53. Atonement

 

by Sam Juliano

…. Because, in fact, I was too much of a coward to go and see my sister in June, 1940. I never made that journey to Balham. So the scene in which I confess to them is imagined…invented. Any of that could never have happened, because Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on June 1st 1940, the last day of the evacuation and I was never able to put things right with my sister, Cecilia, because she was killed on the 15th of October, 1940, by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains of Balham tube station. So, my sister and Robbie were never able to have the time together they both so longed for and deserved. And which ever since, I’ve always felt I prevented. But, what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that? So in the book I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life. I’d like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion. But a final act of kindness I gave them: their happiness.

–  Briony Tallis (Vanessa Redgrave)

Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement has been justly proclaimed as one of the literary treasures of the new millennium.  Because the 2007 film version, directed by Joe Wright has largely been recipient to the same kind of critical praise, we can safely conclude that this trenchant examination of childhood, love and war in class-laden wartime England is a rarity – a great film made from a great novel.  Prior to this accomplishment one would have go back to Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day and the 1993 film made by Ismael Merchant and James Ivory to find a comparable achievement.  To be sure there have been other instances when the written word and the cinematic image have danced together in harmony, though as with just about everything else success is measured in the eye of the beholder.  For this author John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Graham Greene’s The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, Henry James’ The Heiress, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Charles Dickens’  A Christmas Carol and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were all made into excellent films.  I might even be of a mind to include the likes of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and even Stephen King’s The Shining in a more populist vein on a successful literature-to-film shortlist.  Fans of modern literature could certainly make a case for Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men or Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, and there is a subgenre of “truncated” successful films made from much longer great books.  i.e. Frank Norris’ McTeague (made into Greed),  Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, (made into the the three-part French film of 1934).  When one considers, however, that film is only a little over a hundred years old, the instances where the disparate forms line up are few and far in-between.

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