about the comment:

One badly wants stories about that war to have a happy ending and they almost never do.

The stories I’ve heard from people who experienced the war don’t have tidy narratives with climaxes and happy endings (for example, I heard about one woman whose father died when a wall of bombed building collapsed on him. I think he was putting out a fire or looking for bodies).

But I grew up with so many uplifting stories of heroic struggle and meaningful sacrifice that eventually I became irritated by happy endings. When I was in primary school we used to play at being Lancaster bomber crews and fly around the playground. We’d been so taken by the stories of WWII that we never thought about what it might like be firebombed in the middle of the night. Of course there was one boy whose father had been in Vietnam — the father had had an accident and was a quadriplegic.

The book starts with Briony casting her cousins in a play. As a nurse she writes a novella about what happened… and so on. I was interested in Briony’s ideas about what a novel ought to be.

Again I can’t remember how many of these signs there are in the book, but it occurs to me as I read your comment that I was being dopey, unthinking and resistant in not seeing them. Or perhaps not wanting to see them. My generation sees WW2 as very real — my folks were in it, if only just old enough — and McEwen is older than me and a Pom with it so it would be even more real to him. One badly wants stories about that war to have a happy ending and they almost never do. (Witness for example the real-life example of V Woolf, whose mental illness set in again under the unbearable strain of watching the bombs drop, seeing their London flat torn apart, and wondering what would happen to her beloved husband, who was of course Jewish and a peace activist to boot — she drowned herself a matter of months after Dunkirk.)

It occurs to me too that this story-within-a-story thing is as old as the hills — my objection is that I thought McEwen did it badly, as per comment above (and I know exactly what you mean about the genre switch — that sinking “There’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back” feeling). There’s a novel by Anne Bronte called The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in which several narrators’ stories are embedded within each other rather like concentric circles, and she uses the device of the document — one layer of narrative turns out to be a letter, another a diary, and so on — but it’s developed steadily from the outset, not sprung on you at the end in that “nyerdy-nyer, fooled you” kind of way.

The thing about V Woolf, apart from her very beautiful sentences, is that in terms of modes and genres you always know exactly where you are with her. I have to admit to having read no Richardson but she was an interesting and important figure in that time and place. (And IMHO if a writer is someone ‘nobody bothers much with these days’ it’s usually an excellent reason to read her/him!)

But if you want good writing about being a young nurse in England during WW2, you can’t go past Elizabeth Jolley’s My Father’s Moon.

I felt exactly the way you say. Before the twist I thought I was watching a movie where the limits of the everyday world applied. I did my job as a viewer and tried to figure out what was going on and how it would end. Then it introduced a new element that I couldn’t possibly have foreseen.

It had been wasting my time and I was angry.

Maybe my reaction would have been different if my ideas about the limits of the everyday world had allowed for more magic.

So now I’m wondering why I didn’t feel that way about Atonement. I think what saved it for me was the way things clicked into place when I went over the story again. The book starts with Briony casting her cousins in a play. As a nurse she writes a novella about what happened… and so on. I was interested in Briony’s ideas about what a novel ought to be. Should we throw the old conventions away?

I’m not as well read as some of the other commenters here so most of Briony’s thoughts about novel writing were new to me. Atonement made me interested enough about modernism that I’ve finally got around to reading some Virginia Woolf.

When I went to Borders to get a book on Joyce, Richardson and Woolf, the cashier at the book shop told me that his girlfriend wrote a thesis on Richardson, that nobody bothered much with her these days, and that I’d be better off concentrating on Joyce and Woolf.

That made me even more curious.

I have no problem with postmodern narrative tricks at all

I don’t usually either, where the novel has been honestly presented from the outset as that kind of beast, and I should have elaborated more in my comment to make this clearer.

With Atonement (the novel) it wasn’t that I minded the pomo nature of the ending as such — but the best analogy I can think of is the crime writer who introduces, near the end, a new element that the reader couldn’t possibly have foreseen and then hangs the identity of the murderer on that new element. That’s one of the biggest sins a crime writer can commit and it’s kind of what I meant by ‘cheating’; a breach of the reader-writer contract.

Along the same lines, McEwen presented the novel up to its end point in standard realist mode, and I as a reader was reading it in good faith the same way. Realism is not a horse one can change in midstream without, as it were, chucking some of one’s reader/riders into the river.

As I say, I thought it was more successful in the movie, and more successful in the (yes, great) movie of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, compared to that book, as well — partly because they had the neat conceit of casting the characters as actors in a period movie available to them, which was a brilliant solution.

I’m not sure what James means by the nursing scenes being ‘ultimately irrelevant’ — irrelevant to what exactly? Irrelevant in the sense that — given the lovers are in fact both dead — Briony’s emergence out of solipsism ultimately changes nothing, at least for them?

