Atonement

by Ian McEwan

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.

This is, finally, the limit of the atonement Briony has sought through various drafts of this novel. When she is setting the terms as author, how can she expect to purge herself of the harm she did, or expect forgiveness when her sister and Robbie are dead? And yet... the imagination can be benign, for as she falls asleep she thinks she can summon in fiction Cecilia and Robbie sitting near her, enjoying her childish play, The Trials of Arabella - implicity, granting her expiation. My novel Lessons is, in important respects, a companion piece to Atonement, though its material and structure are very different. What we make of our lives when we survey the past is a confused and shifting mental act whose elements can be painfully truthful or consolingly self-deceiving, or constantly shifting between the two as we play at novelist with the narrative of our existence.