‘Atonement’: A Prozac-less catharsis

This Week’s Winner

Willy Liangco finished BS Psychology at UP Diliman and is currently a 4th-year medical student at the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital. He entered med school because he thinks Agent Scully is cool.

He likes reading everything from JD Salinger to detective stories to anything that has superheroes in it. He collects action figures, watches too much X-files, and writes short stories where his friends die. He has absolutely no idea what he wants to be after graduation, and his goal in life is to have a goal.

It used to be that whenever I had the compulsion to swipe my face with a razor blade I would just reread some of my favorite books for comfort or catharsis, such as Nine Stories, Catcher in the Rye, some Bradbury, or heck, even Fear Street (where a character dies by burning or evisceration every two chapters or so) and by the time I get to the middle or the final part, I would be perfectly all right, and once again feel safe shaving with a razor. It is good psychotherapy – it is cheap, accessible, and you are not required to reveal embarrassing details about your life. It is just a matter of finding the right book that expresses the same self-destructive feeling that you have, and self-help books are out of the question.

Perhaps it was the grind of med school or college that necessitated something more poignant, more bitter, more flagellating, or maybe simply because I’ve highlighted Catcher in the Rye to extreme wetness, that I’ve started to pick up books by a guy named Ian Mc Ewan, my new, unlikely, and unwilling psychotherapist. For years I’ve read snippets of his work in bookstores and fought off the urge to buy him, but then I’ve discovered that in terms of sheer ability to whack your head with a hatchet and mix everything up with a meat grinder, there is no one like McEwan. His works don’t just provide you with lancinating, mind-numbing fear that subsides and swishes down the drain, but it stays with you, pulsates, supplants your shallow, real-life angst, and before you know it you take furtive glances behind you and expect something nasty to happen. And the difference with other writers is that you don’t expect to see a monster or a mass murderer – you expect someone you know, like a cousin, or a neighbor, or your mother. With a knife.

In McEwan’s books, the people are vile, self-absorbed, and neurotic, which is exactly the reason why they come out so real. You read his short works about a pornographer becoming inadvertently caught up in his own amoral fantasies, about a millionaire who is having sex with a mannequin, or about a domestic ape using a typewriter, and you don’t feel like you’re in a parallel universe. In McEwan’s world the menace which sometimes takes a preternatural form is but secondary to the tangible wickedness of its very real and very human characters. In his rich, multi-layered sentences there is no apology, and no excuse is made for the untoward behavior of what conventional literature would typecast as the antagonists or the villains – there is no label, and the reader is left to muse over these characters’ motivations and make up their own mind. We see this in the children in The Cement Garden, in the lovers in Amsterdam, in the stalker in Enduring Love.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Atonement. It is described in the blurb and some previews as something about "love waiting at the time of war," or a crime for which someone is "atoning for for the rest of her life." My first reaction was – man, the guy is aging, and has perhaps reached a point when he would relegate all the nastiness and bitterness to the backseat and write something conventional, something more accessible, something "pop." There is nothing wrong with trying something different, but I don’t want my shrink to be in Oprah’s book club.

As it turns out, Atonement is neither mellow nor conventional, and it could very well be the best novel Ian McEwan has written to date. It is extremely satisfying, and after the last page I felt like rubbing my tummy. I felt sated, complete, rewarded. Atonement is classic McEwan – subtle, poetic, at times slow, but it is always with some relish that I read his thick, pregnant paragraphs which are never perfunctory nor purposeless. More than once I had to reread most of the sentences, specially the longer, more restrained ones to understand what was at their core, and it was never without its reward.

