The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 11: Back to school with Ian McEwan's Atonement

An advance warning that this episode features spoilers for Atonement.

September is here, which means it’s the start of another academic year. So get out your brand new stationery and settle down as we head back to school… no polyester uniforms or exams though, so don’t worry. This week, we’re taking a look at Booker-nominated books that feature on school syllabuses in the UK and particularly, we’re diving into Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001, the novel explores how a young girl’s imagination runs riot with far-reaching and devastating consequences.

Atonement by Ian McEwan
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Saturday by Ian McEwan
Spies by Michael Frayn
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Waterland by Graham Swift
Love and Summer by William Trevor
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
Oxygen by Andrew Miller
number9dream by David Mitchell
Hotel World by Ali Smith
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller
The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert
Black Dogs by Ian McEwan
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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Speaker 1:

I’ll be quite honest with you, I’m torn between breaking your neck here and taking you and throwing you down the stairs. Do you have any idea what it’s like in jail? Of course you don’t. Tell me, did it give you pleasure to think of me inside?

Speaker 2:

No.

Speaker 1:

But you did nothing about it?

Speaker 2:

No.

Speaker 1:

Do you think I assaulted your cousin?

Speaker 2:

No.

Speaker 1:

Did you think it then?

Speaker 2:

Yes. Yes and no.

Speaker 1:

And what’s made you so certain now?

Speaker 2:

Growing up.

Speaker 1:

Growing up?

Speaker 2:

I was 13.

Speaker 1:

How old do you have to be to know the difference between right and wrong?

James Walton:

Hello and welcome to The Booker Prize podcast with me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

And me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:

And what you just heard there was James McAvoy, Romola Garai and Keira Knightly in the 2007 film Atonement directed by Joe Wright. The film got seven Oscar nominations including for best picture. In the end, in fact, it only won for best original score, although that was great too. If all goes to plan, we’ll return to the film later. But this being the Booker Prize Podcast, we’ll be concentrating mainly on the Ian McEwan novel on which the film was based. Atonement, shortlisted for the 2001 prize, is by far McEwan’s biggest selling book, especially, but not only, after the film came out. And for many people, including me, it’s his best, even though he won the Booker in 1998 with Amsterdam. He himself has described the success of the book as a complete one-off with about six million copies sold now. Which if you’re not familiar with sales figures for literary novels, translates as absolutely astonishingly loads.

Jo Hamya:

And the reason we’re coming to Atonement now is because it’s September. And so this is the first and occasional series looking at Booker books that feature on UK school syllabuses, which Atonement has done since 2005, only four years after it was published. Other Booker nominated novels on school syllabuses, incidentally, some of which will be getting the same treatment here as the school year goes on.

James Walton:

Jo, any that … We’ve got the list here. Any that you are surprised to see or not surprised to see or?

Jo Hamya:

I mean, I don’t know if it’s a question of surprised or not surprised. There are a lot that I wish I could have studied at A-level. Because I think the texts I had for A-level, they were fine, but they were rather conventional.

James Walton:

Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding and A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. I mean, pretty good, but-

Jo Hamya:

Like A Month in a Country by J.L. Carr, which I guess is actually a Booker novel.

James Walton:

It is. Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

But dry, I didn’t like it. And I wish I could have done something like Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist would’ve been so much fun, would’ve loved to be able to do The Handmaid’s Tale. I feel like that is ripe for a load of 16 year olds to pick over. And maybe I could have gotten onto Ian McEwan sooner if I’d read Saturday at A-level.

James Walton:

Okay, let’s have a look at them. I’m rather surprised to see, although very, very pleased, to see a Spies by Michael Frayn. I mean, not Booker’s most famous books or indeed one of his but it’s a lovely book about two boys growing up in the Second World War, clearly autobiographical. “For the duration,” is the bit I remember about it. “This place is closed for the duration.” And I mentioned that to someone who grew up in the war and they said, “Gosh, that’s exactly … We saw the word ‘the duration’ all the time.” So I like that. Big fan of Brick Lane by Monica Ali, if you can believe the central love affair. That would be my main question for the A-level students. Oh, and Waterland by Graham Swift, which I hope we’re going to do an episode on anyway but it is an absolutely terrific book I think. You’d expect some of them [inaudible] William Trevor’s Love and Summer. And what else is a little bit of a surprise? Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English, maybe not so surprising. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, that’s-

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know if I find that surprising.

