The Art of Truth, Fiction and Everything in Between: Part III and Part IV of Atonement by Ian McEwan

This essay is part of a series on Atonement. Please follow the links below to see the previous posts:

• Atonement Revisited: Chapters 1-8
• Dissemble, Deceive, Destroy: Ch 9-14 of Atonement by Ian McEwan Revisited
• Love in the Time of Shell Shock: A Discussion of Part Two of Atonement by Ian McEwan (Revisited)

Please note that this essay contains spoilers.

In Part III and Part IV, we finally hurtle towards laying much to rest – Robbie and Cecilia’s love, Briony’s guilt, the possibility of Robbie’s acquittal, and their perfect reunion. I love how these expectations are set up in Part III and swiftly demolished in Part IV. Yet, McEwan still manages to achieve a sense of rest in the (im)perfect resolution. We see Briony go from an unsure trainee nurse to someone who learns the nuances of service, to someone who understands, with time, the relationship between her actions and her art.

Part III, for me, was the point at which I felt that Briony’s guilt took on a different color. Her personal atonement seemed to converge with collective guilt pouring into the foreground. The soldiers coming back injured, tortured, and in pain from Dunkirk – a time at which Briony has to forget herself and use her training. McEwan does a good job of weaving in the previous story of Parts One and Two, Briony’s development till that point, into the chaos of the nursing effort. For instance, when Briony stays up after dark to read the reply from The Horizon regarding her writing submission, she realizes, “It was not the backbone of a story she lacked. It was backbone.” (p. 302) To me, that short, simple statement gets to the crux of Briony’s bildungsroman. It’s about her realization that her fantasies have real implications. In fact, it is her realization that the stories she tells are a reflection of who she is. This makes the relationship between art and reality, that timeless conundrum, come into focus – does life imitate art, or art life? I was really moved by the honesty that we see in Briony’s character at this point, the almost slavish obsession with pinning down the truth about her life.

I’d like to contrast Briony of Part III with Briony of Part IV, where McEwan depicts her reaching the end of her life. Briony of Part IV accepts her inclinations toward fantasizing, mixing reality with her imagination, desire to control, all the traits that have made her so unlikeable in the previous chapters. She simply admits – “my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital […] When I am dead […] No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel” (p. 350). Yes, Briony recognizes quite bluntly, her ‘offenses against veracity’ (p.336). But gone are the melodrama and conceited self-absorption that accompanied her so-called ‘atonement.’ Instead, I like to interpret this moment as the evidence of her character’s final wisdom – the ability to distinguish where imagination is important, and where truth – unadulterated by poetic license – must be presented as-is. It’s also a moment that makes self-evident the mirroring between literary techniques, history, development – and the development of oneself through the journey of life. Without evoking the fourth wall, without Briony’s metanarrative commentary, how would we understand so keenly her mastery over herself, over fact and fiction?

By the end, I think we can all find something to hope for, something to relate to, in Briony’s development. She goes from being a self-absorbed teenage girl who does not take ownership of her mistakes, who tries to avoid it altogether and suffer in secret shame, to someone who accepts what she has done. She owns up to the fact that she has harmed others, that there is a gap between what she hoped to achieve – restoring Cecilia and Robbie to their original state of bliss – and what she actually achieved. In the ending, I even found myself admiring how McEwan gives her a sense of dark humor, talking of her dementia: “loss of memory, short- and long-term, the disappearance of single words—simple nouns might be the first to go—[…] Bon voyage!” (p. 335). I could not help but think of all the motifs of circularity in this ending. Simple nouns remind me of Cecilia and Robbie’s simple declarations of love: ‘I’ll wait for you. Come back.’ (p. 190). The Trials of Arabella is finally performed, eighty years later. There is a beauty in how this ending revisits and accepts flaws. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this quote from Loudermilk sums up what I feel that Briony realizes by the end of the novel – edited due to the PG audience of my blog: “Look, life’s about [messing] things up. Then un[messing] the things that you [messed] up. That’s what makes you less of a [mess-up]. Not lying about it” (Sam Loudermilk in Loudermilk, 2017). In essence, this revisionist approach to life and art is what lies at the centre of my Atonement Revisited series. There is much inspiration to be gained by revisiting books and stories that had a lasting impact on our lives.