Disclaimer: I do not own Atonement. It is a masterpiece written by Ian McEwan and if you haven't read the book please do. It is definitely my favourite one yet. There are huge spoilers for the whole plot of the book so please don't read this unless you want to spoil it or know what is going to happen. Hope you enjoy it Please review, MP16 x
Chapter One: The chapters of regret
Briony Tallis typed many drafts of her life, imagining the endings she wanted, screwing them up and throwing them over her shoulder each time. There was no escaping the truth even when honesty was not always what the reader wanted to know, and it left the two people by the fountain in an unreachable place. So she had done what was best for her readers and for her metaphorical characters.
All her life Briony had typed the endings, the final full stop on many a life, yet had never fully understood the lives of those closest to her. Building their characters from the knowledge of letters, and memories, Briony had accounted for their lives as best as she could. In a way of self therapy and to try and build her atonement Briony had contemplated the way here sister would have lived. Thinking of her when she had left and now, contemplating her life after June 1st 1940.
She knew she had no backbone to show her readers, or even herself how it would have vividly played out by telling the truthful ending. If she had actually turned from the wedding of Lola and Paul Marshall up to her sister's bedsit, talked to the landlady with the air of exasperation towards others and seen her sister she knew she would have found her differently than she had first wished for. As she had no contact with her sister she calmed herself to try and imagine how she would have acted, reacted and worked on until the bombings that killed her. In Briony's storybook head it was a way of communicating with Cecilia, a way she could have communicated with her sister if she had had a backbone.
So many summers before the final draft of 'Atonement' went to her lawyers to be published after the subsequent deaths of the three offenders Briony sat down to her type writer for another session of therapy and typed upon the page:
The bereavement of Cecilia Tallis
Briony Tallis
She knew these next few pages would have no backbone, and they would have an honest, hopeless ending but for her own sanity, to set straight what she thought she knew, they must be typed. The little she knew of her sister presently did not affect her accuracy on the account of those short months that Cecilia suffered and for her own sake that was the truth for Briony. 'The bereavement of Cecilia Tallis' was the absolute way Cecilia had behaved, and she would not sway from that thought. To do so otherwise would be to admit once again her lack of understanding and would bring up regret for never turning one final time to her sister. Her readers would never read the 'true' months of Cecilia's life, because what was regret worth in a novel? How was regret a novel? Regret was built on having no backbone in life and regret was hopeless.