Atonement
A-Level Revision Notes –
Quick Notes
English Literature
© irevise.com 2016
1 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
© irevise.com 2016.
All revision notes have been produced by mockness ltd for irevise.com.
Email: [email protected]
Copyrighted material.
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
reprinting, or otherwise without either the prior written permission of irevise.com or a license
permitting copying in the United Kingdom issued by the copyright licensing Agency.
2 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
Table of Contents
Context ................................................................................................................................... 4
Summary ................................................................................................................................ 5
Characters .......................................................................................................................................... 6
Themes............................................................................................................................................. 10
3 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
Register for free today to get access to more GCSE English
revision notes.
Click here for the full list of notes available.
Get Free Account
Why register with iRevise.com?





Access unlimited revision Quick Notes created by top class
teachers and subject experts.
Access revision content across a wide range of subjects.
Access Online Multiple Choice Questions across multiple subjects
to help you learn, remember, and test yourself.
Access Exam Creator, to create custom tailored exam
papers to get extra revision help.
Access revision notes any time anywhere and on your mobile
device.
"I used iRevise.com during my GCSE exams last year and it really helped me so
much! Their revision notes, sample answers, and maths tutorials made me feel so
much confident throughout the year and in my exams. Got the grades I wanted
thanks to them!"
Sarah Hopkins, Hull
Get Free Account
4 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
Context
Atonement, published in 2001, is a book about screwing up. It's by Ian McEwan – a serious
and critically acclaimed big-deal novelist who won the Booker Prize, so the stakes are a
whole lot higher.
The person in the wrong here is Briony Tallis, a dreamy, upper-class 13-year-old control
freak who we first meet in England before World War II. Briony wants to be a writer because
– she figures – they get to control the whole world. When you write, after all, your
characters do what they're told to and speak when spoken to. You can make up a character,
give him an awful name like Beluga Throckmorton, and then make the poor guy do all of
your homework. And you know what? He has to listen to you on account of living inside
your brain and all.
Instead of putting Briony in control of the world, though, her imagination ends up spreading
chaos and misery and guilt.
Summary
A lot happens in Atonement. And then some of it doesn't, so the plot gets even more
tangled.
We start out at the Tallis family's very upper-class English home in 1935, a few years before
World War II. The family is expecting a visit from their maternal cousins – the young twins
Jackson and Pierrot, and 15-year-old Lola – all of whom have been temporarily cast adrift by
their parents' divorce. The Tallis family is also expecting a visit from brother Leon and his
friend, the chocolate magnate Paul Marshall. With five (count 'em, five) people arriving, the
house is in something of an uproar – especially since father Jack Tallis is off in London at his
government job, while mother Emily Tallis is largely incapacitated with a migraine.
In the middle of all this burble and bustle, Robbie Turner, the son of the housekeeper,
realizes that he's fallen hopelessly, passionately in love with his childhood friend Cecilia
Tallis.
Their courtship rituals result – as these things will – in a series of awkward sexual displays.
Cecilia jumps into a fountain in her underwear. Robbie accidentally gives Cecilia a letter he
meant to destroy in which he tells her exactly what he wants to do with her. Then they do
some of those things, not nearly privately enough, in the family library.
These embarrassing events are witnessed by Briony, Cecilia's imaginative 13-year-old sister.
Spurred by confusion, and by her penchant for making up stories, she decides that Robbie is
a "maniac" who is after her sister. This results in disaster when the twins run away after
dinner, and everyone races out to search for them in the dark. Briony finds Lola, who has
been sexually assaulted, and sees a figure running away into the darkness. Though she does
not see his face, she is convinced that it was Robbie, and accuses him to the police. Robbie
is taken to prison, despite the protests of Grace Turner (his mother) and Cecilia, who
pledges her love and promises to wait for him.
The novel now jumps several years to 1940. Robbie has been released from prison to join
the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) fighting in France against the Nazis. The war has gone
horribly though, and so Robbie is trudging cross-country to the sea at Dunkirk, where he, his
5 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
companions Mace and Nettle, and the rest of the British hope to be ferried across to
England and safety. Robbie is wounded and increasingly delirious. He is sustained only by
letters from Cecilia and his hopes for their future together. He finally collapses into sleep,
waiting for the evacuation, which is to begin the next day.
