1. art and entertainment
2. books and literature

Literature 2013 Unit 4 Outcome 1
Creative Responses to texts
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Written in 2001. Shortlisted for the Booker
Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel
Award and winner of the W. H. Smith
Literary Award . The film adaptation was
released in 2007.
PART ONE
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Ian McEwan - Biography
• Born 21 June in 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England.
• Spent much of his childhood in the Far East, Germany
and North Africa where his father, an officer in the army,
was posted
• Returned to England and studied English at Sussex
University.
• He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and
the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the
Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation,
Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded a CBE in 2000.
WHAT HAS HE WRITTEN?
• First collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1976), won the Somerset
Maugham Award
•
Short stories - In Between the Sheets (1978)- claustrophobic tales of childhood,
deviant sexuality and disjointed family life, remarkable for their formal
experimentation and controlled narrative voice
• First novel, The Cement Garden (1978) - story of four orphaned children living
alone after the death of both parents. To avoid being taken into care, they bury
their mother in cement in the basement and attempt to carry on as normal a
life as possible, and an incestuous relationship develops between the two
eldest children as they seek to emulate their parents roles.
• The Comfort of Strangers (1981), set in Venice, a tale of fantasy, violence and
obsession. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
• The Child in Time (1987), won the Whitbread Novel Award
• The Innocent (1990) is a love story set in post-war Berlin.
What has he written? Cont...
•
Black Dogs (1992) visits the most significant events of modern European history, ranging
from Nazi death camps to post-war France and the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
•
Enduring Love (1997), begins with the death of a man in a ballooning accident, an event
that triggers a tale of stalking, fixation and erotomania.
•
Amsterdam (1998) is described by McEwan as a contemporary fable. Three men, a
composer, a newspaper editor and a politician, meet at the funeral of their former lover,
sparking off a bitter feud. It was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1998.
•
Film adaptations of his own novels include First Love, Last Rites (1997), The Cement
Garden (1993) and The Comfort of Strangers (1991) and Atonement (2007)
•
On Chesil Beach (2007)- shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and
winner of the British Book Awards Book of the Year and Author of the Year Awards
•
Solar (2010), a satirical novel focusing on climate change.
OVERVIEW OF ATONEMENT
•
Story is set in 1935, England, with the threat of the approaching war hanging over its
characters.
•
The novel is divided into three sections, with a coda set in London in 1999. Plot is
structured around three-way relationships.
•
Atonement's main characters are Briony Tallis, a thirteen year old with literary
pretensions, her older sister Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of their family's
cleaning lady.
•
Robbie and Cecilia are down from Cambridge, where Robbie has been educated at the
expense of the girls' father, a Whitehall civil servant whose rule over but absence from
the young people's world of play-acting and romance recalls that of Sir Thomas Bertram
in Mansfield Park.
•
As with many of McEwan's previous novels, the plot hinges on a pivotal moment in the
characters' lives which opens the novel.
Context – Question to consider
Write down ideas to the following:
• 1935 England
Comment on the social context and how this
impacted the characters. Consider the class status,
gender roles, the threat of war
• The novel is set before World War II. McEwan wrote
Atonement in 2001.
How might he want his reader to view issues
pertaining to 1935? What are his views and values
regarding the context of 1935?
Questions to consider
Write down notes to the following questions:
• How does the setting of the Tallis house reflect wider social or
material circumstances? Consider social power and privilege;
lack of opportunity; feelings of entrapment? pg. 19, pg 145
• What emotions and impulses are being acted upon or
repressed by its inhabitants? chp. 1, chp,. 2, chap. 8
(Consider Briony’s desire to be an adult, Cecilia’s expected
female role, her ‘torpor’ regarding leaving the family home,
her love for Robbie, Robbie’s love for Cecilia, his desire to be
successful)
• How does the careful attention to detail affect the pace of
Part One?
• What is the effect of the acceleration of plot events as part
one nears its end?
Language and writing features in Atonement
Look again at the first chapters of the novel. Consider McEwan’s use
of language. How does he describe the events and emotions of the
character? How does his writing develop the novel? You need to
consider:
• His use of metaphors/similes
• The impact of his use of imagery
• Are sentences long and complex or simple and straight forward?
• Use of formal or informal language
• Is irony used? What is its effect? Dramatic tension? Social criticism?
•
How does he develop the tone of each character?
Language in Atonement – Detailed Imagery
In the early evening, high altitude clouds in the western
sky formed a thin yellow wash which became richer
over the hour, end then thickened until a filtered
orange glow hung above the giant crests of parkland
trees; the leaves became nutty brown, the branches
glimpsed among the foliage oily black, and the
desiccated grasses took on the colours of the sky...
Though the sun was weakening as it dropped, the
temperature seemed to rise because the breeze that
had brought faint relief all day had faded, and now the
air was still an heavy. pg. 78
Why did McEwan include this description? How did it
develop the tone at this point of the novel? How is it
reflective of Robbie’s character?
Formal Language
But perhaps – he had rolled onto his back – he should not
believe in her outrage. Wasn’t it too theatrical? Surely
she must have meant something better, even in her
anger. Even in her anger, she had wanted to show him
just how beautiful she was and bind him to her. How
could he trust such a self serving idea derived from hope
and desire? pg. 81
Even when Robbie is considering how much he was in
love in Cecilia, and how frustrating it was, McEwan uses
formal language. What is the impact of this? How does it
develop his character? The tone of this section of the
plot? How does it develop key concerns of the text?
Language in Atonement – use of Dramatic Tension and
Metaphor
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. pg. 3
Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project’s
highest point of fulfilment pg. 4
...she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised
world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrong doing.
Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes,
and she did not have it in her to be cruel. pg. 5
Language in Atonement
Writing Task
This activity develops your ability to write in the author’s style
Imagine you are a character from the text. Write a passage in
McEwan’s style – for example:
• Describe the room you are in
• Describe a person you know
• Give an account of your day
(You could imagine you are a character from the text)
What is the genre of the novel
• Historical fiction
• War fiction
• Crime fiction
• Romance
• Novel of manners
Explain your answer in 150 words
Styles of the three parts of Atonement
How could you link the three parts to Victorian,
Modern and Postmodern writing
Explain your reasoning. Provide evidence to
support your ideas.
PART TWO
THE TITLE
Significance of the title?
• What is the meaning of the word ‘Atonement’?
Attempt to write your own definition
• Make a list of synonyms and antonyms for the word
• Why do you thin McEwan chose this as the title?
A change to the tile...
• For the duration of writing the novel, its title
was An Atonement
• After reading the manuscript, Timothy Garton
Ash , suggested he remove ‘an’ because the
novel is about a general sense of redemption
and more widespread guilt
Significance of title cont...
• The word atonement has strong religious connotations
involving the turning away of divine wrath.
• Ian McEwan, an atheist, defines atonement as a
'reconciliation with self', having split the word into
three constituent parts: At-one-ment (The Observer,
September 16th, 2001).
Writing Task: 80 words
Your opinion: Is atonement for the benefit of the
individual or for those who were wronged?
How is the idea of Atonement
significant to the text?
Make a list of the actions/crimes that require
some form of redemption.
You will need to consider:
• Personal actions
• Social actions
• Miscarriages of justice
• War and its atrocities
Your Own Letter of Atonement
Is there something that you have felt
guilt/remorse over?
Write out a letter of atonement to someone in
your life. (It can be linked to your life, or
fictional)
PART THREE
QUESTIONS EXPLORED IN THE TEXT
How can the craft of writing expiate
sin and bring redemption?
• The title refers to the process of forgiving or
pardoning a transgression
• Alludes to the Briony’s search for atonement
after making a serious mistake that has lifechanging effects for many.
• through the remaining years of the century, she
seeks atonement - which leads to an exploration
on the nature of writing itself.
Redemption through writing...
• Throughout the novel, the reader can see the
characters search for atonement. "I gave them
happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them
forgive me," Briony says at the end of the novel.
• Briony recognizes her sin and attempts to atone for it
through writing her novel. She does not grant herself
forgiveness.
• She attempts to earn atonement through giving Robbie
and Cecilia a life together in her writing.
Questions explored in Atonement
In her letters to Robbie, Cecilia quotes from W. H. Auden's 1939 poem,
"In Memory of W. B. Yeats," which includes the line, "Poetry makes
nothing happen."
Write down your ideas to the following questions:
• Is the writing of fiction much more than the construction of
elaborate entertainments—an indulgence in imaginative play?
• Can fiction bear witness to life and to history, telling its own serious
truths.
• Is Briony's novel effective, in her own conscience, as an act of
atonement? Does the completed novel compel the reader to
forgive her?
PART FOUR
THE EPIGRAPH
Why did McEwan choose this epigraph?
• The novel's epigraph is taken from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, in which
Catherine, a naïve young woman caught up in fantasies from the Gothic fiction
she loves to read, imagines that her host in an English country house is a villain.
• She finds the father of her host, General Tilney, very aloof and her first night in
the abbey is disturbing and full of scary incidents
• She finds out that Mrs Tilney died nine years ago, and imagines that due to
General Tilney’s lack of emotion, he is responsible.
• Atonement’s epigraph is the section where Henry, the Tilney son, tells her that
her suspicions are groundless.
• She feels guilty for telling him her fears and thinks he doesn’t like her anymore.
Power of the Imagination
In Austen's novel Catherine Norland's mistakes
are comical and have no serious outcome,
while in Atonement, Briony's fantasies have
tragic effects upon those around her.
Respond to the following question:
What is McEwan implying about the power of
the imagination, and its potential for harm
when unleashed into the social world?
The epigraph – links between Atonement and Austen
• McEwan gives the family home rather gothic touches
• There is an absent father in both novels and the lack of a real mother
figure, Briony is like the young Austen, a writer who takes her craft very
seriously and she is precocious
• Austen was surrounded by an appreciative and receptive family who she
used in her productions
• Austen used to present her childhood writings on a polished way –
mimicking typesetting and including tables of contents and a dedication
• Briony wants to be a great writer and by the end of the novel it is implied
that she has achieves some status. She refers to herself as a novelist by
saying ‘Atonement’ will be her last
Links to Austen
• Tilney Hotel on pg. 363 – link to General Tilney of
Northanger Abbey
• Robbie has a degree in English Lit, reference to him
having a 3rd edition copy of Austen on his shelf
• Crimes in Atonement, just as Catherine has suggested
in Northanger Abbey – the accusation, Robbie’s
punishment, the war, social injustice
Your Opinion:
• What is the effect of the epigraph on the novel and the
reader?
Intertextual References
• The story of the relationship between two sisters seems to draw on
Austen, and perhaps Middlemarch.
• Atonement, for its first section, is a novel in the country house tradition.
• Draws on the many precedents of Austen, Forster, Bowen, Henry Green,
Rosamond Lehmann and Ivy Compton Burnett
• Links to Henry James, What Maisie Knew, and Hartley's The Go-Between,
influenceing McEwan's story of an adult's world seen through the eyes of
a child.
• Atonement also echoes Clarissa's recreation of Bourton in her memories
in Mrs Dalloway
•
The shifting perspectives within Atonement is also evident in Virgina
Woolf's writing.