Death of a genius: Hilary Mantel 1952-2022

A large portion of Atonement centres around the act and consumption of writing. The narrative is self-aware throughout which, we learn only at the end of the novel, is the result of the third person omniscientAll-knowing, or having the ability to see everything. narrator being the same as both the author and the main character. Briony is identified as a writer early on, and it is made clear that her writing is a means of exerting control over her lived experiences. Ironically, she alludes to positioning herself as a God in her early adolescent writings, and reality imitates art when her untruth about having seen Robbie attacking Lola profoundly alters the shape of their collective future. Later, authorship becomes Briony's method of atoning for the central mistake of her youth, by writing into her last novel what could not have occurred in life. Yet despite the power of her story, it remains a story, unable to correct the horror of what she has done.

Briony is not the only character with an intimate relationship with writing. A written note is the catalyst for Robbie and Cecilia's passionate love affair, and throughout their correspondence they reference and relate to each other through literature.

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McEwan stated that Atonement was written "to examine the relationship between what is imagined and what is true". The novel centres around an untruth which has towering consequences. Briony, who falsely claims that she has witnessed Robbie committing a crime, is responsible for a lie which she must carry the weight of for her whole life. Yet Briony is still a child in the novel's first instalment, one who struggles to discriminate between fact and her overstimulated imagination, and it is unclear how far we should hold her responsible in the first act. Her commitment to fiction over reality is laid bare towards the end of the novel, as is her unreliability both as a narrator and an author. She describes her novel, which fabricatesMakes up. a happy reunion of the lovers, as "a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end". But it is ultimately yet another untruth, which offers only her consolation.

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"But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was." 

Briony's guilt is both mitigatedMade less serious. and sharpened by the war. As a nurse, she witnesses the atrocities of battle every day, a crime against humanity of such epic proportions that it makes her youthful sin appear slight. And yet it also amplifies her mistake, depriving Robbie and Cecilia of those only fleeting years they could have had together before their inevitableUnavoidable. demise. As readers, we are left to answer whether Briony ever really achieves atonement for the guilt that has weighed upon her for a lifetime.

The author who came back from the dead

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The first act of Atonement, set in the Tallis' idyllic country estate in the shimmering summer heat, contrasts starkly with the acridUnpleasantly strong and bitter. and harsh scenes of war later in the novel. This narrative device both serves to position McEwan in the genre of the war writing that he coveted whilst writing Atonement, and underlines the graveness of Briony's error. Similarly, the somaticRelating to the body, rather than the mind. descriptions in the first part of the novel are hugely distinct from the rest. The first section emphasises the beauty of Robbie and Cecilia's passionate love for each other through their bodies, which are aestheticised ideals of lovers' forms. However, during the war the only bodies are those that Briony tends to, which are often mere messes of blood and gore - "all ruin, crimson and raw". The dilapidationIn a state of ruin, decay or disrepair. of both environment and body in wartime brings out the tragedy of World War Two and profoundly moves the reader.

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The novel begins with Briony at age 13, the turn of adolescence, experiencing, in many ways, an induction into adulthood. She is realising that the world is not what it once was, being drawn into storylines that she cannot control for the first time. It is only with time that she learns the gravity of the mistake she made as an early teenager, and by then it is far too late to undo. Skipping forward, it is an intentional irony that the far older Briony, now the writer of a novel about memory and commemoration, should find herself dying of vascular dementiaA common type of dementia caused by reduced blood flow to the brain. Dementia causes confusion, slow thinking and changes to behaviour or mood. , depriving her of her cherished memory. Soon, nobody will be left to tell the story of Cecilia and Robbie, but in writing the story she has made it immune to the passage of time. The question is whether this is a laudableSomething to be praised. act, as Briony believes, or a dishonourable fabrication designed to make a lie outlast her tragic misdeed.

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