The attempt was all

The attempt was all is the culminating philosophical statement of Briony Tallis's final novel, Atonement, and the principle by which she justifies her lifelong project of writing. It appears in the 1999 coda, where the seventy-seven-year-old Briony, facing vascular dementia and the impossibility of legal atonement, declares that the attempt to achieve atonement through fiction was itself the point. The phrase crystallizes the novel's central meditation on the limits of narrative power, the irreconcilable tension between authorial control and moral accountability, and the final act of kindness that allows her lovers to survive and flourish against the historical record.

Origin and Context

The phrase emerges in the final pages of the novel, during Briony's birthday vigil at Tilney's Hotel on the night of her seventy-seventh birthday. She has spent fifty-nine years writing and rewriting the story of the 1935 summer day when her false accusation sent Robbie Turner to prison and destroyed the lives of her sister Cecilia and Robbie. Now, facing a diagnosis of vascular dementia that will gradually erase her memory, language, and identity, she reflects on the impossibility of her task. The legal reality is that her "forensic memoir" can never be published while Lola and Paul Marshall are alive, for they would sue for libel. The moral reality is that no act of writing can undo the harm she caused. It is in this moment of absolute impasse that she arrives at her final formulation: "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."

Philosophical Meaning

The phrase articulates a radical redefinition of atonement itself. Briony has spent her career as a novelist believing that by telling the truth about what happened—by setting down the names, places, and exact circumstances of the crime—she could achieve something like moral repair. But she comes to understand that a novelist, like God, possesses "absolute power of deciding outcomes," and therefore cannot appeal to any higher authority for forgiveness. There is "no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her." The attempt at atonement is structurally impossible because the novelist is both the creator of the fictional world and the judge of its moral order. The phrase accepts this impossibility not as a failure but as the very condition of the work: the attempt itself, however doomed, is what gives the project its meaning.

Narrative Consequences

The principle of "the attempt was all" directly shapes the ending Briony chooses for her lovers. She acknowledges that earlier drafts were "pitiless"—that in versions closer to historical truth, Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, and Cecilia was killed by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground Station in September of the same year. But in her final draft, the one she publishes, the lovers survive and flourish. She gives them happiness, though she does not allow them to forgive her. This is not, she insists, "weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair." The attempt to give them a happy ending is itself the atonement, even if it cannot be recognized or accepted by those it is meant to serve.

Thematic Significance

The phrase serves as the novel's final meditation on the relationship between fiction and truth, guilt and redemption. Throughout her career, Briony has been haunted by the knowledge that her childhood accusation was not a deliberate lie but a failure of imagination—a failure to grasp "the simple truth that other people are as real as you." Her writing has been an attempt to enter those other minds, to show how they had equal value. But the attempt at atonement through fiction is always compromised by the novelist's absolute power. The phrase acknowledges this compromise without resolving it. It is not a claim of success but an acceptance of the terms of the struggle. The attempt was all—not because it succeeded, but because the effort to imagine the lives of others, to do justice to their reality, is the only moral act available to a novelist.

Final Formulation

The phrase appears in the novel's closing paragraphs, as Briony stands at the window of her hotel room watching the first gray light bring into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake. She is thinking of Robbie and Cecilia, and of the impossibility of their forgiveness. "If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It's not impossible." The sentence that follows—"But now I must sleep"—is the last action of the novel, and the phrase "the attempt was all" is its final philosophical anchor. It is the principle that allows Briony to complete her work and to let go, knowing that the story she has told is not the truth but a version of the truth shaped by love and hope, and that this is the only atonement available to her.