Since you ask. In the scenes I referred to, we see Briony, as a now 19-year-old, maturing, realising that she isn’t, after all, the author of the world around her, and learning a bit of empathy. The fact that she actually chose to work in the hospital implies she had already made some moral progress. All of this would have had some point if it had resulted some meaningful act of atonement, and in fact I argued that it didn’t matter that the principal victims were dead — indeed, you argue on that basis that it’s impossible to atone for a murder (but think of Robert de Niro in The Mission - now there’s an atonement for you.) But she could still have cleared Robbie’s name and made a significant sacrifice in the process while there were still people alive who cared. However, there was no such atonement, so it’s neither here nor there when or how that moral progress was made, or whether indeed it did at all. The sole reason for inserting her into the 1939 part of the film at all was so that Robbie could have the satisfaction of telling her off soundly in the invented part of the story. From that point of view, what might have been going on in her head is irrelevant — as long as she agrees to follow his instructions, write to the lawyer, and so on.

I have no problem with postmodern narrative tricks at all, but they need to work. The French Leiutenant’s Woman was terrific — at least I thought so when I say it 25 years ago (and yes, I have to admit that I only saw the screen version in that case as well.)

PC, thats right - the critique of class went nowhere. But there seemed to be a hint of a critique through the presentation of the deviant sexuality of its members, Lola and Humbert being one instance. I do wonder what you made of the relationship between brother and sister, which to me, hinted briefly, at an inappropriateness. This was never developed but a few scenes made me wonder. That interlocking lip kiss when they were reunited was a bit interesting. As was the brother staring admiringly at his swimsuited sister in the pool scene. Then, again - if it was meant to be there at all, it went nowhere. The brother’s character was not developed, even in film. (sorry Ive forgotten most of their names)

It was a disappointing film and I felt that I should have read the book because I was obviously missing out on the complexities of the novel. But from your review of the book, obviously not! I wont be reading it.

I didn’t think that the ending took anything away from the story which begins the book. I didn’t feel tricked or cheated. I guess my attitude was that every novel is a made up story, regardless of whether it goes out of its way to tell you that it is. If it was working as a novel before the twist then it still worked.

But did it work? The part when I started to feel uncomfortable was when Briony went to see Cecilia, runs into Robbie and she promises to tell the truth about what happened. This seemed so awkward and inadequate.

So when the twist came I was almost relieved. There was no atonement. It was a tragedy. And all the novelist could say was that soon everyone involved would be dead and all that would remain was her story with its happy ending.

That comment brought me back to the scene where Briony comforts a dying French soldier. He thought she was a girl he’d known from home and at first Briony tries to correct him. But after she sees his open head wound she allows herself to be drawn into his comforting delusion. So maybe Briony’s question is — why insist on truth when all it brings is pain and confusion?

With the twist at the end it was possible to go back over the book and read it in a different way. And that was enjoyable too. It was almost like getting too books in one.

Rather the upper classes that saw Macavoy’s character as an interloper

Yes. In fact if the film had a really major failing for me, it was in the way it downplayed — almost ignored — this class dimension of what was a class-saturated time and place, except to overdo Robbie’s faithful lower-class offsider in the army as a comic turn. Again, the culpability here probably lies with Christopher Hampton and his screenplay.

To me it depends on the age you put Lola at. I see her as the same age as Briony. 13 or so? I read Lola’s amvivalence through the prism of the abused child. IMO Lola was a girl on the brink of adolescence who was in that intensely ambivalent positon of having her sexuality awakened too early. In short she a minor, she was molested, even if she was not sure about it. That she was still considered a child is evidenced at the dinner scene where the matriarch of the piece tells her to wipe the lipstick from her face, saying “how ridiculous” or whatever the line was.

That she has already been compromised/abused is raised in her tearful visit on the afternoon in question to Briony’s rooms where it is apparent her arms have been bruised. She blames her brothers but clearly something has already been going on (prefaced by the flirtatious scene with the chocolate magnate) and here she cries, says her brothers are beasts or something and that she wants to go home. She’s out of her depth as I read it and retreats to the childish cry for home. In the langorous decadence of the upper classes as portrayed in this film, I perceived a sexual menace surrounding Lola and felt her distress was actually apparent in this scene with briony where they first raise the sex fiend that they create from their limited understanding/jealousy and for lola, projection of from her actual experience.

That she is ambivalent/attracted/repelled by her abuser/lover is not unusual for girls who are sexualised too early and who are not able to process their emotions.Her subsequent marriage to him is only a continuation of her double position as his victim and his complicit partner in the deception.

Therefore, there are many victims of the original deception and I read one as Lola.Anyway, I thought Lola’s charactersation interesting. I have met women who were sexualised early in just this way and they seem to exhibit the same double positions as victims/willing partners. They are marred by their too early abuse/introduction into the sexuality of adulthood. Her ambivalence rang true to me, even if the later parts of the film became more difficult.

