Book Six- Atonement

Oh, Atonement. This is one of those very very rare books that I saw the movie before I read the book, and I remember watching the movie with disappointment (I think I was under some sort of impression that it was a chick-flick, which IT WAS NOT, WOW) but then I read the book and it put the movie in a whole different light. I re-watched the movie recently found it amazing, of course. It's funny how that can happen. The one scene where Robbie has just given Briony the wrong letter and she runs off into the fields, and the music is twanging on wrong notes in the background and the typewriter noise starts up and you see him just barely cock his head, and the the whole scene seems to take a deep inhale and the camera sweeps over and centers just on his back, how stiff it is, and everything goes silent. And then he realizes, you can see him realizing it, the pivoting moment that causes the ball to tip and sets everything rolling towards the inevitable...wow. Sorry for the gushing, that scene is just so brilliant in the movie, I even called my flatmates over and made them watch it. 


ETA: OH JESUS HERE IT IS. It so perfect, I can't even...with the letter tapping and everything! He's so cocky, he has no idea what's coming to him, but you can see when he realizes, just gets a glimpse of the slope he's standing on the edge of...oh, just watch it.


Letter Scene from Atonement (CLICK HERE)



Anyway, this is about the book, not the movie. Ack, my feelings about this book are all mixed up right now. If I went into it I would talk a lot of destiny and fate and the sickness of war but I don't want this to sound like a book report, that would be horrible and completely scrub this amazing book of it's remarkable melding of hope and hopelessness, which is what I loved about it at the end. 


A few quick impressions:


- It is incredible how well McEwan writes children, especially children like Briony. I was that child. I was a young writer and so caught up in my own cleverness and convinced that no one ever in the history of the world had had these deep thoughts like mine and once everyone realized how revolutionary I was they would be shocked and/or awed. This line especially, "Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no-one was." I thought about that all the time when I was a kid, even now. Funny how with Briony it seems so innocent, until it becomes sinister. 


-The multi-view narrative works so well, especially at the beginning. You can see just how clever everyone thinks they are and how well they have it all figured out (especially Emily, who really is completely clueless) and how none of them, not one, can see the truth for what it really is, preferring to stick to their own narrowly understood view of the world. So Briony becomes the one guilty of letting  her imagination drastically change real life, but really they are all guilty of it, even Robbie and Cecilia. 


-The war. Whenever I read about war I can only think how- how can men keep going like that, no hope, no order, flushed of their humanity, ready to die at any instant? And how do they keep doing it? His prose is so heartbreaking here- Robbie in the basement, with his strange, heavy baggage, and telling Nettle he needs to stay on for a bit, take care of some business...


-Luc Cornet. Books don't usually make me cry.


-The end is perfect. Swings it all around full circle. Briony got them into the mess by wanting to believe in fate and plot and an orderly balance of right and wrong. She got into it because she believed in villains and heroes and happy endings, and we see in the middle how she has come to reject all these things so throughly. But at the end, she uses them once more to lend out tiny measure of happiness to a stupid, senseless, tragic story. The last thing she can do to atone. Is it a worthless gesture, a cheap trick?  Maybe. But it does make us feel better, if only for a moment. Then Ian McEwan breaks our hearts all over again. He's just so damn good at it! 


In summary: Watch the movie, read the book, and if you're like me you will cry a little and stay up way too late reading it and even possibly realize what a precocious little child you were. Just read it.