Settings & Historical Context of Atonement

English Lit: AQA A Level Atonement - Specification B, topic 1.1.2

Settings and Historical Context of Atonement

Events in Atonement happen in three distinct time periods and several different settings.

The story begins in the hot summer of 1935 in a country estate in Surrey, England owned by the upper-middle class Tallis family.

Almost half of the novel depicts a privileged world of wealth and status which will soon be disrupted by the social upheavals accompanying World War 2 (1939-45).
The world of this section of the novel recalls the country house setting of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), which depicts the grandeur and then the decline of a lifestyle of great privilege in an England ravaged by war and crippled by its economic costs.

Part Two is set in war-torn northern France in the days before the Dunkirk evacuations in May, 1940.
We follow three soldiers as they make their way to the northern coast of France and are provided with numerous examples of the horrors of World War 2.
We see how war affects the soldiers and the innocent civilians who are caught up in it.

Part Three of the novel is set in London in the spring of 1940.
The atmosphere in the city is tense, with its occupants braced for an invasion by the Germans and the return of a retreating British army from the beaches of northern France.
McEwan again depicts the horrors of war by setting the action in a London hospital which is overwhelmed by the wounded returning to England from France. Readers are not spared from the graphic descriptions of the injuries sustained by the soldiers.

The final part of the novel is set 55 years later, in 1999.
It is initially set in London but, in its closing pages, it returns to the country house setting of Part One, with the house now a plush hotel, part of the service sector economy of late twentieth century Britain.