I must also say though, that I felt a sense of discomfort with the portrayal of the girl child in general, deceptiveness, jealousy, destruction…children in the attic types who unleash a retribution beyond understanding. I do remember shifting uncomfortably in my chair at the characterisations of these two girls and their enormous capacity to destroy lives in such a way, unquestionbly accepted by their families.

Who needed to atone really? Surely not the children? Rather the upper classes that saw Macavoy’s character as an interloper and used the children’s stories to punish him for his hubris at his overreaching.

In the face of Laura’s excellent analysis of it as an adaptation, I’m a bit embarrassed about what I thought — but I liked the movie qua movie quite a lot, and thought that on the whole it worked, again qua movie. I don’t have any positions to argue as I think multiple interpretations are not only possible but necessary, and I think that was part of what McEwen (if not Hampton) was on about. So I don’t have an argument to make, just a bunch of random responses to what’s already here.

I remembered remarkably little about the novel and with the exception of the fountain scene and the library scene it was as if I’d never read it at all. Maybe this is because it annoyed me mightily when I first read it (I usually remember books pretty well, and could describe to you in detail, for example, at least half a dozen scenes in McEwen’s Saturday, which I did think was an exceptional novel.) The movie didn’t jog my memory, either. I didn’t remember the whole rape subplot at all, nor did I remember that Cecilia and Robbie died. Or, in fact, much else.

(I disliked the book partly because (a) I thought the tricksy tacked-on pomo ending — sorry, Steve! — cheapened the force of what had gone before, and anyway a novelist can’t really do that after The French Lieutenant’s Woman and get away with it (and also as a reader I felt cheated and cheaply tricked) — and partly because (b) the novel looked an awful lot to me like McEwen’s deliberate answer not only to Fowles but also to Coetzee’s Disgrace — as though he had consciously set himself the task of also writing a book whose title was a single morally loaded abstract noun, as some kind of competitive writing exercise. In the context of ‘male British novelists over the last 40 years’ he looked to me as if he were trying to Oedipally kill the father and Biblically slay the brother in one fell swoop, and in the event failed to manage either. Don’t ever underestimate the competitive streak in writers.)

So I can only say what I thought of it as a movie: that it was adequately (though no more than that) coherent in its narrative, and that it didn’t need to be coherent morally, partly because moral incoherence seemed to me to be part of what it was about. I thought the ending actually worked much better in the movie than it did in the book and for that I think most of the credit has to go to Redgrave.

I agree with Steve that the title didn’t mean there needed to be an actual act of atonement. Maybe it should have been called ‘Penance’, which would have been closer to Briony’s experience, penance being a solitary and self-enclosed act and a one-person moral trajectory. I’m not sure what James means by the nursing scenes being ‘ultimately irrelevant’ — irrelevant to what exactly? Irrelevant in the sense that — given the lovers are in fact both dead — Briony’s emergence out of solipsism ultimately changes nothing, at least for them?

Re the fountain scene, I thought the whole point of that was Briony’s failure to understand her own stormy emotional response to the unresolved intensity between the sister she’s close to and the gardener she has a crush on, an intensity that she herself is excluded from.

About Lola and the chocolate magnate — I don’t remember that part of the book at all, but I thought the film did fall down there in the sense that it wasn’t possible to tell there whether or not Lola was complicit, and that’s one thing the film did need to be clear about — though Briony’s shock at the wedding seems to indicate that she was. On reflection, maybe Nicholas at #1 is right about this and it doesn’t matter that much. Or maybe the audience is being drawn into experiencing the same kind of spectatorial incomprehension that Briony suffers from, but I think Laura’s explanation about Hampton and his shortcomings in conveying interiority is probably the correct one here. The other thing the film offers no explanation of and that to me seemed a hole in the plot is the moment when Robbie returns with the twins and is confronted by the hostile household — as if a guilty man would come back like that in cheerful triumph with the children.

I was intrigued by the conversation between Lola and Briony after the rape — “It was him” — not least because it seemed to me that each girl was projecting onto the conversation her own complete preoccupation/obsession with a particular man; there was something quite Shakespearean about that classic bit of misunderstanding. (I thought that the scene where Lola and her war profiteer first meet and flirt was an absolute cracker and utterly convincing, BTW.)

One thing I thought ironic about the Lola subplot is that in the 19th century it would have been regarded as the morally correct thing for a rapist (except that he would have been called a ’seducer’ regardless of the niceties of consent and so on) to marry his victim, which would restore her respectability and prevent her from becoming a fallen woman.

I quite like those smeary-lens choc-box effects, especially in those nostalgic Bridesheady type productions, and didn’t mind the artificiality (clean water etc), but I do get completely what Laura means about those things as examples of the way the film itself is hooked on spectator mode at the expense of inner life. And I agree that that is the main reason for the movie’s most incoherent moments. But another reason is that the story seems to me a sort of self-deconstructing meditation on the dubious morality of being a fiction writer at all, and that is far too meta to adapt happily to another medium.