Love Among the Books

**WARNING – THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE END OF THE BOOK ***

As a long-time fan of both the film and novel of “Atonement,” one of my favorite scenes has always been the library encounter between Robbie and Cecilia. It’s undeniably sexy on the page, and the smolder of Keira Knightley and James McAvoy only makes it more so onscreen. What bibliophile hasn’t entertained the notion of a romantic encounter in a library?

            But re-reading the novel this time around, the library scene needled me – yes, it’s a sexy setting for Cee and Robbie’s coming together, but why does McEwan set their one moment of bliss in a library?

We are told many times throughout the novel that the house is full of large, empty rooms full of “stubborn silence:” “Noise from outside the house was excluded completely, and even homelier indoor sounds were muffled, and sometimes even eliminated somehow” (136). So, there is nothing to suggest that the library is the most private space in the house. From earlier in the novel, we know the ground floor has a parlor and several other rooms, and Robbie must follow Cee “across the hall” to access the library. Perhaps, it is the nearest room, but McEwan never says as much.

Instead, I would like to posit the notion that McEwan places Cee and Robbie’s only true moment of happiness in the library to foreshadow the book’s ending. By placing them in the library, McEwan foreshadows that Robbie and Cee are characters in Briony’s novel (at least in this telling of the story). Robbie and Cee come together amidst shelves of books, just as their final reunion is only possible in Briony’s novel. They are a story, a novel-- just like the books that surround them in the moment that ultimately incites their troubles.

McEwan uses language to suggest this. He describes Cee “as though about to disappear between the books” (124). Later though, Cecilia will quite literally disappear between the books – only a character with her particular “happy” ending as remembered in Briony’s novel. Her very self will be absorbed into a book as the fictional Cee comes to supersede the memory of Briony’s actual sister. She becomes one with the library in this scene and is revealed to be so at the novel’s conclusion.

McEwan takes it a step further when he describes the moment that Cee and Robbie finally surrender to each other: “They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future.” This is, of course, a romantic description of how lost in the present moment Cee and Robbie are. However, it also aptly describes characters in a novel. Only fictional characters can continue to exist beyond the present moment they’re created in, with no ability to possess memories before or extend into a future beyond the ones they’re given by the author.

By placing this iconic, reverberating moment in the library, McEwan creates a mini meta-narrative. The characters are both performing an action, but self-reflexively hinted to be contents of the books that surround them. McEwan expertly uses setting to foreshadow his overarching meta-narrative.