Now, Here Is a Book With Which to Start Your Book Club

Two posts in two days! Woohoo! Also, our new pick – the book for February-ish, since we seem to be busting through about a book a month – is at the end.

Anyway, I finished Atonement some time ago, and here are my thoughts on it. Because I can never keep them straight in my head though, first I am going to rehash the kinds of questions I think it is a good idea to consider when finishing a book. Here they are again:

Why would anyone think reading this book is a good way to spend time?

How has the fact that I have read this book impacted the way I will do things from now on?

Now, the easiest ways to answer these questions – and the way I answer them about reading, say, message boards on IMDb – is, they wouldn’t and it won’t. But the second question should be answerable for almost any book (Dr. Johnson said something like that, that there was no book so bad that you couldn’t get something out of it, but I can never find that quote and my papers on Dr. J are in Buffalo, in storage). What can one get out of reading Atonement? More narrowly, and maybe combining the two q’s, What has reading Atonement got me that I couldn’t’ve been given by another book?

One thing it might give you, is a reason to have a book club. Atonement exults in words and wordiness at every conceivable level. There is the multivalent way in which Briony, the writer, exists only in her wordiness – we get her powerful drive to express herself and to achieve meaning through words, in writing this novel, but we also get a debased version of it and a cartoon of it, in her false testimony to Robbie and in her puerile writings like the Trial of Arabella (which cartoon is one of the novel’s purest exultations, with its “hieroglyph”s and “evanesce”s). As I discussed earlier, we get things like the talismanic power of words for Robbie and Cecelia, with their “I will wait for you, come back to me”.

And one of the promises that I think we can find in Atonement is the promise that we can achieve understandings with the other people in this universe, and do it with words. I do not think that we ever really understand Robbie and Cecelia, or rather, we understand them only when they are at their most Briony-like. (The same goes, actually, for Emily, the other character to get major point-of-view duties). This makes sense in the world of the book, since Briony is its putative author and, at the end of the day, the lonely, only person between these words and us. (The “BT London 1999” is a remarkably powerful piece of typography, even without the beautiful epilogue that fleshes it out; it collapses the world of the text suddenly, from a relatively broad and democratic set of characters mediated through an authorial conscious to a radically undemocratic story filtered through two). Robbie and Cecelia, once we know the status of this fiction, are totally closed to us. Consider their moment of passion, again one I mentioned earlier, when the text refuses to spell out the fact that they have each said “I love you”: the text retreats in the face of their intimacy, and strives to become, instead, the sort of thing Our Writer Briony would understand. It is impossible for us to know what Cecelia or Robbie mean when either says “I love you”, and it is usually impossible to know what that means, when someone says it to someone else. It is a fundamentally private declaration, and people are usually fundamentally private entities.

But Robbie is told he is loved by not one, but by two Tallis sisters, and the other one is readily understandable. It comes from the writer Briony, and not only is it presented unelliptically but it is introduced by Briony’s statement that it is obvious. And it is, at that moment, obvious to us, because we know what kind of person young Briony is, because we have read about her in this book. Briony is available to us, because she is the genius of the book. Whatever it is that Robbie and Cecelia have is undoubtedly moving, and it is undoubtedly rare, and it is undoubtedly private. Whatever it is that Briony has – whether it’s when she is juvenilely confessing an imaginary love to Robbie as a ten year old, or it’s when she is racked with dissatisfaction with a world that can offer her no atonement – it is something that we can share with her, because it has been totally transfigured into the words that make up this novel.

“She is beginning to get the full grasp of what she did and what it meant,” says Cecelia of her belatedly penitent sister (McEwan, 199). The promise of a novel like this is that what we do can mean something not just in the sense offered by Cecelia’s letter, but in the sense of the novel of which Cecelia’s letter is a part. Briony’s crime and her need for atonement mean something about people, far broader than her narrow original milieu. She shows the kind of community possibly in reading that seems, when put baldly by people like C.S. Lewis, to be a little naive, and thus, to my way of thinking, the kind of thing an ideally running book club might be. Briony represents the promise of meaning – the liberation, by words and wordiness, from her isolation within her particular small set of experiences. It’s a promise, handily enough, of a broad atonement.

Can’t beat the end-with-the-title trick. Next book: after a lot of soul-searching, I made the decision to bait the Crow with another book that is, arguably, related to recent motion picture history, to wit: John Gardner’s Grendel, a book that tells the Beowulf story from the point of view of Grendel, the monster. Enjoy.