Atonement – now filmed with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, and out next week – begins quietly. The 13-year-old Briony Tallis is making final arrangements for the presentation of her play, The Trials of Arabella, to be staged for a family party at her parents’ country house.

It is the 1930s. The summer is hot. Briony’s father is often absent. Her mother has headaches. Briony watches her elder sister, Cecilia. She watches Robbie, the clever, handsome son of the Tallises’ servant.

What we don’t know until later is that Briony is writing this. In a brilliant homage to E. M. Forster or L. P. Hartley, events unfold. Briony sees Robbie and Cecilia in dispute. They break a vase, a family heirloom. Cecilia strips off and dives into a fountain to retrieve it. Robbie writes her a love letter. Briony intercepts it. Later, she glimpses her sister and Robbie embracing, but misunderstands what is going on between them.

When Briony then witnesses another (nonconsensual) sexual act, she chooses to interpret it, and accuses Robbie. It will be the end of all his aspirations, as he is charged and sent to prison.

Of love, war and guilt

Atonement, the big-screen version of Ian McEwan’s wartime epic, is being hailed as the best British film for years

BACKGROUND

• Where truth and fiction meet

• Atonement by Ian McEwan

• The TLS on Atonement

• Atonement by Ian McEwan

• Ken Russell on the adaptation trap

Related Internet Links

• Read more out about the film Atonement

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In the second section we meet Cecilia and Robbie again, but the Second World War has intervened and their private tragedy is played out against a larger horror. When McEwan was working on Atonement, he said that he was confronting the ways in which the war had shaped people’s lives – his parents’ and his own. McEwan was born in 1948.

Atonement is a masterpiece, partly because it reflects on the work of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, Rosamond Lehmann and D. H. Lawrence, and, further back, on George Eliot and Jane Austen. But we can now see that it is also an elegy to a time which, however volatile, still had certainties. For Atonement was first published in September 2001, just as the searing vision of the falling twin towers was to mark the true beginning of the 21st century.

ATONEMENT by Ian McEwan

Vintage, £7.99

Buy the book here for the offer price of £7.59 inc p&p

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