I just finished “Atonement” by Ian McEwan, which I thought was incredible, and it had one of the most effective twist endings I’ve read in a while, in a way that really made me re-evaluate the entire book in profound ways:
* Initially, I liked the second part the least (which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, just that I didn’t enjoy it relative to the other parts as much). Part of that is probably just due to the fact that I’m not big on war stories in general. But with the reveal that the whole thing was written by Briony, the relative lack of engagement I had with Robbie’s POV versus Briony’s segments starts to make more sense; due to a combination of class divide, her lack of direct experience with combat, and overall lack of time spent together, it makes sense for Briony that Robbie’s perspective is the hardest for her to capture.
* The reveal also retroactively reframes the preceding pages as not an objective omniscient account of events, but as a decades-old recollection from the perspective of a single, biased individual. But in a meta sense, isn’t that true of stories? At the end of the day, these characters are figments of McEwan’s imagination, and no matter how vividly he illustrates their thoughts and feelings, they’re only ever his best guess at what other people are like – and that’s really the whole point of the pursuit of fiction and empathy in general.
* Briony’s immense guilt over the events, while certainly very understandable, initially felt somewhat overblown to me. As awful as what happened was, Briony was still just a child, and based on what she saw, it felt more like an incredibly unlikely confluence of unfortunate coincidences than an act of malice that she needed to try so hard to atone for. But since we now know that the story was told by Briony herself, it’s very possible that her recollection of her thought process at that time may not be totally accurate, both out of a sense of emotional self-preservation as well as the generally tricky nature of memory. Maybe there was a bigger part of her than she’d like to admit that knew that it wasn’t Robbie she saw, or at least that she was jumping to conclusions too quickly; but perhaps, despite her contrition, she still couldn’t help but write her role in the story as charitably as possible.
* And of course, on a pure emotional level, the ending was absolutely heartbreaking. Naively, throughout the epilogue I kept waiting for Cecelia and Robbie to show up at Briony’s party, and when the truth slowly started to dawn on me – and then was suddenly and swiftly confirmed – I was crushed. Romances are a bit of a hit or miss for me in fiction – my primary issue is usually that one or both of the characters are involved are too thinly-sketched for me to feel invested – but Cecelia and Robbie, through McEwan’s (and technically Briony’s) lush and intimate prose, really came alive for me.
by Funplings