The narrative shifts to Briony. She is riddled with guilt since realizing that it wasn't Robbie
who raped Lola. In part to try to atone for what she has done, she refuses to go study at
Cambridge. Instead, to her mother's shock, she becomes a training nurse in London, where
she cares for some of the first British soldiers wounded in the war.
On one of her days off from the hospital, Briony goes to visit her sister and offers to tell
their parents and the court that her statement about Robbie was false. She discovers
Robbie, who has survived the Dunkirk crossing, staying in her sister's apartment – scandal!
(Or at least the landlady is scandalized, anyway.) Though it seems unlikely that Robbie's
verdict can be overturned, she promises to retract her statement before an official witness,
to tell their parents, and to write them a full account of what she did and why. She also tells
them that Paul Marshall has married Lola, and that it was almost certainly he who raped
her. Cecilia and Robbie do not forgive her, since she did ruin their lives and it's hard to get
past that. But there is some sense of reconciliation.
The final part of the book is told by Briony in first person. She is old now, and a famous
author. She has just learned that she has vascular dementia, a condition which will lead her
to senility and then death in a couple of years. We learn that the book, Atonement, is her
novel, and that she is waiting to publish it until Lord and Lady Marshall – Paul and Lola – are
dead and cannot sue.
She recognizes that she will not outlive Lola, and that the book will therefore not be
released in her lifetime. She also reveals that the book is not entirely truthful, and that
Robbie and Cecilia did not reunite but instead died separately during the war.
Characters
Briony Tallis
Briony Tallis, thirteen-year-old dreamer and interferer, is a very useful character for you.
That's because when your parents tell you to clean your room you can say, "Hey – you don't
want me to be like Briony, do you? You want me to clean my room and then destroy my
sister's life and bring sadness and woe to the entire family?? I didn't think so."
Obviously, this will work better if you actually have a sister. Okay, it probably won't work all
that well even then. But still, it's worth a try, right?



As a thirteen-year-old budding writer in an upper-class family in 1935, Briony
witnesses and is disturbed by the courtship of her older sister Cecilia and her
childhood friend Robbie Turner.
When Briony's cousin, Lola, is assaulted, she concludes incorrectly that Robbie was
the rapist, and denounces him to the police, resulting in his arrest and
imprisonment.
By the time she is eighteen in 1940, Briony has figured out that she made a mistake
about Robbie and feels all kinds of guilty about it.
6 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.



She becomes a nurse in training, partially to atone for her screw-up, and helps treat
the first round of wounded soldiers returning from World War II. She also begins to
write seriously, and gets positive feedback on a novella about Robbie and Cecilia.
She goes to her sister to try to apologize. She meets Robbie there, and promises
them both to write a long letter explaining what she did and why.
At 77, Briony is a successful writer facing memory loss and eventually death due to
vascular dementia. She has written a novel—the book we're reading— about Robbie
and Cecilia. She reveals that she has changed some details of the plot, and that she
will not be able to publish until after her death for legal reasons.
Robbie Turner
Robbie Turner is the son of the Tallis family's cleaning lady. On the one hand, this isn't very
important at all. On the other hand, it's the single most important thing about him, and it's
also his undoing.
Cecilia Tallis
Cecilia Tallis, Briony's older sister, totally doesn't know what she's doing. She comes back
from college in 1935 and she flops and mopes and smokes around the house like some sort
of morbid adolescent.
Her brother asks her to come up to London with her, and she hems and haws and burbles.
She switches dresses three times before going down to dinner. When her mother tells her
to put some flowers in a vase, she takes all day about it. And then she breaks the vase when
she has an argument with her childhood friend Robbie Turner.
And then she's so mad at him that she takes off her clothes and dives into the fountain to
retrieve the broken pieces of the vase. "Drowning herself would be his punishment."
