Atonement, novel by Ian McEwan, published in 2001. An Academy Award-winning film version of the story appeared in 2007.
Begun as a science fiction story but then abandoned, Atonement took mature form as a work of literary fiction composed of three distinct stories. The first part of the novel begins in the summer of 1935 as 13-year-old Briony Tallis attempts to direct her three cousins in a self-penned play to celebrate the homecoming of her adored older brother, Leon. The children’s lives should be idyllic in their upper-middle-class, interwar setting, but real-life events soon enrapture Briony more than her play. She witnesses a moment of sexual tension between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, whose education Cecilia’s father has been funding. Assuming he is forcing Cecilia into a sexual encounter, and later intercepting a letter Robbie sends to Cecilia declaring his lust, Briony decides that Robbie is evil. When her cousin Lola is mysteriously attacked, Briony wrongly points the finger at Robbie, who is arrested and jailed. Cecilia, heartbroken at her lover’s confinement and never ceasing to believe in him, leaves to become a nurse in London and refuses to speak to Briony.
The second part of the novel follows Robbie five years later, now in the army, as he is exposed to the horrors and suffering of the Dunkirk evacuations. In the third, and final, part, Briony becomes a war nurse in London and begins to come to terms with her guilt over what she did to Robbie and Cecilia, both of whom died before Briony could ask their forgiveness.
In the epilogue, McEwan paints Briony as an aging and dying novelist who is revisiting her past in fact and fiction; in fact, the reader learns that Briony is actually the author of the book, sections of which are untrue and fictionalized. This novel, in the end, is not only about love, trust, and war but about the pleasures, pains, and challenges of writing, the burden of guilt, and, above all, the danger of interpretation. McEwan has said that Atonement is “a book about the imagination and what it means, what the power of the imagination is and what the power of writers is.”