James Walton:

No, neither do I.

Jo Hamya:

I mean, he’s a Nobel winner now. It’s sort of a given that he’s [inaudible]-

James Walton:

Yeah. Sorry, to be honest, I’ve moved on from surprising by then.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

Yes. Do let us know if there’s any of those you especially like us to do. As I say, we’re starting with Ian McEwan’s Atonement shortlisted, as I say, in 2001, when it lost out to a True History of the Kelly Gang. Other historical novels [inaudible] by Peter Carey, narrated by Ned Kelly, Australian Outlaw. And a book famous, among other things, for having no commas, also famous for being the one Peter Carey book that I really like. There were those quite well-known authors on the list. Andrew Miller with Oxygen, David Mitchell with Number9Dream. And Ali Smith, Hotel World. Although all of those would perhaps go on to write better novels, most notably Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, shortlisted in 2004. Although I’m also a big fan of Andrew Miller’s 2018 novel Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, which didn’t trouble the Booker lists at all in fact. The other book on the list was Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room, like Atonement, partly about the Second World War, with particular reference to the long-term psychological effect in Germany. We thought we might start by just saying a little bit about Ian McEwan himself.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, McEwan in my eyes belongs to a generation of male writers who really hit it off in the eighties, and who indeed he was friends with, like Martin Amis, Julian Barnes. McEwan was included on the 1983 Granta list of 20 best young British novelists. He started out more as a short story writer. A lot of them were seen as quite grotesque and dark and psychologically stirring.

James Walton:

Well, I thought he … Because he got the name, which is a cliche [inaudible]-

Jo Hamya:

Ian Macabre.

James Walton:

Ian Macabre. And I think I did see one interview where he looked back on those short stories with something, not exactly embarrassment, but just glad that he didn’t do them anymore, I think. And his first two novels were quite grim as well.

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know. I was listening to an interview with him on This Cultural Life on the BBC where I think he was still pretty much maintaining … I mean, this interview was from just a few months ago. He was still maintaining that those stories were written with a degree of sympathy. But probably started out as a short story writer in any case because he was one of the first, if not the first, student of the now Famous UEA writers’ programme.

James Walton:

That’s Right. Yeah. University of East Anglia for any Americans or anybody else listening.

Jo Hamya:

Which was then headed by Malcolm Bradbury and he was its lone student and apparently he says he just got endless encouragement from Bradbury. There was no workshopping, there was no discussion. He would just reel off short stories and do comp lit for a year, which sounds glorious to me. It sounds like something you don’t really get to do anymore, at least not without all the workshopping. So he’s been shortlisted for Atonement but you may also know him by other Booker novels such as Amsterdam or Saturday, more generally from his most recent book Lessons, which is semi-autobiographical. Or other titles such as Black Dogs from 1992 or On Chesil Beach from 2007.

James Walton: Yeah, I mean, he has written a lot and a lot of different books, I suppose, like most authors, some better than others. But always … It’s a pretty safe bet [inaudible] you always know he’s not going to let you down, and Ian McEwan book, is it? It’s never going to be terrible.

Jo Hamya:

No. Well, I mean, this is the first year I’ve had reading his books and I’ve gotten really into them. I keep telling everyone that I’m having a … instead of having a hot girl summer, I’m having an Ian McEwan summer, which I don’t know whether you take that as a … I would take that as an upgrade. They’re really good books.

James Walton:

They really are. And I would maintain the term the best of the lot.

Jo Hamya:

It is. And it feels almost cliche to say it because it’s the best known and certainly the most acclaimed but there is a reason for that. It’s just an astonishingly beautiful, I don’t know, almost cinematic book.

James Walton:

Shall I say a word about the plot for those who haven’t read it?

Jo Hamya:

Yes, you should.

James Walton:

I should say there will be spoiler alerts in this because we’re, as I say, well, if you’re doing it at school, we’re rather hoping that you might have read it. And also it’s so well known and the film’s so well known that we thought we might as well just say what happens, which is as follows. It’s in four parts. It’s starting in 1935 with a Briony Tallis who’s a 13-year-old girl putting on a play that she’s written. She’s a budding writer. Her cousins have arrived from the north, the distant north, as it’s called, because their parents have broken up. Her brother Leon is also returning home with a friend called Paul Marshall who’s a chocolate millionaire. But while Briony is coming to terms with all that while getting a play ready, which eventually she calls off, I think partly because, well, it all slightly falls apart. But she notices from her window, Robbie Turner, who is a friend of the family.