In Atonement we are introduced to Briony Tallis, a precocious girl setting up a play for the homecoming of her brother. She is the scriptwriter, director, supposed star, and art director of her own show. I am suddenly reminded of those annoying overachievers back in high school and how we wanted to skewer them. Briony has recruited her cousins to be the actors, giving them an elaborate script with all its verbal acrobatics. I am then reminded of an annoying, pretentious kid who has also erroneously used the thesaurus as a ten-year old child – me. We then meet the two other main players of the story – Briony’s sister Cecilia who should have worn a skirt that doesn’t become transparent when wet, and Robbie Turner, who should have been more careful with his use of the word vagina. The idyllic atmosphere and the pastoral, Dickensian pieces create an ideal setting for respite by the pool, drinking cinematic orange juice and talking pleasantries, and so far the day has only been ruined by minor glitches – Briony walking out in frustration during a rehearsal, her cousins whining in their difficulty to adjust with the Tallises, and Cecilia and Robbie’s secret, unresolved, yet palpable tension making them avoid each other. So far nothing very important is happening, until that incident by the fountain.

In Briony’s head, and in what she would later rationalize as a result of sisterly concern, she transforms the scene into something more than what it really is. I understand her, because I also used to have a hyperactive imagination, like most kids I know. Every single person was perceived as having an ulterior motive, every attempt at friendship a deception, every simple event having a much deeper connotation. It was what my real-life psychiatrist had pointed out 15 years ago – a childish desire to witness something grand, to participate in something intriguing and taboo, so that one could profess his own vindication, and be thanked, and be a part of the adult universe. At this point, McEwan turns into one of those authors that suddenly talk to you directly while you’re reading: Remember what you thought when your high school teacher hugged your female friend? Or what about what you assumed your therapist was really after while she was prescribing lithium and spewing those theories? It was the tendency of the impressionable, childish mind to hyper-dramatize, and hence feel self-important.

By the end of the day Briony accuses Robbie of sexual assault, she bears false witness, she commits a crime, and we want to slit her throat. But Briony has such a strong conviction that she doesn’t think she has sinned. At this point there is no penance required, no self-flagellation to be imposed, because in Briony’s head she is the heroine, and it is only in the journey through adulthood that we see how she goes about realizing her folly.

Going through a stringent nursing school is Briony’s first step at absolution, as she sluices bedpans and converses with limbless and nose-less war casualties. Robbie participates in the British retreat to Dunkirk, while Cecilia is a full-time nurse. For a while I was a little flustered at the Robbie-Cecilia correspondence – all of a sudden this becomes an "I’ll wait for you to come back from the war" story. I was late to realize that this was merely a context to illustrate the magnitude of Briony’s sins – that in the face of the death and suffering of the war, everything seems miniscule compared to her crime. The bloody arm stumps, the near-death experiences, the extreme hunger – these only serve to, ironically, magnify Briony’s crime.

Briony strives for forgiveness through writing, but she, like the readers, is forced to stare at the downside of her chosen form of penance: She is the writer, she is God, and no one is above her. She who wields the pen will never be forgiven, because in the act of writing there is no one, no higher authority to grant forgiveness. She could only create self-punishment, which is never enough. At the heart of this novel is the nature of absolution – it is elusive, it does not come cheap, and it is pointless when there is no one around to forgive you.

Like a true McEwan we are transitorily led to a comfort zone, believing that Robbie and Cecilia successfully, obligatorily walk off to the sunset and everyone is forgiven, until we are slammed in the final chapter with some perception-contorting device. We begin questioning everything that we have read. We begin reexamining what we think McEwan meant. It is not a cheap twist, it is not a shallow gimmick, rather it is the very skewed axis of the story – showing us that we could meander and introspect and journey and create epics and flagellate ourselves, but atonement is never grasped easily. In our own setting, we could say sorry and confess to a Catholic priest and go to jail and unencumber ourselves of sins past and tell ourselves that all is forgiven, but rarely can we truly achieve the peace that comes with absolution.

It was with some guilt, then, that I was able to identify more with the character of Briony than with either Cecilia or Robbie. As much as I wanted to hate her because outside her tiny, pocket universe she was wrong, I rooted for her because I understood her, and then felt slightly guilty. Then recovered. Then felt guilty again. This is what a good book should be – something that doesn’t merely entertain, but something that turns your morals backwards and inside out that you begin to reexamine yourself, and introspect, and discover more questions. Read this book. You need this. I foresee that Atonement is something I would always reread for entertainment, comfort, or catharsis, and that McEwan will continue to be my unwilling therapist for a long, wicked time.