Atonement Study Guide

Ian McEwan was born in 1948 to David and Rose McEwan. Because of his father’s work as a military officer, McEwan grew up living in Asia, Germany, and North Africa. McEwan returned to England to study English at Sussex University. After completing his undergraduate degree, he enrolled in a creative writing master’s program. In 1975, McEwan’s first collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, was released, and was given the Somerset Maugham Award. Since then, McEwan has written prolifically, in genres encompassing film, television, novels, and short stories. Additionally, he has received further honors like the Booker Prize, awarded for his 1998 novel Amsterdam. Atonement, acclaimed as one of his strongest works, was written in 2001. Following Atonement, McEwan has written one libretto and five novels, the most recent of which will be released in September 2014. He has two children from his first marriage to Penny Allen, which ended in an acrimonious divorce. McEwan is now married to Annalena McAfee, a British writer and literary critic.

Atonement’s plot is shadowed by Western Europe’s violent twentieth-century history. At the book’s beginning, World War I is still a relatively recent memory, and the later plot is dominated by World War II. Briony and Cecilia both dedicate themselves to the war effort by working as nurses, and Robbie conscripts in the military to fulfill his prison sentence. Various historical battles shape the plot: Robbie fights to repel the Nazi invasion of France, and dies on June 1, 1940 at Bray-Dunes, during the Dunkirk evacuation. Cecilia dies a few months later during a bombing raid on London’s Balham Underground station (though the novel actually misidentifies the date of this event as September 1940, when it in fact took place in October of that year).

Historical fiction based on World War II has emerged as an exceedingly popular literary genre. Prominent World War II novelizations include straightforward treatments of the conflict, such as James Jones’s 1962 book The Thin Red Line, as well as more humorous or surreal (but just as serious) works such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, published in 1961, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, published in 1973. Atonement also has common ground with widely popular non-fiction books such as 2000’s Flags of Our Fathers, written by James Bradley with Ron Powers. Notably, five years after Atonement’s publication, McEwan addressed allegations that Atonement had failed to credit the influence of the works of Lucilla Andrews, a novelist and a trained nurse whose 1977 autobiography, No Time for Romance, chronicled World War II’s hospital environments in detail.