Ian McEwan - image from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette - photo credit: Joost van den Broek

I was bored with this until half way through, but then it got interesting. It touches on imagination versus reality, fiction versus fact, in addition to the story content. A portrait of an upper middle class English family is interrupted by a supposed rape in which a young imaginative (vengeful) girl misidentifies the rapist. I found that it stayed with me and that I appreciated it more with time. The film, released in 2007, was an amazing translation.


Links to the author’s personal and FB pages

This is where a 2.5 star rating would be ideal. I am extremely ambivalent about this novel--first the pluses: the writing is gorgeous; McEwan has some of the best prose out there. Every line has meat to it, nothing is throwaway, and every visual is so vivid that the reader is transported to a specific time and place. Secondly, (what everyone praises the novel for), the commentary McEwan is making about the novel itself--the fact that it is written, that characters and plots are manipulated by the author, and how a real character emerges (eventually) while at the same a written story exists too. This is very difficult to write about without revealing anything about the plot, but as one reads the novel, it becomes clear what McEwan is trying to do. Finally, the references to other literature (including some of the best novels--Clarissa, Lolita--and novelists--Elizabeth Bowen is directly mentioned, Henry Green and Virginia Woolf are obvious influences) is fluid, never forced, and is done to showcase a love of literature.
At the same time, there are downsides to McEwan's endeavor--how to write a novel that is commenting on its obvious falsity (its construction as fiction), while at the same time trying to convey reality. This is perhaps an impossible task, and I'm left with the nagging feeling that the novel wants to have its cake and eat it too. The characters and situations are so obviously phony that it becomes distracting in the first part of the story. I was drawn in by the fantastic writing, but then found myself wanting to hurl the novel across the room at some of the ridiculous choices by both the characters and the novelist. Namely: 1) The main plot twist makes little realistic sense. Absolutely zero would fly in a mystery novel let alone real life; 2) The characters in the first part are boring aristocrats who we don't care about (check out a Henry Green novel; except in his novels, the reader continues to laugh at them, there is no attempt at emotional attachment); 3) The 'mystery's' solution is obvious to the reader before the crime even happens; 4) Briony (part 1) is an insufferable narrator (as kid narrators, To Kill a Mockingbird excluded, so often are); 5) The novelist's choice to name a sexually, precocious teenager 'Lola' (too obvious a reference). But these choices are meant to be ridiculous--reality is only supposed to set in in the epilogue. At the same time, I marveled at how real parts 2 (Robbie at war) and 3 (Briony as a nurse--some of the hospital scenes are the best I've ever read) seemed to be. Then the question became for me--if they seemed real because of the way the scenes were written (the gore again in the hospital), but could not have been real because the characters and overall plot of the Tallis family are so fake, isn't that cheating? I haven't reached a conclusion yet, but something is still bugging me about the conception of it. Ultimately I prefer novels that go the opposite route--Paul Auster's Oracle Night for example--that start out real and quickly become fake, or throw out the idea of a realistic, consistent plot entirely (only in the conclusion does David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas come together), rather than the never-ending 'is it real? is it fake?' push-and-pull of Atonement.

Atonement by Ian McEwan is a novel that explores guilt, redemption, and the tricky nature of truth. The story is divided into three parts, beginning in the 1930s at an English country estate and continuing through World War II and beyond. The second part of the book describes a character's experiences as a soldier during the war.

The story starts with Briony Tallis, a young girl who lies about a situation between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of the family's housekeeper. Briony's false accusation against Robbie has devastating consequences for everyone involved. She spends the rest of her life trying to make up for the wrong she did, leaving readers to wonder if true forgiveness is ever really possible.

The third part takes place in 1999, with Briony now an author. In her book, also titled "Atonement," she writes about the events of her life and reflects on the impact of her actions as a young girl.

The novel moves slowly at times, contains rough language, and deals with how a single lie can spiral into something much bigger.

