Briony's final novel 'Atonement'

Briony Tallis's final novel, also titled 'Atonement', is the culmination of a fifty-nine-year writing project that began in 1940 and was completed in March 1999. The novel is a self-conscious, metafictional work that attempts to atone for Briony's childhood false accusation against Robbie Turner, but its final pages reveal that the happy ending she gives the lovers is a deliberate fiction, an act of authorial grace rather than historical truth. The work exists in multiple drafts, the earliest from January 1940 and the latest from March 1999, with half a dozen different versions in between, including a second draft from June 1947. Briony has regarded it as her duty to disguise nothing—the names, the places, the exact circumstances—and to put it all there as a matter of historical record. However, as a matter of legal reality, various editors have told her over the years that her forensic memoir could never be published while her fellow criminals were alive, because one may only libel oneself and the dead. The Marshalls have been active about the courts since the late 1940s, defending their good names with a most expensive ferocity, and could ruin a publishing house with ease from their current accounts. Briony knows she cannot publish until they are dead, and as of the morning of her seventy-seventh birthday, she accepts that will not be until she is, because even with Lord Marshall dead, her cousin Lola would not tolerate an accusation of criminal conspiracy.

The Writing Process and Its Burdens

Briony began the earliest version of the novel in January 1940, just months after the events of 1935 and the outbreak of war. The second draft followed in June 1947, and there were half a dozen different drafts in between, the latest completed in March 1999. The work has been her fifty-nine-year assignment. She has regarded it as her duty to disguise nothing—the names, the places, the exact circumstances—and to put it all there as a matter of historical record. However, as a matter of legal reality, various editors have told her over the years that her forensic memoir could never be published while her fellow criminals were alive, because one may only libel oneself and the dead. The Marshalls have been active about the courts since the late 1940s, defending their good names with a most expensive ferocity, and could ruin a publishing house with ease from their current accounts. Briony knows she cannot publish until they are dead, and as of the morning of her seventy-seventh birthday, she accepts that will not be until she is, because even with Lord Marshall dead, her cousin Lola would not tolerate an accusation of criminal conspiracy. The obvious suggestions have been made—displace, transmute, dissemble, bring down the fogs of the imagination—but to be safe, one would have to be bland and obscure, and Briony has refused to do that.

The Final Draft and Its Fictional Ending

It is only in this last version that the lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as Briony walks away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. Briony now considers what purpose would be served if she tried to persuade her reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station, or that she never saw them in that year, or that her walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common and a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. She concludes that such an account would constitute no sense, hope, or satisfaction for a reader, except in the service of the bleakest realism. She could not do it to them. She is too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life she has remaining. She faces an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion, and no longer possesses the courage of her pessimism. When she is dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, they will only exist as her inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham and enraged their landlady. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. She knows there is always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, "But what really happened?" The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of her final draft, then her spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.

The Impossibility of Atonement

The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. Briony reflects that she has not traveled so very far after all, since she wrote her little play, The Trials of Arabella. Or rather, she has made a huge digression and doubled back to her starting place. She gave the lovers happiness, but she was not so self-serving as to let them forgive her. Not quite, not yet. If she had the power to conjure them at her birthday celebration—Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella—it would not be impossible. But now she must sleep.

The 1999 Birthday Performance and Final Reflections

On the morning of her seventy-seventh birthday, Briony decides to make one last visit to the Imperial War Museum library in Lambeth. The results of her scan have come through, and she has vascular dementia. Her doctor told her that the process will be slow, but her brain, her mind, is closing down. The little failures of memory will become more debilitating until the time will come when she will not notice them because she will have lost the ability to comprehend anything at all. In two, three, or four years' time, she will not recognize her remaining oldest friends, and when she wakes in the morning, she will not recognize that she is in her own room. She has been given the route map: loss of memory, short- and long-term, the disappearance of single words—simple nouns might be the first to go—then language itself, along with balance, and soon after, all motor control, and finally the autonomous nervous system. At the museum, she donates her dozen long letters from old Mr. Nettle to the archives. She also receives notes from an obliging old colonel of the Buffs who has read the relevant pages of her typescript and faxed through his suggestions, correcting details such as "twenty-five-pound guns" to "twenty-five pounders" and noting that a Stuka does not carry a single thousand-ton bomb. She loves these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction. Later, at Tilney's Hotel, the old Tallis house converted into a hotel, she attends a birthday dinner organized by Charles, Pierrot's grandson. The children perform The Trials of Arabella, the play she wrote in 1935. The prologue speaker, a pale, freckled, ginger-haired Quincey child, recites her lines with thrilling clarity. Briony watches the performance and feels that her feeble heart makes a little leap. She makes a speech, explaining that it was entirely her fault the rehearsals fell apart because halfway through she had decided to become a novelist. Now, at five in the morning, she is still at the writing desk in her room, thinking over her strange two days. She has been standing at the window, watching the first gray light bring into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake, and the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away, into the whiteness. She likes to think that it is not weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let her lovers live and to unite them at the end.