Atonement revision booklet for AQA A Level English Lit B
Essay, Crime Writing: Explore the significance of guilt in the novel Atonement (23/25)
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English Literature B
Elements of Crime Writing
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To what extent do you agree with the view that Briony
deserves her punishment for the crime she commits?
For many readers of ‘Atonement’, it is difficult to sympathise with
Briony and subsequently, forgive her for the terrible crime she
committed against Robbie and Cecilia, despite her lifelong remorse.
It is often considered therefore that the self-punishment she inflicts
upon herself is proportional to her crime, which was arguably
motivated by malicious intentions to incriminate Robbie.
Nevertheless, it is equally true that Paul Marshall's assault of Lola
helped make Briony's transgression possible, and subsequently,
some readers may believe that the protagonist's punishment is too
severe compared with Marshall's punishment, which is negated by
McEwan in his classically 'macabre' style.
To comprehend the scale of Briony's crime, it is necessary to
understand the effects on Atonement's principal victim, Robbie. At
the close of Part One, we are offered the tragic image of Grace
Turner shouting 'Liars! Liars!' to the those who have condemned the
son whom she will never see again - McEwan's use of repetition and
the use of the exclamatives here emphasises the crime that is the
false accusation which will come to ruin Robbie's life forever. The
omniscient voice which pervades Part One remarks bluntly on the
way that this one evening has been a form of ‘eternal damnation' for
Robbie, with the adjective 'eternal' conveying the powerful message
that his fortune will never reverse, a sentiment which comes to
dominate the next two parts. The exploration of the way in which
the life can be destroyed in just one short moment is a common
theme in McEwan's novels such as ‘The Child in Time’, in which the
protagonist looks away from his child for one second before she is
gone forever. Robbie's similar destruction can be attributed almost
entirely to Briony; her series of misunderstandings leads her to
repeatedly and increasingly brand Robbie as a 'maniac', a single
common noun which ultimately has terrible consequences for his life
as it is what perhaps motivates Briony above all to incriminate him.
This motive is arguably somewhat malicious due to the very fact
that the word only appeals to Briony because she believes it has
literary 'refinement', and so she is too self-centred to look beyond
her own 'love of order' to imagine Robbie's own thoughts and
feelings. Imagining another's consciousness becomes a key theme
of the novel as Briony's lack of this literary ability as a child forms an
essential part of her ignorance which is inherent to her motive and
subsequently, the crime. If the motivations can be deemed
malicious, then Briony deserves all of the punishment she later
inflicts upon herself.
, The protagonist's clarity of purpose both before and during her
transgression also makes her appear rather despicable, and
therefore worthy of punishment. Her crucial interrogative 'It was
Robbie, wasn't it?' is importantly phrased by McEwan, demanding an
answer in the affirmative due to the phrase 'wasn't it' instead of
simply 'was it'. As a result, it seems that Briony is looking for
another witness to aid her in the incrimination of Robbie, even
though she knows there is no evidence and hence feels the need to
arguably coerce the victim into siding with her version of events.
Her indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others is again
apparent when she elevates herself to Lola's degree of turmoil with
the phrase 'together they faced real terrors', which is not only
ignorant of Lola's obvious pain, but also another factor supporting
the view that she considers Lola a useful ally in the incrimination of
Robbie. We see her clarity of purpose in the novel's most damning
sentence, which also acts as her crime as she says monosyllabically
'I saw him'; this forms part of another key message conveyed by
McEwan in that it expresses just how little evidence is needed to
condemn a man, and he therefore creates powerful social
commentary about a justice system which takes the unreliable and
vague evidence of a 13-year-old girl.
Indeed, the way in which the police took Briony's evidence as fact
and gave her no chance to retract her evidence could be a factor
which limits her culpability, and by extension makes her
undeserving of punishment. This negative portrayal of a police force
which merely looked on...impassively' is a trope central to many
works of crime fiction, particularly in the Golden Age era in which
writers such as Agatha Christie presented the police as ineffectual
and almost farcical. The police do not even ask questions to Briony;
they simply state, 'You saw him, then.' and the noticeable absence
of a question mark here is a telling reminder by McEwan that they
have not challenged Briony in any way to test her truthfulness. It
could potentially indicate that the police are not against Robbie's
incrimination and are therefore willing to accept Briony's testimony
without hesitation, another key element of Golden Age crime fiction
in which the working-class suspect was often pursued by the police
as a scapegoat.
If the police were ineffectual in encouraging Briony to re-think her
version of events, then the Tallis family were at least equally so.
Although Briony attempts to dramatise Emily's pain through the
personification of a 'creature' within her mother which bore her no
malice', we come to see by the end of Part One that this excuse for
not being there for Briony is completely invalid as she was suddenly
free of migraine when the opportunity to secure Robbie's
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