'I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just "on spec", addressed as follows: "Clancy, of The Overflow"'

To borrow the opening verse of a famous Australian poem by Banjo Patterson, this is precisely what parts of Atonement feel like. A letter, written and directed to relatives wrongly accused in the hope of seeking forgiveness or at the least: atonement. Atonement is one of the finest modern literary novels I have read, lyrical and hauntingly moving, while captivating the reader with an interesting story. As for the ideas behind this novel, they are profound. I believe this book alone is one which should class McEwan as a writer deserving of acclaim.

I noted in the previous McEwan novel I read how McEwan had written in the first person present tense. In Atonement his writing is still a beautiful, if not more beautiful, but set in the third-person. And personally this works better in describing the events of the story. By the end of the novel the narrative does drift into first person, but only as necessary for the story's completion. For by the end of the novel the reader will see that this book is 'not written' by McEwan but rather by Briony Tallis herself as her testimony of a wrong once done. I thought this method of having Atonement be something of a book within a book was a brilliant meta-linguistic technique. Of course I did not recognise this until the end of the novel, which is when McEwan wanted his readers to see this fact.

The novel focuses on Briony Tallis, a thirteen year old in 1934, who could perhaps be described as capricious and wilful. She wants the world to run according to her designs (as any thirteen year old does) and is a budding author, having been in the process of writing a play. This introduction to Briony perfectly places her into the narrative as a naive dreamer, a girl who sees black and white and then argues what she sees.

At the story's opening Briony Tallis spies her sister Cecilia strip down to her underwear in front of one particular boy, Robbie Turner and so begins a dreadful misinterpretation, particularly when she reads a smutty letter from Robbie to Cecilia, as Briony suspects Robbie of committing wrong against her sister. This belief is confirmed to her when she finds Robbie and Cecilia in the library making love. When Briony's cousin Lola is raped, she reports that it was Robbie who did the deed, though he claims innocence. And so Robbie, one a 'family friend' is separated from his lover and a once loving family because she believes so clearly that it was Robbie.

The themes of this novel essentially resolve around the conflict created from Briony's mistake. The question is asked subtly by the novel: can anyone be forgiven or make up for a mistake made as a child? The question is not should they, for I think that most people would believe that yes, an individual should be forgiven if they are truly sorry for their mistake. But the question asked is 'can they be forgiven?'. Another aspect of McEwan's brilliant writing is that he does make complOvex and solid characters in this novel who respond not to fairytale logic but rather who respond as emotional individuals. And as emotionally driven humans there are some crimes and some wrongs that we never want to right or forgive. Personally this element touched me due to my beliefs in God and that we all need someone who can unconditionally forgive, because I do not think that we as people can forgive every detail of a crime done against us. Or we may pardon them but never forget their mistake. We will allow mistakes to colour our perception of individuals. And from this perspective this was a great book, along with the writing, the characters and the overall story.

Overall a piece of literature that deserves to be read and has been read by many hundreds of thousands of people. It's a potential classic in the making and certainly has to be McEwan's best work in writing. I encourage anyone who is interested in stories about unfair accusations and forgiveness to give it a try if they have not.

The subject matter of Atonement is literature itself, but it is much more. First, the writer is one of its characters; second, because Ian McEwan’s novel creates a world where subjectivity and objectivity interfere mutually. The characters are full of life and the language, even if elaborate and subtle, does not go around or makes inroads into itself.

The narrator and protagonist, Briony Tallis, emerges in the beginner as a pre-adolescent that dreams to arrange the world in her texts, as in the play she is writing. Her love for order, for the careful design according to her spoiled desires, is translated into an impulse to write that hardly depend on the theme.

n  n   

“There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.”

n  n
Her cousins, Lola, and the twins will be the actors, with which she plans to awe the assembled family, that include her parents, her older sister Cecily and the son of the housekeeper, Robbie. On that day of 1935, Briony sees Cecily and Robbie in a game that culminates in a fateful scene. Briony believes she sees something that profoundly perturbs her. The development of the story doesn’t let the reader stop. When, later, Lola is raped by a man that was not seen, Briony, without any grounds, makes a ‘deduction’ of who committed the crime.