Lola Quincey
Lola Quincey, the fifteen-year-old cousin of the Tallis children, wants to be grown up. She's a
drama queen who paints her toenails and wears perfume with a "womanly tang" and steals
the main role in Briony's play while acting like she's too good to be in the play anyway. She
has an invincible egocentrism that she inherits, apparently, from her mother – an
"obliviousness to anything beyond her own business" that enables a thoughtless cruelty. If
she were your cousin and came over to your house and stole the lead role in your play, you
probably wouldn't like her very much and we'd totally understand.
Paul Marshall
Paul Marshall, Leon Tallis' friend and successful businessman, is the chocolate guy. He's also
a doofus and a bore. When he visits the Tallises' home, he babbles on about his Amo
chocolate bars that are going to be bought by the government to be shipped to soldiers. He
even seems to want there to be a war just so he can make some money.
When the nine-year-olds, Pierrot and Jackson, suggest that there won't be any fighting,
Paul's spiteful enough to refuse to give them candy bars. It's like he's nine himself. Cecilia,
on meeting him for the first time, thinks "how deliciously self-destructive it would be,
almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably
stupid".
7 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
Paul's also a villain. He assaults Lola – who is only fifteen. When she escapes him, he seeks
her out again, and manages to rape her outside in the dark while the rest of the family is
looking for the runaway twins. Quick reminder in case you'd forgotten: the twins are Lola's
little brothers. And their parents are getting divorced. So not only does Paul Marshall rape
Lola, but he does so while she's out looking for her missing baby brothers while visiting her
aunt and uncle because her parents are getting divorced. He then sits back and lets Robbie
take the blame.
Eventually, Paul marries Lola, and goes on to be hugely rich and respected. He gets his war,
he gets his money, he gets the girl, he gets away with rape. If anyone wins the novel, it's
him.
The Tallis Family
Emily Tallis
Emily is Briony, Cecilia, and Leon's super delicate mother. She suffers from migraines and
spends a lot of her time lying in her room, letting her mind drift. She also spends a certain
amount of time feeling bad about not being able to do more. In her dreaminess and her
guilt, she's quite a bit like her daughter, Briony.
Emily loves Briony, and has mixed feelings about Cecilia, whose education and restlessness
she seems to resent. Her relationship with Cecilia breaks down completely when Emily
supports Robbie's prosecution.
Jack Tallis
Jack is Briony, Cecilia, and Leon's father. He's absent from home in the early part of the
novel, partly because he's involved in the government which is preparing for war, partly
because he's having an affair, and partly because it just seems like he wants to be.
Leon Tallis
Leon is Briony and Cecilia's older brother and an all-round nice guy. "In Leon's life, or rather,
in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed".
This is, presumably, how he is able to be friends with that toad Paul Marshall.
Unfortunately, the stories Leon tells himself about the loveliness of everyone aren't any
truer than the stories Briony tells herself. And when they prove false, he's lost. He doesn't
help Cecilia defend Robbie, causing her to break with him permanently.
Jackson and Pierrot Quincey
Jackson and Pierrot are Lola's nine-year-old twin brothers who join her in visiting the Tallis
family. They're both somewhat traumatized by their parents' divorce and being away from
home – Jackson so much so that he wets the bed.
We meet Pierrot again, some sixty years later, after Jackson has died. He has become quite
close with Briony.
Charles Quincey
Pierrot's grandson. He organizes Briony's 77th birthday party.
Hermione Quincey
8 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
Emily's sister; Lola, Jackson, and Pierrot's mother. She's dramatic and irritating and leaves
her husband to pursue her bliss. Kind of an early hippie. She's not really in the story per se,
but she still drives Emily crazy. We a little bit like her for it and a little bit think she sounds
pretty awful.
Betty
The cook. She often has conflicts with Emily, which Cecilia has to sort out. She makes
Jackson clean his own sheets when he wets the bed, and generally terrorizes him and his
brother, though not out of any malice.
Mr. Hardman
Danny's father, a worker around the house. He testifies that Danny was with him on the
night of the rape.
Danny Hardman
A worker who does odd jobs around the house. He's attracted to Lola, and for years Robbie
and Cecilia think he was the one who raped her. Turns out he's as innocent as can be,
however.
Ernest Turner
Robbie's father. He was the Tallises' gardener and handyman before he walked out on his
wife and child. No one knows what happened to him.
