In which I am clearly an under-performing eng lit grad.
Now before we begin I must say this: I am not one of those literary snobs that thinks all film adaptations are awful, pale-in-comparison versions of their novel counterparts. Books are read through one individual's filter, and films can never, by their very nature, achieve that. The trick is to separate your own perception of the story away, file it a place in your imagination that is solely yours, and enjoy someone else's version instead. Note the differences, approach from a different angle, learn all the things you missed.
Works such as Lord of the Rings are perfect for this. The novels are filled with so much extrapolation, so many hidden details and lengthy sub-plots, they are impossible to film as a whole. So Jackson didn't. Instead, he created his own version of the original story: twisted it in a way in which it was still recognisable, but not the exact copy, or any attempt to be. It stands on it's own, as it is, and it's a beautiful triumph of film work.
This is all very well for writers like Tolkien. Tolkien is a narrator, pure and simple. His prose is adequate, but not exactly mind-blowing. He creates the world, he describes it, he tells the story. It works.
McEwan, though. He's a different matter. McEwan is one of those writers whose prose reads like poetry. The narrator is part of the story, even in third person. He weaves and sews a story together with these words that absolutely mesmerise. It's gorgeous, and naturally hard to translate onto a screen.
I felt that Atonement, film-wise, was actually doing really well with this. There's this gorgeous overlaying typewriter sound continuously, hinting at Briony's fabrication. Some of the cinematography, especially of the war, is simply breathtaking, and I love how they didn't translate the French into English, instead letting the actors tell the story in other ways.
However, initially I found the ending incredibly frustrating. In the book, even as an elderly woman, Briony does not get her Atonement. She cannot publish her book, finally confront her wrongdoing, because as she begins her decent into Vascular Dementia she knows Lola will out live her, and litigation prevents publication. In the film, this detail is ignored, and the final scene shows Briony giving a television interview, summing up the final words of the novel, about nobody wanting truth, about hope being more important.
I suspect this was done purely for simplicity: in the novel the last part is written in first person narrative, and therefore to play out on screen correctly Briony had to be talking to someone. But it infuriated me. The point, the whole point, was for Briony to not get her redemption. The truth never outs, the fantasy will always survive, and she, herself, after all the involved parties are dead, will exist only as her own fabrication of her childhood foolishness. Cecilia and Robbie die tragically in actuality, but in her retelling the lovers live on to finally get their deserved happiness.
How dare they spin the novels main point away like that? The whole idea is, as Briony says on her final page, that the writer is God. That she tells the story, she sets the terms, and there is no higher power to admonish, forgive or condone.
Except maybe that's the point. The writer of a novel tells the story, has the final say, is the only one who knows the truth of the world they created*. A screen-writer, a director, an actor, is not afforded such luxury. They can only tell part of the story: they leave it to countless others to fill in the blanks, adjust the telling and co-operate until it becomes something legible. In novel form, Briony cannot achieve atonement, and in doing so her final lie, the fact that Cecilia and Robbie had no happy ending, lives on. She is the truth-holder, and so the truth does with her. But in the film medium, Briony is alive when her mistake is brought to light. And so in life, she admits her lie to the interviewer and her final fantasy is exposed. The world at large knows there was no fairytale for her sister, there is nothing to hide behind, what the reader wants the reader cannot have.** But what Briony can have, what we all can have, is that final atonement.
And so maybe the point is this: as we expose more of ourselves in tiny, modern and 21st Century ways, we can't hide the truth of who we are. Or rather, perhaps we become less of a fantasy of ourselves. We are no longer our own picture drawn up in our head. There is no thirteen-year-old in the western world with the innocence 1930's Briony had, no room for that kind of misunderstanding, or for the kind of self-speculation she indulges in. We give little pieces of ourselves away in more and more ways: through twittering, facebooking, writing pretentious blogs at midnight that no-one will be particularly interested in reading. We no longer have a hold on how the world views us, on how we hold ourselves. We are split in so many places, so far and wide, that the truths of our being are no longer under our control. We cannot project who we want to be, like Briony imagining herself to have transcended into adulthood via one account of voyeurism, or Cecilia changing her mind about her dress several times, needing to present the right picture to Robbie. Now-a-days, change your outfit however many times you want: he's still gonna see that drunk photo of you with 20 chins on Facebook.
We are not who we say we are, even to ourselves: that has always been true. It's just getting harder to hide it. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe in being exposed, on having that author of our own life privilege taken from us, we can reach out own Atonements. Not as literary poetic, maybe, but probably a whole lot more satisfying in real life.
*of course that excludes my absolute favourite literary theory, Barthes' “Death of the Author”, but it still works in this context.
** I suppose you could argue that the final part of the book, the 1st person narrative, would have been published alongside Briony's novel, and therefore the truth would come to light anyway. But it still stands that Briony would have not had her final chance at redemption in her own lifetime, and therefore is still a victim to her own story, started so long ago.