Jo Hamya:

He’s their gardener [inaudible].

James Walton:

Yeah, yeah. He is their gardener and he’s the son of the housekeeper. And he’s been funded through Cambridge by their dad.

Jo Hamya:

By the Tallis’ dad, you should say.

James Walton:

Yes, sorry. Yes. By the Tallis’ dad, I should say. And he got a first at Cambridge. And he’s grown up with Cecilia, who also went to Cambridge and didn’t do quite so well, Cecilia being Briony’s older sister. The first bit is all set on a really worn, very hot summer’s day during a heatwave. And quite early on in that summer’s day during the heatwave, Robbie and Cecilia realised that they’ve fallen for each other or perhaps loved each other all along. Briony sees Robbie and Cecilia by a fountain. They’ve broken a vase and some pieces have gone into it and Cecilia strips off to her underwear and goes in to get it. And already Briony is trying to put together a story because she doesn’t really know what’s going on. She doesn’t know about the broken vase. She thinks-

Jo Hamya:

Well she thinks that Cecilia may be in some sort of danger. She perceives some sort of threat in the way that Robbie’s standing or … She’s a very fanciful child.

James Walton:

Indeed. And this is absolutely made a lot worse, according to Briony, when Robbie writes a letter saying his feelings, that he says that he’s fallen for her. And then for his own amusement, he does one version of the letter where he says, “I want to do things to your … ” Well, I’m afraid the word … Well, the C word.

Jo Hamya:

See you next Tuesday.

James Walton:

Yes. Okay. But then he writes the proper letter without the rude bit, gives the letter to Briony, realises he’s given her the wrong one with the rude bit in, which Briony reads before she delivers it and therefore decides that he’s a maniac.

Jo Hamya:

A sex maniac.

James Walton:

A sex maniac without really obviously knowing quite what a sex maniac is or indeed quite what the C word is. But she decides he’s a maniac. A theory that is rather corroborated because Cecilia actually finds the letter. She doesn’t object, does she? It unlocks her in a way, as he puts it. And the two have sex in the library. But unfortunately, Briony walks in and sees them and decides that Robbie is attacking her sister. Then twins from up north go missing and everyone goes out to see them … to try and find them around the grounds of this enormous country house where they all are. And Briony finds the older cousin, the oldest cousin, Lola, who’s 15, basically being raped, and she decides that she saw Robbie doing it, and she sticks to her story

Jo Hamya:

Decides is a key point of that.

James Walton:

Yeah. She’s given chances to recant but it fits in so clearly with what she thinks is going on. And Robbie is arrested, and as we later learn, jailed, and that’s the end of part one. Part two cuts to Dunkirk where Robbie has been released from jail on the grounds that he’ll become an infantryman and an astonishingly vivid picture of retreat to Dunkirk, at the end of which Robbie makes it there. And we last hear him say, “Wake me up at seven.” He’s in a bad way but the boats are on the way. Part three, Briony is doing penance because by now she realises, not only that it wasn’t Robbie, but that it actually was Paul Marshall, this chocolate millionaire guy. And Briony hears that Paul Marshall, the rapist, is actually marrying the rapee, Lola, goes to their wedding and then visits her sister, which is the clip we heard right at the beginning there. That Cecilia, who’s cut herself off from the family, Briony goes there to try and sort things out.

Robbie is there. As I say, not in a particularly forgiving mood, but she agrees to do the best she can to make things right, at least to tell their parents that it wasn’t him. And if possible, to get it … to put it right legally, although that’s not clear. But then here comes the big spoiler, the big twist. So at that point, the novel is signed BT 1999. So it’s a book written by Briony Tallis. And the big twist is that in the final part, Briony, who is now 77 and suffering from vascular dementia reveals that actually that was the novel she wrote to try and put things right or to try and make things at least a bit better. Because actually, Robbie died at Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed in a bomb attack on a Balham Tube Station in 1940 as well. So they never got together. There was never a … It was never resolved, nothing was ever sorted. So I suppose, first question, Jo, what did you make of all that then?