Here we are, therefore, in the territory of Jane Austen, cited in the epigraph, or Henry James, George Eliot, and many other English authors: social tension versus sexual stress, pride and prejudice conflicts, mere misunderstandings that adopt dramatic dimensions. McEwan considers the simple distortions that physical acts, such as vision, can suffer when clouded by moral bias. Briony is attracted to Robbie and envies in Cecily her independence and, and in her anxiety to wipe out her shortcomings recreates the world in her own way, succumbing to prejudice and threatening her already reduced capacity to accept reality.

But, more than that, what McEwan shows is how a writer can worsen weaknesses such as vanity, cowardice and credulity, sentiments that derive from the solitary and fallible condition that is above all human. Briony, with an absent father, a sick mother, a distant brother and an adult sister, fills her solitude with words that want to arrange everything, as she organizes her room.

n  n   

“But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.”

n  n
She is emotionally deprived as all of us, but a few degrees above the Richer scale: her need to be praised, her inability to deal with her environment, her surrendering to a fantasy of perfection – it is as if she were an immature child, seeking protection from life itself.

However, the novel goes beyond an intimate recounting. In the second half, McEwan throws the reader into the Second World War, with memorable descriptions of the United Kingdom’s empire ultimate whisper at the battle of Dunkirk. McEwan uses this as background to show us Robbie’s feelings. Among dead and wounded, he drifts with his head down and wrapped in his own sentiments to protect himself and to dream he will be exonerated for having survived in a battle where so many had died.
n  n   

“Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. ...He knew by heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily.”

n  n But what rots and sustains him is his hate for Briony:
n  n   

“In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.”

n  nAbove everything:
n  n   

“Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.”

n  nThe ability of McEwan is very well known, but in Atonement he arrived were he had not reached before and where few living authors – maybe Coetzee, Philip Roth and a few others – were able to arrive. The force of his narrative comes from its plot and its magnitude as well as from its richness and structure. The story is strong, but who narrates is not subservient to its hierarchy and its rhythm: it’s a subject that lets it flow and, at the same time, chooses the moments and the way to reveal its parts. McEwan does not need to resort to fragmentation and mysticism to deal with the battle between affection and speech, tolerance and freedom, a clash so in evidence nowadays.
____

Considering this entire novel is forged out of an implausible and highly insensitively described incident it's incredibly successful in its artistry and reach. The incident in question is a sexual assault. The victim has already been described as a drama queen who loves nothing better than to be the centre of attention. There's then nothing in the text to suggest she has undergone anything as serious as rape. Initially, I assumed it was a bit of hanky panky because she wasn't depicted as being overly traumatised. It was a shock to later hear she had been raped. Then she protects the rapist by agreeing to accuse someone completely innocent of the assault. McEwan conveniently skips the trial when the wrong man is convicted of the crime. This belittling of rape becomes more uncomfortable later when we discover the victim marries her rapist. So, there's some clumsy plotting and some highly dodgy sexual politics (McEwan perhaps showing his age) but I'm going to judge the book on its literary qualities, not its sexual politics, and for that reason definitely a five star read. I especially enjoyed the descriptive writing of the retreat of Robbie as part of the British expeditionary forces to Dunkirk.

I'm sobbing as I write this review of this hauntingly beautiful, poignant and tragic novel. McEwan's writing is something I am completely in awe of- his uncanny ability to capture so many different worlds and minds within this tale is spell-binding. I feel left with the ghostly presence of all the characters- but especially Cecilia and Robbie and their love- and it is like the beautiful ghostly imagery of "the luminous absence shimmering above the wetness of the gravel", This book is a masterpiece and has a heavy weight on my heart (an ache that comes from reading something wonderful and heart-breaking all at once)- teaching me the inexorable consequences and possibilities that can come from hasty action and the hazy spectrum and blurred lines of the transition from childhood into adulthood. This is such an engaging exploration of guilt, coming of age, childhood naivety and intentions, the horrors of war, the power of the imagination and the human conscience. I look forward immensely to reading more of McEwan's novel and am envious of his way with words! Definitely going on my favourites shelf.

