Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’: Ordinary Evils
Briony, of course, is the most evident villain in the novel. Through the machinations of an over-imaginative eleven-year-old, she somehow manages to land Robbie in jail. However, McEwan goes to great length to explore Briony’s thought processes leading her to fabricate the story about Robbie. The text begins by describing her elation at having created a play with which to welcome her brother home. The narrative continues to highlight her excitement at finding her cousins able to participate, then abruptly it all goes wrong when cousin Lola usurps the part written for Briony. Once the play continues to deteriorate, McEwan paints a vivid picture of a petulant child upset at not getting her way, but accentuates that picture with Briony’s additional distress at not being able to provide a proper welcome home for her brother Leon. However, it is interesting to note that what upsets her is closely tied in her brother’s reaction to the intended welcome, and consequently, to her role in it. The way McEwan seams these intents and distresses together is what makes Briony an understandable and sympathetic character. A reading of the initial section of the text would reveal simply a creative child, albeit a somewhat spoiled one, struggling with the way that growing up works.
The entrance of her misdeed, however, creates a problem with that perception of her. That she not only implicates Robbie in the rape of her cousin but she also sticks to her story, despite the fact that she is revealed to have misgivings time and again, serves to draw a rather nasty picture of her. McEwan’s way of dealing with this picture is not to underplay the evil in her act or the havoc that it wreaks upon her family and Robbie’s, but rather to attempt to explain the evil inherent in all of the ordinary characters in the text.
Cecilia’s first entrance into the novel shows her flitting around her family’s property, having first picked some flowers. She seems innocent enough, but as the narrative delves further into her thoughts, she is revealed to have less innocent thoughts at hand. She takes a circuitous route around the garden in order not to have to speak to Robbie, a trusted friend of the family, and her thoughts are then moved to Briony’s play, about which she has no good thoughts. The redeeming factor is that McEwan later divulges Cecilia’s deeper romantic feelings for Robbie, which required her to take the circuitous route not simply out of irritation with Robbie, but out of her own nervousness. Further, Briony’s play is later shown to have been a disaster that could likely not have been salvaged, just as Cecilia had thought.
This is McEwan’s approach throughout the novel. When Robbie directs an obscene letter to Cecilia rather than the chaste one he meant to send, the perception of Robbie is, to the reader, one of a poor boy who screwed up, but to Briony he becomes a monster. However, the tenderness of his treatment of Cecilia following that incident coupled with his unending devotion to her throughout his time in prison and then in war is the antidote to this small error in judgment. Cecilia and Briony’s mother is not immune to this infiltration of evil. Even putting aside the miscommunication regarding the roast on the eve of Leon’s arrival at home, Emily Tallis was very proud of having a “sixth sense” that allowed her to “know” what was going on in the house around her. She was just positive that she knew the truth about her household. Yet when Robbie was wrongfully accused of the rape of Lola, she not only didn’t know that it was Paul Marshall who had committed the deed, but she didn’t even consider the even more obvious choice, Danny Hardman, who had been caught leering at Lola. In itself, this is a small example of this ordinary evil, but when it is combined with its end, Robbie’s time in jail, and ultimately the destruction of Robbie and Cecilia’s life together, it grows.
Further, Leon becomes implicated. The act that becomes the ruin of Robbie and Cecilia couldn’t have been enacted had Leon not invited Robbie to the dinner. The closeness that Leon and Cecilia seem to share certainly wouldn’t have excluded that fact that Cecilia wouldn’t have wanted Robbie to attend the dinner. As such, Leon’s invitation can be interpreted as an instrument of his brotherly taunting of Cecilia. The twins, who can hardly be seen as anything but innocent children, ran away from the same dinner, thereby creating the situation outside that allowed Marshall to accost Lola, and putting Robbie in the same woods where the rape occurred. Lola herself is simply an adolescent struggling to grow up without the benefit of family. Yet she has what seems to be some sort of scuffle with Marshall prior to the incident at the island temple but then cannot identify him as her assailant at that time. It is unclear whether she was in fact raped or if it was a consensual meeting. In either situation, she kept her silence about her assailant not being Robbie, thereby sealing his fate along with Briony.
The aspect of villainy that makes it so appealing is that often readers can see themselves in the villains and thus identify with the villain. An enemy who is purely evil often is not as disturbing as the ordinary villain whose life can be compared to the reader’s normal life with the additive of evil. It is this concept that McEwan strives to create in his Atonement, filling the text with ordinary characters living, for the most part, ordinary lives. The fact that each character engages in his own ordinary evil that contributes to the larger evil of the whole story only serves to make the novel that much more compelling.