Jo Hamya:

Oh my God, it’s my favourite book this year that I’ve read. It’s absolutely exquisite in every single way, on every single level. The prose is flawless, the gradual revelations of characters’ motives are so subtly done and the imagery is exquisite. And I could actually just rave about this book for a full week, nevermind an hour. In my eyes, it is actually almost a flawless novel. Actually, I’ll cancel out the almost. It is a flawless novel.

James Walton:

And you don’t mind that it turns out not to have been true?

Jo Hamya:

Oh my God, it’s even better. Are you joking?

James Walton:

McEwan said when he sent it to his editor, he included an apologetic letter explaining that because of that trick at the end, and it was only a novel, and it’s a book about how whether writing a novel can put things right, meant that it was a book for other writers. And he anticipated modest sales. And he says that, “My editor phoned back and said, ‘You’re so wrong. It’s about the Second World War, a country house and a love affair. It’s going to be huge.’ So what do I know about publishing?” McEwan went on. “There are three things that people in Britain fall over for. If you want to get rich, you have to have a country house, a love affair, some barbed wire and some howitzers.” And of course, this book’s got them all, but also that big twist, that it’s a novel about what novels do to reality, which is fundamentally to distort it. Now, you’ll know this, of course, Jo, but there’s a debate that writers always have with themselves, which perhaps in over simple terms is that fiction is supposed to be a portrait of life.

But it has the big problem that fiction is essentially orderly. Things make sense. One thing leads to another in a basic cause and effect. Characters are coherent, as you say, you can see their motives and there’s a clear shape. Life on the other hand is none of those. So even Briony, in her younger days … The whole of the book, she’s rewriting exactly what she saw and what she did. And when she’s in the hospital, she decides [inaudible] that same problem she faces, she says, “The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. She no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the 19th century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. The modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than the modern composer could a Mozart symphony.”

And yet, of course, when it comes to it, she writes all of the characters and plots, the Mozart Symphony version. And I think that’s the same with McEwan. I mean, you could criticise his books, I think, for being almost too competent. Someone once said of him, in his careful, excessively managed universes in which everything is made to fit together, the reader is offered many of the true pleasures of fiction, but sometimes [inaudible] with its truest difficulties. And it’s not here, it’s not in Atonement. McEwan himself, his next book, Saturday, there’s a main character who’s a surgeon, Henry Perowne, who is against fiction, because he says, “Moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life. Questions of misinterpretation are not often resolved, nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade.” And yet, of course, the whole of Atonement is based on the fact the questions of misinterpretation are either resolved or remain pressingly unresolved.

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know. I don’t know if I agree with that. Because this impulse to wrap something neatly in a bow or to narrative-ize it, it isn’t just a function of the text itself. And I don’t think it’s just a function of literature. It’s a deeply human thing to do, so a lot of characters in the book do it too. And I was trying to find this while you were speaking. Briony’s mother, Mrs. Tallis, constructing a whole narrative around Lola in her mind, about how Lola reminds her of her own sister, who’s selfish, who wants glamorous things, who wants to run off and never take responsibility. It’s just this … How old is Lola at that point? She’s 15?

James Walton:

15.

Jo Hamya:

A 15-year-old girl, her niece, that she’s creating a whole familial trial in her mind around for absolutely no reason other than, on a separate occasion, her sister has had a divorce and dumped her with her children, but the children aren’t at fault. So Emily’s an example of this idea of-

James Walton:

Emily being Mrs. Tallis.

Jo Hamya:

Emily Tallis and Mrs. Tallis is this example of the actually I think quite chaotic impulse, natural impulse, that most people, and indeed most characters in this book, have to, yes, wrap things in a bow. But then the chaos that springs out of that is, as in this book, is very unwieldy. I mean, Lola convinces herself, whether for … Well, I mean, it’s implied that it’s for money by the end of the book. Lola convinces herself to marry her rapist and that … just because in her mind, that narrative makes sense, but actually what she ends up is trapped in a marriage that’s based on trauma. So even in the, I guess … I’m half agreeing with you and half disagreeing with you.

