The play – for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper – was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed.

Like last week, the opening is full of energy and anticipation. Here, though, the work is done; we are in the calm before the storm, or what I sometimes call the ‘Christmas Eve period’. Further, we know what the event is, and one impact of this is that we can focus on the only character named: Briony.

So, who is Briony? There seems to be plenty to admire, but perhaps only in small doses.

She’s precocious, energetic, intelligent, driven even, but it all feels tinged with recklessness, maybe a youthful self-absorption.

When does imaginative confidence become an assumption that other people will inhabit the world we have created for them?

Close Reading

Several years ago I taught a delightful Year 7 class (11–12 years old for overseas readers). Amongst the many fond memories they left me with was our lesson on sentences, when, at their insistence, we added a new type to the usual roster: the ‘jumbo’ sentence.

And the truth is that I have always enjoyed the ‘jumbo’ sentence. There’s real craftsmanship not just in its construction but in the decision to employ it. And it makes us, readers, do some work in a way that the shortest sentences don’t (although they too can be devastatingly good). This one, in 53 words, gives us a real sense of the character’s industry and imagination, too.

I think that, on close (and cold) reading, there are two things which strike me. The first question I have is whether Briony will turn out to be lonely. Where are her friends and collaborators, people her own age to bounce off, to interrupt this burst of creative energy?

Secondly, I wonder at the metaphor McEwan has used: the ‘two-day tempest of composition’. Setting Shakespeare’s play aside, almost all my connotations of a ‘tempest’ are negative ones, and the phrase is almost alliterative, full of hard sounds which set my teeth on edge, just a little. The ‘tempest’ suggests power, married to something hard to control, maybe directionless.

Is this Briony?

The fact that she’s skipped two meals suggests determination and maybe wilfulness, but also that she’s been given a lot of licence. I certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to miss two meals as a youngster.

One of the interesting things about the next two sentences is how none of the additional characters are given a name. This is, I think, where my adjectives like ‘reckless’, ‘assuming’ and ‘self-absorbed’ begin to feel appropriate. Without names, and co-opted into performing a play with just a single day’s notice, these anonymous cousins from ‘the North’ (even that is suggestive) are reduced to their use value, effectively dehumanised.

And what of Briony’s brother? All this effort seems to have gone towards honouring his return, but he isn’t honoured with a name. And here we are again, that little assumption that the world will pause, that everyone else will drop their demands of the newly arrived figure, to accommodate Briony and her play.

I want to be clear: I’m not marking Briony down as malicious or especially unlikeable. I see the confidence and unconscious selfishness of youth. Probably unwittingly, she seems to want to place herself front and centre of any celebrations, stealing the limelight which ought to belong to her brother.

This is why earlier I described her as being fine in small doses. With her intensity of nature and wilfulness, I feel just that bit overpowered by her.

Maybe I’m reading too much into the opening, but my sense is that her brother’s return is intended as a joyous occasion. If this is the case, then what we learn about the play – with the strict 100-word limit guillotining the sentence – is ‘chilling’ and ‘desperately’. They feel jarring in the context of a celebration. Again, I’m not absolutely condemning her for this, any more than I would any child, but there’s a hierarchy of needs here which prioritises what she wants to write, not what others might want, or what fits the occasion.

There we are. If I were one of those Northern cousins, I’d be dreading my visit, and the idea of Briony bossing me around for days on end. And I suspect that if I were her returning brother, I’d smile, indulge her, and then hope I was left alone for a bit!

As you read on, look out:

• How Briony treats others: including the new arrivals over the next couple of days.
• How others treat her: is she too indulged? Am I right in suspecting people might endure her rather than choose to spend time with her? Does it back up my suggestion that she might be lonely?
• The success or otherwise of the play: I only had two words to go on, but somehow it feels portentous …

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And a final personal coda

I have a history with Atonement. When I first read it, as a mature university student, I finished the novel, threw it across the room, and arrived at a seminar furious. I was particularly angry at Briony’s apparent assumption that the power to tell a story somehow confers the power to absolve someone of their mistakes.

I delivered what was, by all accounts, an impassioned lecture of my own on guilt and forgiveness. My lecturer, Paul, stopped the seminar to let me finish.

So perhaps it’s worth saying that I come to this novel with considerable baggage. I love Ian McEwan‘s ability to get under my skin; I also fear it, a little. But for the purposes of this series, I’ve tried to put all that aside. These first 100 words must stand on their own, without the benefit of hindsight, and without my knowledge of what Briony will become.

Whether I’ve succeeded is another question entirely. What do you think?

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