Πήγαινε για τριάρι, στην αρχή. Μια γραφή πυκνή, να σχολιάζει τα πάντα, κάθε κίνηση, κάθε υπαινιγμό και ιριδισμό των χαρακτήρων του. Δεν ήταν άσχημη, όχι. Άπαξ και την συνήθιζες, είχε κάτι το παιγνιώδες τελικά. Μακριά από τον διδακτισμό, αντιμετώπιζε τους ανθρώπους ως πλάσματα προς παρατήρηση. Σα να έχουν μπει στο μικροσκόπιο. Κανείς δεν γλύτωνε, κανείς δεν εξωραϊζόταν. Μα, τελικά, το βιβλίο αυτό ακριβώς λέει: όσο νεαρός και αν είσαι, διεκδικώντας την συμπόνοια και την αγάπη ολάκερου του κόσμου, τα σφάλματά σου και οι αδυναμίες σου είνα ικανές να κάνον μεγάλο κακό.

Ωστόσο, η γραφή αυτή απαιτεί κόπο, εξουθενώνει, και έρχεται η διάρθρωση του βιβλίου σε τρία μέρη να το σώσει. Όπου στα επόμενα δύο, η αφήση χαλαρώνει, και ο αναγνώστης ανακουφίζεται, αξιολογώντας όπως του πρέπει εκείνο το πρώτο μέρος.

Κάπως στα χνάρια του Ίβλιν Γουό, του Σόμερεστ Μομ. Αυτής της Βρεττανικής λογοτεχνίας, όπου ένα επιβλητικό σπίτι είναι το κέντρο μιας προπολεμικής/μεσοπολεμικής ιστορίας, με τους χαρακτήρες του, χρόνια μετά να επισκεπτονται το σπίτι, και ανακουφισμένοι να θυμούνται μια ιστορία.

Τελικά, ωραίο βιβλίο. Γλυκό και στιβαρό μαζί.

”Find you, love you, marry you and live without shame."- Atonement, Ian McEwan.

Reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement feels like being a child, watching the most secret parts of my heart being brazenly displayed on paper. It's both innocent and cruel, adorable and foolish. While marveling at its accuracy, I also felt a slightly intoxicated sense of shame, longing to see more of this "other self" for a longer time.

The novel is more brutal than the film. Novels excel at the endless flow of thoughts and consciousness, requiring full immersion from the reader. Films, on the other hand, rely heavily on actors to convey a certain kind of illusion, making us feel like we can keep up with the pace of thought. In the film, we can still fawn over Keira Knightley, but in the novel, we have to endure the childish and lengthy mental world of Briony Tallis. Yet, the novel is more captivating than the film. Visuals are too superficial and ultimately still need to be analyzed with words. Only by confronting the text can we achieve full immersion.

SPOILER ALERT!

It's a cold story. The 13-year-old Briony, immersed in a fervent interest in writing and fantasy, is overwhelmed by the changing relationship between Cecilia and Robbie. Lola, Jackson, and Pierrot, at a young age, are sent to live as dependents at the Tallis house, while Mrs. Tallis, enduring her husband's infidelity and a persistent headache, must also hold up the changing Tallis family. This chaotic situation is brought to the stage in a frustrating summer, as tedious and dull as Briony's hastily rehearsed play. Lola is raped, and Briony, based on her imagination and prejudice, firmly believes that the perpetrator is Robbie, sending this promising young man to prison with a "clear purpose, malicious heart, persistence, never wavering, never doubting." From then on, 3 lives are changed forever.

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first part, from Briony's perspective, describes the beginning and end of the rape incident. The second part follows Robbie's military career after his release from prison. The third part is Briony's reflection and redemption of the crime she committed as a trainee nurse.