Even in the minutiae of this book, you do have that instinct to, I don’t know, I guess to gather everything neatly into a plausible story, just on an individual level, to make sense of your own life, but the end result is always fairly horrific and nothing like the story you were telling yourself in your head. I mean, yes, Atonement is a very well constructed novel but I don’t think it loses sight of that very human mess. We’ve been talking a lot about the form of the story but I suppose we should actually talk about the story itself. Because there’s a lot of meat on the bones. So I suppose one of the core questions this book asks is, in fact, it’s titular concept that the idea of atonement. Do you think Briony manages to set things right by writing this book in memory of Robbie and Celia?

James Walton:

And giving them the happy ending that life didn’t give them?

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

No, and I don’t think she-

Jo Hamya:

Me neither.

James Walton:

And I don’t think she does either.

Jo Hamya:

On a different level, because there’s this very interesting thing that happens when she puts aside childish things and she goes and trains as a nurse, and the reason that she does so is because her sister once did. Well, I suppose there are two questions wrapped up in there, really, now that I think about it. There’s the atonement Briony wants to perform towards Robbie and Cecilia but then also there’s the atonement that she wants to bestow upon herself for all the guilt she feels. So feasibly the novel makes her feel better, even though it doesn’t fix anything. And is that good enough? But then more tangible things she does, like helping wounded soldiers in hospitals, do you think that exonerates her in any sort of way?

James Walton:

A bit and I think McEwan does too. The book refers to Briony’s crime. And McEwan himself has said he doesn’t see it as a crime. And she basically did something terrible when she was a 13-year-old girl who thought she was more mature than she was. And she made a dreadful mistake and it had unbelievably hideous consequences. But what else is she going to do? Is what she did about the best you can do in those dreadful, dreadful circumstances?

Jo Hamya:

I suppose there’s also the fact that it’s not just her crime, it’s also Paul Marshall’s for raping Lola. It’s Lola’s for not speaking up once she’d realised that it wasn’t Robbie. I mean, the book clearly says that Lola was attacked while it was dark, so she doesn’t see her attacker, but she does at some point come to realise who it is and she never comes forward. So this idea of it being solely Briony’s crime is a skewed one as well.

James Walton:

Yeah, no, I do feel sorry for Briony. And actually, this is a slightly different point, but that idea that you … things are terrible, so you rewrite them to put them right, I think also explains to some extent why Dunkirk plays such a big part. Because I certainly grew up, and maybe even you did, the idea that Dunkirk was an astonishing triumph.

Jo Hamya:

Triumph. Yeah.

James Walton:

And hurrah for the heroism of the small boats and everything. But Dunkirk was an unbelievably terrible route.

Jo Hamya:

It was a catastrophe.

James Walton:

It was a cataclysmic defeat that got rewritten by history to make it more palatable.

Jo Hamya:

Just Churchill making speeches.

James Walton:

And McEwan restores all its absolute horror. Soon as we’ve put this forward as a help to students, among other things, we’re hoping people of all ages and backgrounds and so on are listening, but you’ve looked into some questions that seem to come up when this is a set text.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. A lot of the questions actually tend to quite interestingly treat … they refer to Atonement as a crime novel, which I don’t know how far I would agree with that, but they seem to be referring to the idea of Briony committing a crime and her culpability. The questions also tend to focus on class, which is valid, I think far more valid than the crime question.

James Walton:

Yeah. Because McEwan doesn’t see it as a crime novel though. And I’m reminded, there’s a good interview with him where when he’s first put on the A-level syllabus, it wasn’t … it was for Enduring Love I think.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

And he said he found one of his son’s essays lying about, which started off, “In this passage, McEwan says so-and-so … ” And he said, “I don’t want him to put McEwan. I wanted him to put Dad.” But then he said he gave him some top tips as to what exactly was going on, and the guy got really low … his kid got really low marks. So what does the author know? Because he definitely doesn’t see this as a crime novel. He doesn’t see Briony’s thing as a crime. He sees it as a mistake, a really sad and regrettable mistake that a 13-year-old girl, particularly an imaginative, budding novelist 13-year-old girl, would do. The class is definitely there, isn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

Let’s talk about class and love, James.

James Walton:

Yeah. Class and love. Okay.