Grace Turner
The Tallises' cleaning woman and Robbie's mother. She tells fortunes on the side to make
extra money. She adores her son and, along with Cecilia, is the only one who supports him
when he is accused of rape.
Corporal Mace
A large man who thinks quickly on his feet. He gets Robbie out of trouble a number of times
before the two of them get separated.
Corporal Nettle
He and Robbie stick together until just before the evacuation at Dunkirk. As Robbie grows
sicker, Nettle takes care of him. Briony writes to him for information about Robbie's
wartime service and it seems likely that he was with Robbie when he died.
Sister Marjorie Drummond
The nurse in charge of Briony and the other trainees. She is strict and terrifying. If you make
a mistake on her ward, she will destroy you.
Fiona
Briony's roommate. We don't get too many details about her except that she looks vaguely
like Lola and she and Briony are friends mostly because they've been thrown together,
rather than because they have anything much in common.
Luc
An injured French soldier whom Briony comforts briefly before he dies. He has a massive
head wound and believes that she is his fiancée. He tells her he loves her, and she says she
loves him before he dies. It is subtly suggested that Luc might be a stand-in for, or version
9 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
of, Briony's husband, who we hear about briefly in the last part of the novel, and who seems
to have been French.
Themes
Coming of Age
Atonement covers 64 years, which is long enough to do a serious amount of growing up.
Everybody who wants to grow up in the book – Lola, who paints her toenails and wears
perfume; Briony, who wants to learn all about how adults feel so she can write it down;
Robbie, who wants to be free and pursue his own ambitions; Cecilia, who wanders around
moping and smoking waiting for her life to start – gets old. Every single one of them – even
those who actually died before they had a chance, thanks to Briony's novel.
1.
Her sandals revealed an ankle bracelet and toenails painted vermilion. The sight of these
nails gave Briony a constricting sensation around her sternum, and she knew at once that
she could not ask Lola to play the Prince.
Lola is fifteen going on twenty-five. She can't play a prince because she's already working so
hard at playing a princess. Briony, meanwhile, is freaked out by the slightest suggestion of
sexuality. All of which is going to cause problems down the road…
Compassion and Forgiveness
The name of the book is Atonement, so you know it's a story about trying to get forgiveness
for your sins. Those sins are, oddly, mostly about making up stories. And the way you try to
get forgiveness is also by making up stories. Briony did wrong by imagining that Robbie
raped her cousin. Then she writes a fictionalized novel about how he didn't rape her cousin
to atone for it. Paul, on the other hand, doesn't say anything about his own sin from first to
last, and doesn't seem to feel the need for forgiveness either. Maybe atonement only works
in a story. Just like you can't have a beginning without an end, you can't have forgiveness
without a tale that tells you what you did wrong.
1.
Looking at the boys…she knew they could never understand her ambition. Forgiveness
softened her tone.
This is probably the first mention of forgiveness in the novel, and it's Briony forgiving
Jackson and Pierrot, rather than anyone forgiving Briony. She's kind of condescending about
it though, isn't she? She figures she can understand them but they can't understand her. If
the novel is about forgiveness and compassion, this maybe isn't as great of a start as it looks
at first.
Dreams, Hopes, and Plans
Expressing a dream or a hope or a plan in Atonement is a pretty sure way to have the novel
drop a heap of misery in your lap. Briony sets out to stage an awesome play; Robbie decides
to head off to medical school; Cecilia tells Robbie to come back to her – and what are the
results? The only person who manages to have all his dreams come true is Paul Marshall –
and that's hardly a feel-good outcome.
10 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
Briony seems to be on the money when she says she's going to sink into dementia and
death at the end of the novel. So that's cheery, though probably not the end of life she's
originally hoped for.
1.
Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project's highest point of fulfilment.
Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were
moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, when she burrowed in the delicious
gloom of her canopy bed, and made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little
playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon.
The first thing we learn at the beginning of the book is that Briony is writing a play. Just
about the next thing we learn is that the production isn't going to live up to her hopes. This
is a subtle signal that… life is filled with disappointment and despair.
Literature and Writing
As you might have heard us mention before, Atonement is literature about literature. It's
writing about writing. It turns back and bites its own tail, like a flexible yoga dog. Briony
writes the novel within the novel, of course, as well as the play in the novel and even a
novella in the novel.
