Imaginary Attonement

Rating: 7/10 (17 December 2007)

Voltaire wrote that history is a pack of tricks that the living play upon the dead. The point of Atonement appears to be that history is a pack of tricks the living play upon themselves because it is more comforting that way. We are shown the newsreel story of Dunkirk as epic of British pluck and endurance, compared with a purportedly real account of Dunkirk as spectacular balls up. In parallel, we see Briony's fictional tidying up of the mess she has made compared with the actual unhappy and unresolvable consequences. Although she knows the truth, she is still trying to persuade herself that her fiction restored something irretrievably lost that it was beyond her power to restore in fact.