"Shut Up, Mom, I'm Atoning!"

When I was about twelve, some friends and I decided to amuse ourselves by inventing a secret admirer for a geek and social pariah of our acquaintance. We composed perfumed love letters, full of romance-novel phrases we barely understood, and left them on his desk; later, with fits of hilarity, we watched him read and reread them out on a corner of the playground. We let this go on for several weeks, and finally concluded the prank (I may be wrong, but I think we scheduled it for April Fools', delighted with our own cleverness) by demanding that he bring a single red rose for the after-school tryst when he would finally meet his dream girl. He dutifully showed up at the meeting place with the flower, and waited for a while, and eventually left, alone. Watching him stand out there by himself, we tried to muster up our former evil glee, but instead, we just felt like complete jerks. At least, I did, and I think the other girls did too, because we never mentioned the prank again. He's probably forgotten all about this by now, and to be honest, I don’t even remember his name, but I still feel like I owe that guy an apology. Such are the cruel caprices of youth.

It’s this kind of thing, but more so, that forms the central drama of Atonement. Cecilia Tallis has returned to her rural English home after graduating from Girton. She fancies that her family cannot get along without her, and hopes that they will be impressed by her collegiate worldliness, but finds her parents too wrapped up in their own lives, and distanced by their shambles of a marriage, to take much notice of her. Thirteen-year-old Briony, Cecilia’s little sister, has grown into an odd, dramatic, precocious girl, lost in the fictional worlds of her own creation. Big brother Leon’s impending arrival prompts Briony to write a play in his honor; she casts her visiting cousins (here for an extended stay because their own parents are getting a D-I-V-O-R-C-E) into various roles, and immediately sparks a personality conflict with Lola, the supercilious fifteen-year-old cousin who considers herself a grownup and above such childish things. Meanwhile, Cecilia is getting peeved with Robbie Turner, the cleaning woman’s son whose education was sponsored by Cecilia’s father; Robbie seems to have developed a giant chip on his shoulder with regard to Cecilia. But this is no ordinary chip - it is a chip of love. Robbie decides to explain his mental behavior via a love letter, but mistakenly hands the wrong copy to Briony for delivery: an early draft with a lewd and lecherous postscript. Naturally, Briony opens the letter and reads it before giving it to Cecilia, and interprets the contents to mean that Robbie is a crazed sex maniac capable of violence against her sister. So, when Briony walks in on Cecilia and Robbie in a feverish embrace, it is perhaps natural that she assumes that Robbie is attacking Cecilia. When Lola turns up later that night, sexually assaulted but unable to identify her attacker, it’s Briony’s golden opportunity to punish Robbie for what she presumes are his crimes; with a teenager’s inability to comprehend the significance of her actions, she forges on ahead, irrevocably changing the lives of everyone involved.

No speed-reading through this one - Atonement requires careful attention; each sentence must be unpacked, considered, and digested before moving on. It’s easy to point the finger of blame at the trigger man (in this case, Briony), but Atonement makes the interesting point that it takes a community effort to condemn and ostracize an individual from society, and readily believing the worst of someone is a form of betrayal too. In addition, there is the question of atonement: is it possible to truly make reparations to someone you’ve wronged? How much is enough, when no amount of penance and suffering can make things go back to how they were before? Occasionally a bit slow, and certainly not summertime beach reading, Atonement is nevertheless an interesting and well-written story that doesn’t pretend to have the answers to the thorny questions of guilt, punishment, and redemption that its story raises. Or maybe I just like it because it makes me feel better about tormenting that kid back in my heartless junior-high days.