Jo Hamya:

There is actually quite an interesting link between the two in my mind where Briony is concerned, she’s a girl who grows up in this bucolic English countryside manor, and all she does is spend time reading and writing stories about knights in mediaeval England. Even when the C word comes up and she’s trying to make sense of it, I mean, she makes sense of it in a … She’s a 13-year-old girl and she makes sense of it in the most upper middle class way I’ve ever heard. She says, “She tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts and yet it danced through them obscenely, a typographical demon juggling vague, insinuating anagrams, an uncle and a nut, the Latin for next, an old English king attempting to turn back the tide.”

James Walton:

Can you get onto the bit … Isn’t there a bit about the figures under a crucifix or something later on?

Jo Hamya:

Oh my God, “Three figures huddling at the foot of a cross, that the word had been written by a man confessing to an image in his mind, confiding a lonely preoccupation, disgusted her profoundly.” My point is that later on in the novel, around this same time, it’s revealed that Briony has actually made moves on Robbie, which he rejected roundly because she was a child. So there’s a scene that’s recalled, I think by Robbie. Yes, by Robbie. In which Briony throws herself into a river, well, as a way of showing Robbie that she loves him-

James Walton:

She wants him to rescue her.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. She wants him to rescue her. And so she throws herself into a river and he realises that she might die and puts his life at risk, jumping in after her to save her. And when he drags her out, well, Briony says to him, “Do you know why I wanted you to save me?” And Robbie says, “No.” “Isn’t it obvious?” “No, it isn’t.” “Because I love you.”

“She,” being Briony, “said it bravely, with chin upraised, and she blinked rapidly as she spoke, dazzled bythe momentous truth she had revealed. He restrained an impulse to laugh. He was the object of a schoolgirl crush. ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’ ‘I mean what everybody else means when they say it. I love you.’ This time, the words were on a pathetic rising note. He realised that he should resist the temptation to mock but it was difficult. He said, ‘You love me, so you threw yourself in the river?’ ‘I wanted to know if you’d save me.’ ‘And now you know I’d risk my life for yours but that doesn’t mean I love you.’ She drew herself up a little. ‘I want to thank you for saving my life. I’ll be eternally grateful to you.’ Lines, surely from one of her books, one she had read lately or one she had written.” And I think there are a lot of things wound into those two scenes when you put them side by side.

In the first place, there’s this idea of a 13-year-old girl who has all the time in the world to construct an idea of love out of books or writing them or plays. Whereas if you place that next to Robbie’s idea of love for Celia, for this girl who’s inaccessible to him by means of … because he’s not born into enough wealth to really access her, he has a far more tortured and protracted time of it. And then I find it really interesting that Briony’s idea of getting Robbie to profess his love for her, should it exist, is essentially through an act of service or servitude, considering that he’s already her family’s gardener. It’s just a little bit too on the nose. I don’t know if Briony’s even aware of this as she’s doing it, she’s probably not because she’s a child. But to her, the only way that Robbie could show her love is by risking his life, or at least discomforting himself immensely. And then for her to say, “Thank you very much.”

James Walton:

Yes. Well, obviously that’s from stories, that the heroine gets rescued from drowning by the … It also I think then throws back to the opening scene in the fountain where Cecilia goes in and I think Briony half sees that as Robbie saving her from drowning or that that’s part of what happens when love goes on.

Jo Hamya:

But actually … Sorry to cut across you.

James Walton:

No, go on.

Jo Hamya:

But this whole idea of it being Celia who goes into the fountain, Celia who strips herself, there’s this quite a protracted moment of prose in which she’s taking her clothes off. And yes, this is partly because it arouses Robbie, but I guess also because it inverts their roles a little bit. The fact that it’s Celia discomforting herself, going into the water, looking for the piece of the vase that Robbie broke. Suddenly she’s the person who’s, I mean, quite literally lower as she’s seeking for the porcelain in the water.

James Walton:

The other thing is-

Jo Hamya:

Maybe a more valid start for love in their case than what Briony demonstrated.

James Walton:

The other point I might add about class is even when they’re checking out … just to make sure the police are checking out to make sure it’s not … that it is Robbie, the only other suspect is the handyman’s son, isn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

Never crosses anyone’s mind that it’s Paul Marshall.

Jo Hamya:

The chocolate millionaire.

James Walton:

And then, another class thing is that Robbie, when he gets to Dunkirk-

Jo Hamya:

Speaks French.

James Walton:

And he’s suddenly the posh one. Even though he is a private, because he can only be a private because he’s been in prison, but he’s leading two corporals towards the beaches, and they’re struck by his poshness. So then suddenly he’s the posh one.