But there's also Robbie's X-rated note that precedes the X-rated business he gets into with
Cecilia. And then there are the letters between Robbie and Cecilia when he's in prison, in
which they communicate their love by talking about great literary lovers past. Atonement is
like walking into a library and having all the books jump up and down shouting at you to
read some other book. And yes, there are lots of references to libraries in Atonement too.
1.
The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the
sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe
paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss
breakfast and lunch.
The very first sentence of the novel is about Briony writing her play – which is itself a symbol
of the novel. So the first thing we do is to write about writing a novel about writing. It's a
wonder Ian McEwan didn't get so dizzy that he had to stop right there.
Family
On the one hand, family in Atonement is peace and happiness and mom reading the play
you read out loud while hugging you and doing all the voices. On the other hand, family is a
multi-tentacled monster that grabs you by the feet and pulls you down into a boggy pit of
jealousy and neurosis and unpleasantness.
Emily never gets over hating her sister Hermione. Jack Tallis betrays his wife. Everybody
she's related to betrays Cecilia. Families are a mess. But then in the last scene Briony's
happily surrounded by cousins and nieces and distant relations once removed.
1.
Briony knew that if she had travelled two hundred miles to a strange house, bright questions
and jokey asides, and being told in a hundred different ways that she was free to choose,
11 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
would have oppressed her. It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted
was to be left alone.
Briony is talking about her cousins, who have just arrived. They probably do want to be left
alone to some degree, but at the same time they've also just left home because their
parents are divorcing. So in that sense they probably wish that they hadn't been left so
alone.
Sex
There are basically two sex acts in the novel, and they're both really important. The first is
when Robbie and Cecilia have their sweetly scandalous encounter in the library, and the
second is the even more scandalous but not even a little bit sweet assault of Lola by Paul
Marshall. Briony is a witness to both – and misunderstands both completely, to the
detriment of everybody (except Paul).
You could say sex causes a lot of grief in the book. But really it's more that the stories
around sex that Briony (and Lola) only half know are inadequate and messed up. It's not so
much sex as what people think about sex that dooms poor Robbie – and lets Paul get off
scot free.
1.
Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously
self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so
hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them
loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.
We never actually hear Cecilia express sexual desire for Robbie – the library scene is all from
his perspective, not hers. That means the only person we hear her kind-of sort-of lust after
is Paul, who she thinks is so awful that it would be "almost erotic" to marry him. Maybe this
"deliciously self-destructive" impulse is what draws Lola to Paul as well?
Versions of Reality
The different versions of reality here are more like different perspectives, mixed up with
dreams and hopes and fears. Leon's version of reality is one in which everybody is nice and
friendly. Emily lies in her bed and imagines what everybody else is doing throughout the
house. And of course Briony writes a novel which is one version of reality, telling some
things truly and tweaking others. She doesn't put in any hobbits, but she does add a couple
of ghosts.
1.
She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. (1.1.4)
Briony wants to have the world just so… and the version of reality she gives us in the novel is
just so in many ways. The book is very carefully structured in its own right, and we eventually
learn that she's cleaned up the ending too. Even if she hadn't though, fiction is almost
always neater than fact.
Warfare
Often times, war in literature is presented as horrible, but it at least allows for some exciting
plotting. If you're at war, you're doing something. Not so much in Atonement, though. There
aren't any battles here – just a messy retreat and people being shot at. War isn't so much a
12 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.
plot itself as an ugly barrier in the middle of the plot. Briony the novelist, like Briony the
nurse, ends up having to clean up after the war, bandaging up the story she wants to tell
where war has torn it apart. If war gets in the way of people's plans, then maybe it isn't a
story itself but something that ruins other stories.
1.
There were horrors enough, but it was the unexpected detail that threw him and afterward
would not let him go.
Robbie's saying that the parts of war that are memorable or disturbing are the surprises.
Another way to look at this is that the things you haven't imagined or don't expect – the bits
that you haven't dreamed or planned for, are the ones that knock you on your butt.
13 Atonement – A-Level Revision Notes – Quick Notes – English Literature.