I’ve always considered this creation of loathsome characters to be the sign of a great writer. I have a lot of respect for an author who can craft someone in such a fascinating way that in the end I dislike them as much as if they had wronged me personally. One writer I admire for her ability to make me hate her characters is Edith Wharton. The first novel of hers that I read was The House of Mirth, published in 1905. A classic novel of manners dealing with 1890s American aristocracy, the book centered around character Lily Bart, a young woman offered everything, but who causes scandal after scandal, turns her back on the man she loves because he isn’t wealthy, and finally dies of an overdose because she is unhappy. After spending an entire novel watching a spoiled brat complain that her life was too hard, I wasn’t surprised – or sad – when Lily Bart was dead. I remember my kind, grandmotherly literature professor being completely dumbfounded that I wasn’t upset that the character died at the end.
All that to say, the novel I read for February – Atonement by Ian McEwan – is another such book. Like Wharton, McEwan’s prose is beautifully written and captures the life of the upper class of a bygone era. His phrases and descriptions made even the most mundane events, like a puddle drying in the sun, seem simultaneously beautiful, delicate, shameful and heartbreaking. The point of view changed a couple of times, bringing to life the minds of an elderly woman full of regret, a young WWII soldier wrongfully accused, and a pretentious little girl with clarity and detail. All the while making me despise one of the characters.
Unlike Lily Bart, who squandered her life feeling sorry for herself, McEwan’s character Briony Tallis spends her life attemting to make atonement for a terrible mistake she made as a child. One summer as a young girl she oversees the budding romance between her sister Cecilia and Robbie, the son of a family servant. Completely misunderstanding what is going on between them, she considers Robbie a deviant and publicly blames him when a visiting cousin is raped. Because of her witness Robbie is sent to prison and later becomes an English soldier while her sister abandons the family for implicating him and becomes a nurse in spite of her prestigious college education. Eventually Briony grows up and comes back into the storyline again after a lengthy section chronicling Robbie’s war experience and his relationship with his love, Cecilia. Now Briony herself is a nurse, trying to remain tied to Cecilia and Robbie through this choice of profession, and after confronting them to apologize plans to retract her witness statement and clear Robbie’s name.
There the novel abruptly switches, and it is revealed that the entire novel to this point is actually Briony’s final manuscript, finished and ready to publish. She is now in her seventies and is preparing to print her book and set the record straight. As much as I disliked Briony for her eagerness to jump to conclusions and sticking her nose where it didn’t belong in her childhood, it was nothing compared to how much I loathed her in the final pages. There Briony confesses that the end of the novel is false – Cecilia and Robbie did not get back together, but both of them died young without ever seeing each other again. She never apologized or retracted her statement, but instead lived life as a successful writer and penned the book, with the happier ending, as an atonement for her wrongs.
Reading the end of this book I was reminded of another college professor who taught us to remember that the single narrator is action the most unreliable. Without any other testimonies they can easily fool the reader into believing whatever they want them to. Briony is that narrator. Even though in the epilogue she claims to have written in honor of Cecilia and Robbie, it seems to me that she’s really doing all of this to clear her own name. She writes the portion of her transgression so that she is at fault but we are inclined to forgive her due to her childhood innocence. She presumptuously writes about the other characters thinking of her when they are away, and punishes herself by not letting the fictional versions of them forgive her, as if this could make up for never actually telling the truth.
I liked the way this book was written – sort of like last month’s book, with great description, dialogue, and multiple point-of-view changes – but in the end I felt completely duped by Briony’s chracter and hated her; not just for fooling me but for ruining the lives of all the other characters. What is the real truth of what happened? Why was Briony such a coward as to never contact her sister and tell her she had lied? What good was it to write a nice story about them after everyone it effected was dead?
This book exasperated me, but like I said, making me angry at the characters proves to me what a great writer the author is. Also as the above professor said, a movie or book that continues to stick with you is probably a good one. This one was definitely good.
And on a lighter note, I can finally watch the movie adaptation I bought in the $5 bin a few years ago!
No comments:
Post a Comment