Dissemble, Deceive, Destroy: Ch 9-14 of Atonement by Ian McEwan Revisited

This is part of a series where I revisit one of my A-level readings, ‘Atonement’ by Ian McEwan. You can find the first post linked here.

A summary of the book is available on Goodreads: Atonement by Ian McEwan summary

These chapters of Atonement are best understood as a magic trick, or I think this conceit is helpful. Misdirection, objects and people hiding in plain sight, and sight itself playing tricks on viewers. The most noticeable motif of these chapters for me was the inability to make out clearly what is seen and to close the gap between sight and interpretation.

Chapter 9 to 14 – Optical Illusions galore…
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I was struck this time round by the blind and unacknowledged privilege of Leon Tallis. It reminded me greatly of an article on White Privilege I read in a Postcolonial Literature Module at the University of Oxford (linked here) – essentially there are thousands of ways we have privilege and we do not acknowledge it. The narrator – or perhaps Cecilia’s free indirect focalisation – tells us:

“In Leon’s life, or rather, in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed.” (9.101)

The key is in the phrase ‘his account of his life’. The problem of interpretation is a key theme in these chapters, and the divide between thoughts and reality even more so. It is infinitely easy for Leon to think in this way because, as McEwan reveals to us, his burdens are off-loaded onto others. Cecilia has to mother everyone in the family, act as hostess, be pressured into marriage. Emily Tallis has to do the invisible but painful work of sitting as still as possible while her husband is unfaithful to her and carry the suppressed anger of years (see Chapter 12). And given that he is a young man of money, he has no compunction to make something of himself as Robbie does.

The country house, creating the premise for a Gothic novel since…goodness knows when
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The country house and the close proximity of all the characters on the summer evening encourages comparison and contrast. The fact that a crime takes place that night also invokes an ‘Inspector Calls’-esque thought process in the reader – at least for me, I felt the need to question who really was to blame for the victimisation of Robbie. I also wanted to believe that Briony was a victim of everyone else, and the others were to blame. There is some evidence for this view of Briony – consider where McEwan describes her as a ‘bride-to-be […] who dares not speak her mind because so many preparations have been made on her behalf’ (13.159). It is the pressure of others combined with the lethal desire to be accepted leads her to repeat those damning words – ‘I saw him. I know it was him’ (13.160).

But as I thought through the full circumstances, I realised I didn’t want to go for an ‘An Inspector Calls’ style blame game for Briony’s misguidedness. Everyone is a victim; everyone is to blame. Emily Tallis is both a victim and abuser, given her trauma. In the case of Lola, the ease with which she calls Robbie a ‘maniac’ is because she must displace her suffering onto someone – someone who can be accused (10.112). Perhaps it is only Leon and Paul Marshall whom it is difficult to imagine as victims at all, they are to varying degrees, riding the wave of privilege created by the oppression of women, children, and the working class.

In this brief essay, I have not had the space to explore Cecilia and Robbie’s exultant lovemaking in the library, and their relationship in general. I would really encourage anyone interested in this to consider the subtle links between Cecilia, Robbie, and Paul Marshall: how, Cecilia makes a ‘steeple’ (11.125) with her hands symbolises their holy union, whereas Marshall’s ‘steeple’ is a show of falsehood (5.59), the power with which he hides his true intent. It is also crucial to think about how the darkness of the library is transformative: ‘At last they were strangers, their pasts were forgotten’ (11.127). It is only Robbie and Cecilia who experience this radical defamiliarization; it is only Robbie and Cecilia who see each other clearly, in the chaos of these chapters.