“It was wrong to open people’s letters, but it was right, it was essential, for her to know everything.”

A blossoming love, an indecent letter, a brutal crime. Misconstrued, they set the stage for a tragic transgression—an unforgivable sin—that will haunt Briony Tallis, the remorseful heroine of Ian McEwan’s novel “Atonement,” for the rest of her life.

In the English countryside in 1935, Briony, a 13-year-old aspiring writer, secretly observes the budding romance between Cecilia, her older sister, and Robbie Turner, the intelligent and respectable son of a servant. And although it becomes “essential” for Briony to unearth the meanings and motives behind the young lovers’ actions, she ultimately succeeds only in drawing distorted conclusions about an adult world that she neither fully comprehends nor inhabits.

Briony is quick to jump from one assumption to another as “evidence” accumulates. Upon reading an obscene draft of a love letter written by Robbie and intended for Cecilia, Briony recasts the family’s trustworthy friend as the perverted “maniac,” and when she chances upon the two lovers in the library, she has the “exhilarated notion” that she has just delivered her sister from a brutal assault.

After her 16-year-old cousin is raped, Briony instantly identifies the perpetrator as Robbie, whom she has already judged to be a “thoroughly bad person.” And what ultimately compels Briony to lie about Robbie’s involvement, ensuring his wrongful incarceration, is the irresistible literary appeal of the event. By insisting that she “knows” Robbie as the shadowy figure she witnessed fleeing the scene of the crime, Briony can simultaneously create and partake in “her story, the one that was writing itself around her.”

The novel, then, is Briony’s attempt to atone for the crime she has committed. It is her purgatory and almost—but not quite—her absolution. Set against the carnage and devastation of World War II, McEwan’s masterpiece is a tale of personal estrangement and shattered community, individual guilt and collective suffering, childhood, and war—and the survival of love in the midst of it all.

Narrated by an aged Briony, the novel expertly alternates between different characters’ perspectives, delicately yet incisively, delving into the psyches of the wronged and war-bound Robbie and his faithful Cecilia, of a young impetuous Briony and her repentant older counterpart—the wartime nurse who abandons her intellectual pursuits and undergoes “a stripping away of identity” as penance for her crime.

A lyrical chronicle of the ways in which “guilt [refines] the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime,” “Atonement” is a breathtaking and heartbreaking exploration of the nature and bounds of humanity.

—Staff writer Calina A. Ciobanu can be reached at ciobanu@fas.harvard.edu.

Atonement
By Ian McEwan
Knopf
Out Now