Atonement Is Not an Easy

ATONEMENT is not an easy book to be judged according to mainstream ethical and moral standards. Author, Ian McEwan, is not interested in making moral statements or passing any ethical judgments on the actions of Broiny Tallis. Instead here is an author who believes in telling the story as he envisioned it and lets you decide what the moral outcome should have been. It is also a shrewd way of compelling the readers to test, judge and review their own ethical stand on something which might appear obviously wrong.

In short, the writer wants to ask his readers a simple question: Should a person be forgiven for ruining innocent lives if you knew that the culprit was as young, unwise, and overly imaginative and also over ambitious. Would you then let the person get away with the crime of completely destroying two innocent lives? Broiny Tallis is the culprit in the story. She is an unusual protagonist for neither does she possess the sensibilities of an average heroine nor does she appear to be a victim.

But having said that, what is really inspiring is that despite her obvious flaws, she is still anything but evil. We can say that a person with a wild imagination like hers is susceptible to making the mistake that she made, only in her case it went a little too far and ruined the lives of two people who were innocent. An aspiring writer, Broiny primary flaw was her overly fertile imagination.

She felt that words could give you the power to create anything: "By means of inking symbols onto a page she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's.. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising...." (p. 37). The obsession of playing with words results in a catastrophic situation when she wrongly accuses Robbie of sexually harassing her cousin.

This accusation was deeply grounded in what she had witnessed one morning. Despite the fact that she never heard a single word of the conversational exchange between Robbie and her own sister, Cecillia, Broiny assumes that Robbie was a sexual pervert. Everything, it appears, was a fantasy for her-something she could work upon to make it more interesting. For example, when she receives the letter which was supposed to give her elder sister, she looks at it as another piece to serve as the groundwork for her stories.

The letter marked the transition from childish stories of castles and princesses to more mature subjects. "No more princesses!.. With the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principle of darkness, and even in her excitement over the possibilities, she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and would need her help" (p. 106-7). What follows is deeply tragic as Robbie is sent to prison and two people in love are separated forever.

Years later, Broiny realizes that she had made a terrible mistake and wants to atone for it. Hence the title of the novel-however this atonement, we realize is meaningless because it is completely fictional. Being a writer, Broiny writes the story of her sister, Robbie, and her own grand error. But instead of presenting the story as it was, she manipulates the ending and unites the two lovers. This was her way of atoning for her mistake-even though we know it was only on the paper.

Broiny doesn't appear to be in as much pain as she should have been. She doesn't seem to care much about the facts as she writes: "If I really cared so much about facts, I should have written a different kind of book" (p. 360) But she does suffer from immense guilt and sees nursing as her way of making up for destroying two people and what could have been a happy future.

However Broiny's brand of guilt is meaningless, shallow and even arrogant because of the fact that she is a writer. Her writing skills make her believe that she can do anything with anyone's lives. Even she herself understands that her atonement attempt is a sham for a person with power to create stories is at par with God. "I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened?...The problem...has been this:.