I've finally got round to reading the book, and haven't seen the film so not sure if it ends the same. I am a bit confused though ..
Did Briony tell her parents in the end? Did Robbie and Cecilia really survive the war? If they did, why didn't they come to her birthday party? And if she DID tell the truth, why was Pierrot there - surely he would have been loyal to Lola?

It is deliberately ambiguous ! If you see the film you get a more categoric ending

Thought it was a cop out

I loved the book but the ending was such a disappointment! I must see the film now .. I think Kiera Knightley is good casting for Cecilia, in terms of the description at least, I hope she lives up to my expectations on screen. I like to hope they did get together in the end but in real life it would be more likely that he died in the war and she could quite easily have died in the bombings.

I've only read the book, keep meaning to get the film out. I personally don't think they did survive the war, I think Briony was giving them a better ending by rewriting history in her account of what happened. We discussed it in our book group and everyone had a different opinion though, that's just mine!

oh
I completely agree with KT14 but didn't think there was any ambiguity about it!

No ambiguity in either the book or the film - Robbie and Cecilia did not survive the war.

I thought it was a rubbish book but I didn't think that the ending was ambiguous - they were both dead.

Do you mean they never even managed to meet up again at Cecilia's lodgings or did they both die after that? I definitely think it is unclear.

The story about Robbie and Cecilia surviving the war is a literary device to prolong the story and tell it as it might have happened. The reader gets much more involved with the characters and is therefore all the more distressed when they die.

There wouldn't have been much of a novel if that bit hadn't been included.

They never managed to meet up at Cecilia's lodgings.

The meet up is all in the author's head in the film (not read the book) as a way of getting over her feeling so guilty for lying about him. So she gives them a happy ending

Agree that there's no ambiguity - they don't survive the war, and Briony wrote the happy version to atone for what she did. My memory is a bit more hazy about the rest - but I seem to remember thinking that she didn't tell her parents or anyone else the truth (sort of no point because Robbie and Cecilia are both dead, so it won't achieve anything). But I can't remember whether she told the truth eventually, or whether/why Pierrot was at the party.

briony created a fantasy situation of a happy ending due to her guilt-atonement

I don't think it is clear in the book that Robbie and Cecelia never met at her lodgings. What is clear is that Briony never made it there - she went to Lola's wedding in Clapham and then chickened out of walking to Balham to see Cecelia. As we're not given a date for Lola's wedding we don't know whether it is possible that Briony could have visited them even if she'd had the courage to do so; they may already have been dead.

At some point in 1940 Robbie dies in France (Dunkirk - May 1940) and Cecelia in the bomb that hit Balham tube station (I think that was towards the end of the year). The book does not say whether there was any point before that when Cecelia and Robbie were together other than the meeting in the tea house. I rather thought they would have been for a bit, but that's my interpretation.

A rather selfish 'atonement' I thought! Briony lands Cecilia & Robbie in a crap place which results in their deaths, has a lovely career herself as a writer and gets a final bestseller by re-writing the misery she caused. So that's all OK then. I think she's only saying sorry on the off-chance that there is a God and she doesn't want to mess up her Judgement Day. The spoilt brat.

<hefts up bosom and purses lips>

Robbie never makes it back to England - he dies in France - and Cecelia dies when she's caught in an underground station that floods when bombed.

Everything from the meeting at the lodgings onwards in Briony's atonement for her childhood crime; she writes them a happy ending but they do not have one, I'm afraid.

i never got to the end.

i gave up because i couldn't be arsed reading about an utterly selfish beeotch of a person, and vapid and stupid into the bargain, like Briony.

For me the whole point of the book is the brilliant, and ambiguous, ending. As summerdresses says, she is commenting on how as a writer of fiction you can make things up the way you would have liked them to have been. It's about the beauty of being a writer.

But I think it's fascinating that we all (me included) desperately want them to have survived and are hugely disappointed that they only have done in Briony's imagination, but would be quite happy if they had done "really" - but that would just be in the author's imagination. I can't quite get my head round that.

Lol Expat - it's all pretty excrutiating, isn't it?

I finished it but hated it; normally I wouldn't have bothered going on until the end but I must have been bookless at the time.

hats off to anyone who finished this self indulgent badly written dross. i hated it

it was a library checkout for me, jane.

actually, briony reminded me of that little brat cartoon character, Lola.

i just truly couldn't be bothered.

I think writing books about writing books is such wank, I really do.
Now, Birdsong, that's a fantastic book about love and wartime.

Birdsong is brilliant.

The book was good and I was glad I read it before I saw the film as the film was v. disappointing.

I hyaven't seen the film and prob won't bother

I quite liked the book but I don't particularly 'get' Ian MCEwan. too many bloody words

I only saw the film. AFAIK they never did meet up again, both died but Briony made up her version if they had of.

I loved the film even though I thought I wouldn't. Loved the library scene.

Lola was married when she was 20 and was raped when she was 15 (she is a couple of years older than Bryony). So that would be 5 years after the opening chapter - 1935/6? The party of Bryony at the end was partly so her playlet was performed 70 years after she wrote it .

I enjoyed the description of the dinner party at the start but a lot of the book was hard to wade through. I do struggle with Iain McEwan's work though.

I didn't much like Birdsong, but the Pat Barker trilogy - that is fabulous.

This has been bugging me, so I reread the last chapter last night. It makes it pretty clear that in 'real life' Briony doesn't go to visit her sister's lodgings because she can't face seeing her 'recently bereaved sister', suggesting that Cecilia has just heard about Robbie's death in France. It also makes it pretty clear (I think) that Robbie and Cecilia never met up after the time in the tearoom, when Briony says 'Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love?'.

It also explains that Briony hasn't told the truth publicly, because she and her publishers would be sued by Lola and her husband if she did. However, she's planning to tell the truth in her book, which won't be published until they're all dead.

What's still ambiguous is how much Briony has told her family, although I think the suggestion is that she hasn't told any of them the truth. With regard to Pierrot, it says in the last chapter that 'It's accepted that they never mention his sister', though it's not clear whether that's because they both hate her or because Pierrot knows that Briony has some sort of problem with her but agrees not to mention her so that he and Briony can still be close.

So there's my take on it, OP - HTH. But of course as others have said, the whole thing's ambiguous really, because it's all still a book, and the whole point of the ending is that authors can create whatever 'truth' they want.

I had to read the ending twice, too. Robbie and Cecelia both die in the war. Robbie dies at Dunkirk and Cee at the tube station in Balham. Briony writes an alternative ending to atone for her part in their deaths.

I have not seen the film though.

Hester - was going to mention Regeneration. If you want a wartime book, that's the one to read. Set in WWI rather than II; based around the real-life meeting of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart hospital - it's just brillaint.

or brilliant

Aww I love atonement I was reading it last year when I met my DH.

From what I can remember thinking at the time was that she made/re-wrote celia/robbie history a bit so at least in her imagination they were together and she could redeem herself.
I'm certain there is a point where she admits that's what she done and that she was lying to the reader, that they were alive and that she never did manage to atone her crime.