Atonement – Ian McEwan

Atonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan concerning the understanding of and responding to the need for personal atonement. It is the story of a teenage , Briony Tallis, whose false accusations lead to a young man, Robbie, being wrongly imprisoned for sexual assault. Robbie and Briony’s older sister, Cecilia, are in love so Briony’s act destroys two lives. By the time Robbie is released, the second world war has begun and he has been conscripted. He and Cecilia, who has forsaken her family to become a nurse, meet only briefly before he is send away to France. As Briony realises what she has done, she endeavours to atone, leaving the privileges of her up-bringing and the pursuit of literature at university to devote herself to nursing during the war.

Trinity Church on Clapham Common is the setting for one scene in the book – “Even when Briony had crossed the road and walked onto the grass she did not see the church at first. It was half-concealed among trees in leaf, and was not what she expected. She had been imagining the scene of a crime, a gothic cathedral, whose flamboyant vaulting would be flooded with brazen light of scarlet and indigo from a stained-glass backdrop of lurid suffering. What appeared among the cool trees as she approached was a brick barn of elegant dimensions, like a Greek temple, with a black-tiled roof, windows of plain glass, and a low portico with plain columns beneath a clocktower of elegant proportions. . .