Although the first part spans only 2 days, McEwan uses an almost exaggerated length to describe the events that occurred at the Tallis house during these 2 days. It's a typical McEwan technique: long, subjective descriptions of the environment, weather, scenery, characters' actions, expressions, and language. This stream-of-consciousness writing style is like a monster with outstretched tentacles, lurking in every corner of the mansion. After tirelessly complaining about the hot weather, we know that at a certain tipping point, the monster will retract its tentacles and crush everything. Briony, so much like us when we were young, is sensitive, arrogant, and immersed in fantasy, constantly battling against some imaginary enemy. The reason she loves writing is probably because in novels, she can find the satisfaction of "becoming an emperor." There, everything is orderly and structured, "Death is the patent of the morally deficient, and marriage is a report that doesn't deliver the punchline until the last page." Part of her mind is precocious, but another part is childish. This childishly pure obsession with love leads to her vulnerability and makes her particularly easy to destroy. When the development of the real world deviates from the moral track of the fantasy world, she frantically tries to extract some delusions from the fantasy world to fill the gap in the logic of reality, but this only leads to misunderstanding and illusion. Briony is a child who believes more in illusions.

There is an interesting phenomenon in most of McEwan’s works: the absence of male symbols (or rather, the absence of the father figure). In The Cement Garden, the parents pass away at the beginning, and in this novel, Jack Tallis is absent throughout the rape incident, trapped on a train and fast asleep. Leon, as the eldest son, is also unable to do anything, leaving a 13-year-old girl to take all the credit. This absence of symbols leads to a feminine tone in his stories. The perception of atmosphere and consciousness, and the attention to the surrounding environment are all characteristic of feminine sensitivity.

What does feminine thinking bring? First and foremost is the sentimentalization of thought and a potential hostility towards men. Another important point is the indulgence in fantasy. They would rather believe the testimony of a 13-year-old child than face Robbie's honest and innocent life. Another element brought about by the imbalance between yin and yang is an inappropriate sense of responsibility. When men disappear, the responsibilities that should have been borne by men fall on women. Cecilia and Mrs. Tallis both feel that they should be responsible for this family, although their narrow shoulders cannot bear this burden. Briony, in particular, has a pathological sense of responsibility towards her sister. If it weren't for her protection of her sister, she probably wouldn't have made such a ridiculous mistake.

After his release from prison, Robbie joined the army. During this time, he kept in touch with Cecilia through letters. By now, Cecilia had severed ties with the Tallis family and had become a war nurse. They poured out their love and affection in letters and made an appointment to meet again and start a new life after the war. Briony also gave up her Cambridge degree and became a trainee nurse. The third part is about her career as a trainee nurse. In the hospital, all the dirty work was done by them. In addition to their work, they had to complete the required courses of the school. The guilt and guilt of her childhood became her nightmare. It was in this way that she punished herself. When you put all your mind into scrubbing the utensils in front of you repeatedly, you won't have so much time to be tormented by your conscience. She even attended Robbie's wedding and watched him marry the man who had raped her. Was this a sarcasm or a homecoming?

In Lola's indifferent eyes, Briony understood that everyone knew the truth, but everyone tried to keep quiet. She found Cecilia's residence and met Robbie there. Under her watch, they kissed passionately for a long time. Briony promised to confess to her parents that she had perjured herself, then issue a statement and swear to a lawyer. Then they walked side by side and sent her to the subway station. So far, forgiveness didn't seem impossible, but we who have read the book know that this is not the real ending. The lovers finally got together, but that was just another fantasy of Briony's.

The most ingenious part of the whole book is not the "book within a book" structure, but the way this structure is presented. Remember the letter Briony received from the publisher? She sent her work, "Two on a Seesaw," to the publisher and received a reply. In the letter, the editor commented on the story as follows: ”It captures the stream of consciousness of the characters and presents their subtle differences to the reader,” and ”It describes the perceptions and feelings of each of them in great detail while at the same time depicting light, stone, and water vividly."

