Atonement Review (Book, Not Movie).SPOILER WARNING (book & movie)

Yesterday, I spent my last day of spring break finishing up Atonement. Upon finishing the book, only a few hours passed before I insisted we watch the movie (earlier in the day while we were out on errands I had requested my father take me to the movie rental place). The movie was good, but it puzzled me that the writer had decided to mimic the book closely in small insignificant details and left out more major ones, such as the leg in the tree and the Stuka bombings. But the ending revealed something to me that I failed to notice in the book and it forced me to go back and re-read parts of the book. Briony never went to Cecilia's house to atone. She never found out if Robbie had come back to her. In fact, she later discovered that Robbie had never made it back from France because he died from septicaemia. And Cecilia was killed in the bombing of Belham station. Her visit to them was merely the way she wanted to think of it, not what really happened. Briony wrote her own novel entitled Atonement and it was made up of this false reality. So two very important questions popped in my head: How much of the book "actually" happened and how much therefore was made up by Briony for her novel? And did Briony ever in fact atone? First I will address the first two-parted question. Atonement is broken into four parts. The first and last parts were "real" and the middle two parts were Briony's model, her version of the story, sugar-coated and embellished. The second part that described Robbie during the English withdrawal from France was all a part of Briony's novel. In the final part, she refers to Mr. Nettle, which was the name of one of the corporals that was walking with Robbie in part two. It is possible that this Nettle guy never even met Robbie Turner, but was simply a person Briony received war information from for her novel and then re-payed by incorporating him in her novel. Robbie and Cecilia most likely never met for tea, because this was part of Briony's novel. And how would she know that they had met while he was on leave if she never spoke to them since he was taken away except for one letter to Cecilia that never produced a response. Briony just did not want the lovers' last moment together to have been when he was led into a police car, handcuffed. The leg in the tree is another matter of intrigue. I recalled how Briony looked through a window while searching for the twins and saw her mother's leg crossed over her other. I was puzzled as to why so much detail went into the description of this leg, which appeared to be "disembodied". Could this have been the silent subconscious inspiration for the leg in the tree that Robbie looked upon in Briony's novel? And the words "Come back. I'll wait for you. Come back." It is possible that Cecilia never uttered these words to Robbie. How would Briony know what was said by her to him before he was taken away? Or what their letters contained? She NEVER saw them after her crime. Now I will address the second question I proposed. Did Briony ever atone? In my opinion, she did not. Her moment of atonement was when she gathered the courage to seek out Cecilia and apologize and recant legally. But that never happened. It was a figment of her novel. The real Briony was to much of a coward to do this. To atone is to make ammends, and she in fact never did this. Maybe she wanted to later on, but by then it was far too late.