Jo Hamya:

It’s so cruel.

James Walton:

Yeah, it is.

Jo Hamya:

It really is.

James Walton:

I could ask you this straight out, Jo, this fits in. This idea that the most sophisticated readers actually just want to be told a story. Was there any part of you that thought, “Ugh,” when it turned out to all be like a tricky … when Briony says, actually, none of this actually happened. It wasn’t quite like that. Is there any part of you that thinks, oh, Ian, you didn’t have to do that? You could have just ended it where it ended on that happy ending of Robbie and them back together. Or are you way too sophisticated for that. I’m always a bit like that. The novels where that idea that you want to know what really happened, I know is naive, and I know that none of it really happened because it’s all fiction. But there is part of you that wants to know what really happened. And that-

Jo Hamya:

What do you mean by what really happened?

James Walton:

Well, Briony refers to that at one point, right at the end, I think, slightly … I don’t know if it’s sneeringly or not. I know there is always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask what really happened. And she says, “the answer is simple. The lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a single type script of my final draught, then my spontaneous sister and her medical prince survived to love.” And she says, “No, what really happens is what really happens in the book.”

But we know it’s not what really happened in life, except that what happens in life is in the book, I know it’s all quite complicated, but I do … With tricksy books, which serve up several endings, it might’ve been this, it might’ve been this, it might’ve been this, there’s part of me that thinks, yeah, that’s brilliant because that’s how fiction and life work and everything. There’s part of me that just thinks, just tell me what really happened really. Well, we promised at the start that we’d get back to the film and so shall we? You’re a big fan, aren’t you?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. We shall, oh my God, I love this film. Actually, I’m going to say that less desperately.

James Walton:

You can say it as desperately as you like.

Jo Hamya:

We shall, it does happen to be one of my favourite films. But I don’t think I’m biassed when I say that it is possibly one of the most faithful interpretations of a novel I’ve seen on screen in my life.

James Walton:

Astonishingly so, isn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

I mean, I actually could not see a teacher objecting to a student watching this film as an aid to reading the book. Actually, I had probably seen the film something like … I’m Not exaggerating when I say 30 to 40 times before I ever read the novel. And that’s actually probably underselling it. And I was quite shocked at how well they paired together. And it’s in really unexpected ways too. So a fact that I actually really love, I’m just going to drop this in, because it’s one of my favourite things about this. The first part that takes place in the Tallis household where this idea of a hazy summer day where the Tallis’ wealth is abundant and anything might happen, and there’s a gauze of fiction that you don’t know about covering the proceedings, which will be broken by the end of the film. One of the ways that’s conveyed by Joe Wright is that he put a quite specifically Dior stocking over the camera lens to film through for that entire sequence.

James Walton:

Very interesting.

Jo Hamya:

How opulent is that?

James Walton:

Also, I think one of the ways in which it’s faithful is that it does the same thing as the book does, which is it’s almost a pastiche, while also being [inaudible]. So it’s almost a pastiche of a country house filmed the first bit. It was most famous for the … I think when it came out, as I remember from the reviews, there’s an astonishing … What’s that shot where you could just go sweeping out?

Jo Hamya:

It’s like a drone shot.

James Walton:

Yeah, go right over the top and showing the beaches of Dunkirk. But at the end of that, you don’t think, “Wow, the beaches at Dunkirk.” You think, “Wow, what an amazing aerial shot.” And also particularly at the end, so it has the same twist at the end, Vanessa Redgrave turns up as the elderly Briony and says, “I did the right thing. I’ve given them their happiness. I gave them their happiness.” And then we cut to them being happy. So Robbie and Cecilia, after the war, arrive at this house and they’re on the beach with the waves crashing. They’re swinging each other by the arms.

Jo Hamya:

That footage looks like it’s been shot on a Bolex as well.

