By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State
...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.
It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?