Isn't this exactly how we felt when we were reading the first part? It turns out that not only the third part, but the entire Atonement we read was written by Briony. No wonder the description in the whole book is so feminine; no wonder the characters in the second part are slightly thinner than those in the first and third parts, and the description is no longer as complex, and even some unreasonable plots, because it was a story she made up through her imagination, and she couldn't personally experience the life of a retreating army. No wonder time seemed to be frozen in the first part. Briony used this repetitive description to reduce her guilt. That was the beginning of the story, when the crime had not yet been committed. At that time, the veil of emotion had just been lifted, and the lovers had just cleared up their misunderstanding and were about to drink their first sweet wine. She wished time would stop at that moment, instead of the 64 years that followed.

Briony's atonement is not becoming a nurse, but writing, restoring her true, somewhat ugly self, restoring the vain roots of that stupidity, restoring that actually pure love and erasing the tragic ending of the lovers' death in a foreign land. The real story had already ended, it was neither grand nor empty, but it was very hasty and very ruthless.

At the end of the novel, 77-year-old Briony returns to her old home, which has been turned into a hotel. Here, she celebrated her 77th birthday. The play "Arabella's Torment," which was half-finished at that time, was finally successfully staged 64 years later. The unqualified young actors back then had become old and withered in the audience. They were haggard and sentimental, and Briony's torment would also end in slow oblivion.

There is guilt here, and there are people who are deeply in love. If there is only one thing that makes people feel sad, it is not that the crime is unforgivable, but that the crime is unforgivable, because the only 2 people in the world who have the right to forgive her are no longer there.

4.4 / 5 stars

I'm pretty sure this was initially 2 books merged into 1. One on war and one drama used as a cameo. Maybe there was a part bildungsroman thrown into the mess for adding more poignancy to the drama? Maybe not.

God forbid ever meeting people like Briony. She's such an idiot with all her aesthetic way of thinking. Even in her mature age she still is one. For one, she believes that her writing is some sort of atonement. As if anyone would care about her graphomany. As if her magical thinking would have any other effect other than make her believe that she got her atonement by doing something that she believes useful. Good for her. Under all her everything she's still that brat who believes that the world's biggest problem is her play / her atonement / her fantasies / her and not the people whose lives she blew up.

And everyone around her is not much brighter. Her so-called precociousness is basically too much free time on her hands. Maybe she should've been, I dunno, studying Math or Chinese to set off some of that fantasy keeping her up doing harm? Or washing dishes? Or helping whoever was cleaning their house? Betty? Or learning domestic economy or whatever it was that women were supposed to learn at that period? I'm totally sure that had her idle time been shortened by at least 50%, there wouldn't have been any grounds for the debacle. She would've been taught to distinguish between fantasy and actual stuff (don't tell me she was too young for it, kids as young as 3-4 can do that perfectly fine!) and that would've at least given her a chance to distinguish between her maniac perceptions and what she actually saw. As it was, she was half-mad with her fantastic thinking and was very far removed from real life.

So, considering that I believe that the whole premise is ludicrous and the bunch of these MCs need a shrink and some sensible activities to do, I'm looking at the plot and thinking it's dreadful.
I definitely dislike all the other reviewers' arguments about how she was a kid and didn't know what she was doing. Since, what does that really mean? What, every kid now has a free pass to go and destroy some lives? That's why kids don't vote, because they might not know what they are doing. And that's why they need upbringing and education and medical help (incl. psychiatric, if needed).

The sex-rape-id-thing. What the hell was everyone thinking? A not-very-stable not-so-little girl accuses a boy of a rape and they just lap it up! How could she have seen his face in the dark?
And what was her fragging deal? She was quite old to bother people into playing out her horrible plays? Isn't she then old enough to maybe think a bit in a straight way?!