James Walton:

And the thing is, I don’t think many people in real life do that. Loads and loads of people in films do. And yet it’s still affecting. So it’s a slightly corny filmy thing and yet it still really, really works. Just like, as in the book, some of the writing, little bit over the top, little bit … but it still really, really worked and it’s equally deliberate.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I think perhaps some of the things that you’d miss if … I remember being a student, I know that if I could, I’d watch the film instead of read the book just to save myself some time. But some of … There are things that the film misses. I think it does a good job of conveying a young Briony’s desire to write and her fancifulness but it doesn’t fully get to the extent of how indulgent and wide-ranging she is with fictionalising aspects of her life. So for example, there’s a whole paragraph that we spoke about of her trying to make sense of the C word through references to crucifixes or Latin or whatever. In the film that is just conveyed through, it’s actually probably why the score got an Oscar out of anything. The sound of a typewriter going through her mind as she’s reading, but it doesn’t really … you don’t really see it from the kind of upper middle class thought or chain of thought that runs through her head. All you see is the shock on her face. So finer points like that that a film can’t really convey.

James Walton:

And also some things there’s just not time for. So the retreat to Dunkirk is quite … All the details that McEwan researched in the Imperial War Museum, the astonishing details, quite a lot of them get lost.

Jo Hamya:

All right, James, we’ve had an influx of requests for help for the Booker Clinic.

James Walton:

Oh, yes. The Booker Clinic seems to be taking off. Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. Which I think is down to the fact that I put out a far less civil call to action across my socials than Booker usually does.

James Walton:

Yes, I saw that. It could have been, I think, summarised by, “Get your effing fingers out everybody.” But it sounds if they have actually.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, sometimes you just have to take a firm hand with people. And by people, I don’t mean you, dear listeners. Oh, I should say, before all of this though, that a lot of your requests for help or advice are going apparently to our Instagram inbox. And they should be going to our email address at [email protected]. So send them there instead, please. And we’ll read through them. So Anon says, “I currently live and work far away from old friends and family. I love where I am but I still miss them and often feel that there is two of me. One is in a new country doing exciting things. The other is still back home with her family, living her old life. Help?”

James Walton:

I don’t know if this is help exactly. It’s one of those helps where it proves you’re not alone and that other people have shared this experience. Because the book that immediately springs to mind is Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009. And it’s about Eilis Lacey, who’s a young Irish woman who moves to New York in search of a better life and finds it. But at the same time, she can’t help missing her folks back in Ireland. And essentially that Booker Clinic is the plot of Brooklyn. And I hope that makes you realise that … It doesn’t give you the answer, it just shows that that is a difficult situation that has been faced and is faced by Eilis Lacey, and very touchingly and honestly, in Brooklyn. So I think there’ll be some consolation in the recognition of that situation. I hope so. And good luck.

Jo Hamya:

That was actually going to be my recommendation as well. And actually though, there’s a really great film adaptation with Saoirse Ronan actually, who also-

James Walton:

Who also plays the young Briony Tallis. It’s all fitting together.

Jo Hamya:

It’s all coming together.

James Walton:

And not only that [inaudible] a screenplay by a Booker, long-listed author.

Jo Hamya:

Nick Hornby.

James Walton:

Indeed.

Jo Hamya:

So that rounds us off really nicely. If you have any dilemmas that you’d like us to help you with through the medium of Booker literature, once again, please do send them in to [email protected].

James Walton:

And don’t forget, also, if you … any books on your school syllabus you’d like us to cover, then do send them in. But this podcast, being what it is, ruthlessly they have to have been at least long listed for the Booker Prize. And I think that’s it for today is it, Jo?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, that’s it. Good luck with your A-levels guys.

James Walton:

Oh, good luck with your A-levels. And if it helps, which it might not, when I, at my great age, have anxiety dreams now, they’re still all about A-levels, so good luck.

Jo Hamya:

Really?

James Walton:

Yes, they really are.

Jo Hamya:

Do you know what? The best advice my teachers ever gave me was just study consistently, and the night before, just do something really, really fun. And the morning of, just relax, don’t do all the cramming and the revision. Just chill out in the roughly about 30 hours prior to the exam, let it Go.

James Walton:

That’s your advice from your Auntie Jo there kids.

Jo Hamya:

That’s it for this week. If you haven’t already followed the show, please do and remember to leave a rating.

James Walton:

You can find us at thebookerprizes.com and on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack, @thebookerprizes.

Jo Hamya:

We’d love to know how you get on with your studies for Atonement or what you thought of Atonement more generally.

James Walton:

Until next time, goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Bye.

James Walton:

The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Meolo and the executive producer is Jon Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht production for the Booker Prizes.