Island Temple

The Island Temple, built in the style of Nicholas Revett in the late 1780s, was intended as a point of interest, an eye-catching feature to enhance the pastoral ideal, and had of course no religious purpose at all. It was near enough to the water's edge, raised upon a projecting bank, to cast an interesting reflection in the lake, and from most perspectives the row of pillars and the pediment above them were charmingly half obscured by the elms and oaks that had grown up around. Closer to, the temple had a sorrier look: moisture rising through a damaged damp course had caused chunks of stucco to fall away. Sometime in the late nineteenth century clumsy repairs were made with unpainted cement which had turned brown and gave the building a mottled, diseased appearance. Elsewhere, the exposed laths, themselves rotting away, showed through like the ribs of a starving animal. The double doors that opened onto a circular chamber with a domed roof had long ago been removed, and the stone floor was thickly covered in leaves and leaf mold and the droppings of various birds and animals that wandered in and out. All the panes were gone from the pretty, Georgian windows, smashed by Leon and his friends in the late twenties. The tall niches that had once contained statuary were empty but for the filthy ruins of spiderwebs. The only furniture was a bench carried in from the village cricket pitch—again, the youthful Leon and his terrible friends from school. The legs had been kicked away and used to break the windows, and were lying outside, softly crumbling into the earth among the nettles and the incorruptible shards of glass. Just as the swimming pool pavilion behind the stable block imitated features of the temple, so the temple was supposed to embody references to the original Adam house, though nobody in the Tallis family knew what they were. Perhaps it was the style of column, or the pediment, or the proportions of the windows. At different times, but most often at Christmas, when moods were expansive, family members strolling over the bridges promised to research the matter, but no one cared to set aside the time when the busy new year began. More than the dilapidation, it was this connection, this lost memory of the temple's grander relation, which gave the useless little building its sorry air. The temple was the orphan of a grand society lady, and now, with no one to care for it, no one to look up to, the child had grown old before its time, and let itself go. There was a tapering soot stain as high as a man on an outside wall where two tramps had once, outrageously, lit a bonfire to roast a carp that was not theirs. For a long time there had been a shriveled boot lying exposed on grass kept trim by rabbits. But when Briony looked today, the boot had vanished, as everything would in the end. The idea that the temple, wearing its own black band, grieved for the burned-down mansion, that it yearned for a grand and invisible presence, bestowed a faintly religious ambience. Tragedy had rescued the temple from being entirely a fake.

The Scene of the Crime

It is on the island, in the darkness near the temple, that the novel's central, unpunished crime occurs. During the search for the runaway twins, Briony comes upon the clearing and sees a figure—a man—backing away from a seated Lola. She immediately understands what has happened. The man disappears onto the roadway, and Briony kneels beside her cousin. In the ensuing exchange, Briony, driven by her own conviction and the desire to frame a narrative, insists that the attacker was Robbie Turner. Lola, initially uncertain, yields to Briony's certainty. "It was him, wasn't it?" Briony asks. Lola nods. "It was Robbie." The temple's isolation, its decay, and the darkness of the night create the conditions for a crime that will never be legally acknowledged, and for a false accusation that will destroy lives. The temple is the stage for a miscarriage of justice that the novel spends the rest of its length trying to atone for.

A Place of Memory and Self-Mythologizing

For Briony, the temple is also a site of personal transformation and the birth of her artistic identity. Earlier on the same day, she had come to the island to slash at nettles with a hazel switch, a violent, purifying act in which she symbolically killed off her childhood self and her failed play. She imagined herself as a champion nettle-slashing athlete, a fantasy that allowed her to escape the humiliation of her ruined rehearsal. But the return from such daydreaming was always a moment of realignment with the hard mass of the actual. It was on the bridge leading to the temple that she had waited, challenging existence to dispel her insignificance. And it was on the island, after the assault, that she made her most fateful decision, one that would define her life as a writer and as a guilty party. Decades later, in 1999, Briony reflects on the temple's disappearance. The lake has been drained, the temple demolished, replaced by a wooden bench and a litter basket. The island is now a long mound of smooth grass, like an immense ancient barrow. She cannot even estimate the spot where she once sat and comforted the young Lady Lola Marshall. The physical erasure of the temple mirrors the erosion of memory and the impossibility of fixing the past. The temple, once a symbol of lost grandeur and neglected memory, becomes a symbol of the past's ultimate unknowability and the futility of atonement.