I think Robbie's just not very well-written. It's just as if the author wanted him to be a shade of some general partially randomized boy. You know, to give the general idea of all the wrongfully-accused young men who, well, got into mess not of their own making?
Or is that the author just showing us that large chunks of the story are just Briony making all this stuff up as some sort of self-therapy? If so, how very nice for her.

Basically, the only really fleshed out character is Briony. The rest read like ghosts: moth-like, we've got names, we've got them doing things but they are transparent. Likely that's the author letting us feel that we are seeing things second-hand with Briony's eyes.

The atonement: None for anyone. We don't enter the same river twice: we may only dream about it.
One can be sad with Briony not getting her chances but damn, the 1st part was such a stupid plot twist. On the chances:
- she didn't get her memo for not making stuff up and subsequently, no chance for actual atonement for her / by her. Some things you can't take back so best to tread carefully all along.
- quite a lot of characters didn't get the chance to live and love at all. Even the several years that were allotted to them before war: yes, to Robbie and Cecilia.
B. basically robbed them of their whole lives: while war wasn't of her making, the aftermath of the rape debacle for the 2 of them was. And, as destiny would have it, that was all that there was to be. Until B's tender mercies.

Briony being a l'enfant terrible:
Q:
She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister’s room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony’s was a shrine to her controlling demon: (c) Dratt. This girl just has too much of free time on her hands. They should've just gotten her to do something useful with all that extra energy: study Chinese, go and train to become an Olympic-grade skater, study physics for science career... You know: useful stuff.
Q:
Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. (c)

Briony's social skills are pretty much nonexistent. Kudos to McIan for getting how children can sometimes think but drat, that's horrible to follow. She actually tries to rope her cousins into a play rehearsals no more than 6 minutes after their arrival. She doesn't even have the slightest idea that maybe some people would hate the idea of participating in a play. Why did no one stop (even for a bit) to discuss with her how other people might feel? Kids can be especially dumb when it comes to other people. I'm pretty sure she had no idea that other people might have personal lives out of her censoring.
And her interaction with Lola?
Q:
Briony struggled to grasp the difficult thought, wasn’t there manipulation here, wasn’t Lola using the twins to express something on her behalf, something hostile or destructive? Briony felt the disadvantage of being two years younger than the other girl, of having a full two years’ refinement weigh against her, and now her play seemed a miserable, embarrassing thing. …
she proceeded to outline the plot, even as its stupidity began to overwhelm her. (c) Well, it was a miserable thing. Who are we kidding?

Briony's very egoistic from the start and she seems to be very much in love with her older brother. What's it with McEwan and incest themes? Well, at least this time around the incest is more of a subconscious longing than action plan.
Q:
She was not playing Arabella because she wrote the play, she was taking the part because no other possibility had crossed her mind, because that was how Leon was to see her, because she was Arabella. (c) God, she was Arabella? She was supposed to demonstrate to her bro that he should marry a nice girl she approves of. And then what, because of her cousins' freckles, now she is Arabella?

Melodramatic much?
Q:
As she saw the dress make its perfect, clinging fit around her cousin and witnessed her mother’s heartless smile, Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter’s dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the pink ribbon straps… (c)
Anyway, what's Briony's deal that even after all the time, plays seem to remain her only instrument of self-expression?

Q:
I was elated and urgently wanted to tell my closest friends.(c) That's Briony rejoicing on the vascular dementia news. Isn't she still a drama queen? 

Other fun ideas:
Q:
It was not generally realised that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone. (c)

some major mistakes need a lifetime atonement
a tragic novel questioning the ability to overcome guilt
and repent of a crime that destroyed other lives

Wenn du Ende der 90er Jahre nach Luft gejapst hast, als der Vorhang über The Sixth Sense fiel, stehen die Chancen nicht schlecht, dass es hier ähnlich sein wird.
Noch die Schwächen, die man während des Lesens zu erkennen meint, erweisen sich schlussendlich als Teil des Ganzen. Ich bin begeistert. In meinen Augen eines der klügsten und am besten konstruierten Bücher der letzten 50 Jahre.