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the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed.
One of the literary ghosts that stalks this novel is Jane Austen. Her heroines typically cross a moral minefield to find and marry the right man. Along the way there are important life-lessons to be learned, principally how to read other people. Impulsiveness, vanity, deceit and rudeness must be surmounted. The suitable man is kind, honest, trustworthy and financially secure. However, he will have lessons to learn too.
These good-sense qualities are not always evident at first. In an Austen novel, sexuality is not directly addressed, of course, but is richly implied by a certain powerful fascination, an awkwardness in conversation, a blush, self-consciousness or an outburst of anger. The epigraph at the beginning of Atonement is from Northanger Abbey. The passage is worth re-reading, not only for the delightful lucidity of Austen's prose, but because it ties the story of the heroine, Catherine Morland to Briony's. Catherine has been immersed in her reading of lurid gothic novels and her imagination runs riot. She is staying in a former abbey and suspects her host of murder. Henry Tilney, her future husband, brings her back to earth in the passage I quote.
Briony's 'spontaneous Arabella' must also face moral hazards before she marries her prince. Appropriately from a pre-pubescent author, this 'tale of the heart' is sexless. Like Catherine, Briony herself lets her imagination go wild and causes suffering to others. As a novelist, she will spend a lifetime writing many shifting accounts of her misdeeds in the attempt to atone. Ultimately, her fiction writer's instincts prevail and she falsifies the past to give satisfaction to her readers, and as 'a final act of kindness', and to make 'a stand against oblivion and despair'. But in her postscript she reveals the truth and accepts the inherent difficulty of atonement. Perhaps all that counts is the effort to atone - 'The attempt was all.'
In too brief a summary, this is Briony's life-lesson. I return to the question of what can be learned over a lifetime in my new novel - actually called Lessons. Do we get wiser as we age? There are powerful elderly politicians around today who hardly seem wise. But surely something is learned after many decades on earth. Lessons tells the story of the life of Roland Baines. An intense sexual experience in his early teens deflects his existence. He passes through love affairs, fatherhood, two marriages, social and technological change. The course of his life and his changing state of mind are shaped by global political events that lie far beyond his control. He is haunted by what he might have been, and by admiration for what his first wife has achieved - at the cost of her own and other people's happiness. What has he learned? Absolutely nothing, he thinks as he approaches his mid-seventies. But can we believe him?
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She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so.
Many of the things that possess Briony once possessed me. Making a small, controllable world was one impulse, and I've watched it with fascination in my own children and grandchildren. Part of the attraction is in making a world, a scene, an enclosed environment that is completely comprehensible - unlike the adult world. My own enclosed fantasy land was a train set. It consisted only of a small oval track and a siding. But, crucially, it had a tunnel, a station, a level crossing, a few trees and houses and a few tiny people. I liked to lie up close, on my side on the floor and feel myself part of this society. The train ran on time! The people were model citizens. The world was benign. Meanwhile, in the real world around me, I sensed that things were falling apart.
britt ✨ and 282 other people liked this
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, organized 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.
The ironies here will only be apparent in retrospect. Briony is about to foolishly unleash great misfortune on Robbie and Cecilia, and she will carry the secret of her error for most of the rest of her life.
Lily and 158 other people liked this
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. One could drown in irrelevance.
Everyone is as real to themselves as you are to yourself. My guess is this is one of those crucial moments of childhood, of growing up. The realization - or perhaps just the first intimations - came to me when I was ten, in a military hospital in North Africa, waiting to have an operation. I had a large ward to myself. The fans were turning slowly in the high ceiling above me. A nurse had just left the room and it occurred to me that her own thoughts and feelings might be just as vivid as my own. If it was true of her, then it was true of everyone. Too big to comprehend. Terrifying. I shied away from the idea.
This passage brings me to 'other minds'. During the late nineties, when I was writing Atonement, I was intrigued by general discussions, especially in developmental psychology' of a 'theory of mind' - in other words, the comprehension of what it was like to be someone else. It helped me understand one of the essential features of fiction and the imagination, and it informed my descriptions of Briony's thinking. After the 9/11 attacks (which came around the time of this novel's publication) I wrote a piece for the Guardian with Atonement still fresh in my mind: (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2)
'If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.
The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination.'
Margaret and 151 other people liked this
The self-contained world she had drawn with clear and perfect lines had been defaced with the scribble of other minds, other needs; and time itself, so easily sectioned on paper into acts and scenes, was even now dribbling uncontrollably away.
This connects with my note on 'hidden drawers, lockable diaries'. If you like organising a world, lining up the dolls, running a train set etc, then become a writer! This is what many children do, and some of us go on doing it for the rest of our lives. All writers discover that the world will keep intruding. Best defence is to make that intrusion, in the name of realism, your material.
Alisha Yowell and 103 other people liked this
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
I wonder how many readers experience 'oblivious' daydreaming. You drift away into an unbidden story. You're hardly aware of what you're doing. When you come back to earth, unless you make the effort of memory, perhaps of writing it down, the little dream is gone. There's no recall.
Matthew and 120 other people liked this
Not everything had a cause, and pretending otherwise was an interference in the workings of the world that was futile, and could even lead to grief. Some things were simply so.
I couldn't disagree more with Mrs. Tallis's sentiments - it represents an abandonment of curiosity and thoughtfulness.
Zelda and 78 other people liked this
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.
Some readers have written to me to describe Briony as thoroughly wicked and detestable. But look, she's only 13 when she commits what she later calls her crime. The power of self-persuasion has been much researched, and we all know it in ourselves. Her imagination has distorted her judgement. I devote many pages to that conversational dance as Briony tells her family and the police that she 'saw' Robbie in the dark running from the scene of the assault on Lola. Briony is being - perhaps unconsciously - encouraged to name him. She feels she cannot go back on her story, and she is being gently persuaded not to back away. When she smothers her doubts and doesn't alter her story, she earns quiet approval.
Then her guilt torments her for decades. She writes many drafts of the story. The reader has read the last. In the postscript, she is an old woman, a famous writer, ill and dying - and still tormented as she makes her confession. She has lived the 'examined life' and attempted to atone.
Sue Magee and 127 other people liked this
From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
'...among all else...' The subtext here is relevant to Briony's experience. What's true of the 'material thing' is also true of the mind. The damage that she has done to others and to herself, is not going to be easily mended.
Laura and 103 other people liked this
The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her.
This is, finally, the limit of the atonement Briony has sought through various drafts of this novel. When she is setting the terms as author, how can she expect to purge herself of the harm she did, or expect forgiveness when her sister and Robbie are dead? And yet... the imagination can be benign, for as she falls asleep she thinks she can summon in fiction Cecilia and Robbie sitting near her, enjoying her childish play, The Trials of Arabella - implicity, granting her expiation.
My novel Lessons is, in important respects, a companion piece to Atonement, though its material and structure are very different. What we make of our lives when we survey the past is a confused and shifting mental act whose elements can be painfully truthful or consolingly self-deceiving, or constantly shifting between the two as we play at novelist with the narrative of our existence.
Olivia and 212 other people liked this
