On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Rob...
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
作者简介
· · · · · ·
Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award...
Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.
What excited her about her achievement was its design, the pure geometry and the defining uncertainty which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility. The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of charact...
2020-10-18 16:09
What excited her about her achievement was its design, the pure geometry and the defining uncertainty which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility. The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer’s morning, the sensations of a child standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow’s flight over a pool of water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. She had read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation was being worked in human nature itself, and that only fiction, a new kind of fiction, could capture the essence of the change. To enter a mind and show it at work, or being worked on, and to do this within a symmetrical design—this would be an artistic triumph.
Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion? Yes, indeed. And having done so, might she obscure the fact by concocting a slight, barely clever fiction and satisfy her vanity by sending it off to a magazine? The interminable pages about light and stone and water, a narrative split between three different points of view, the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen—none of this could conceal her cowardice. Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream—three streams!—of consciousness? The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella—and was necessary to it. What was she to do now? It was not the backbone of a story that she lacked. It was backbone.
There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I’ve made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham and enraged and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love. The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. I’ve been standing at the window, feeling waves of tiredness beat the remaining strength from my body. The floor seems to be undulating beneath my feet. I’ve been watching the first gray light bring into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake. And the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away, into the whiteness. I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible. But now I must sleep.
The intricacies were lost to him, the urgency had died. Briony would change her evidence, she would rewrite the past so that the guilty became the innocent. But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the stateme...
2020-10-18 16:03
The intricacies were lost to him, the urgency had died. Briony would change her evidence, she would rewrite the past so that the guilty became the innocent. But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts. The witnesses were guilty too. All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die? Down here in the cellar we’ll keep quiet about it. We’ll sleep it off, Briony. His sugared almond tasted of her name which seemed so quaintly improbable that he wondered if he had remembered it correctly. Cecilia’s too. Had he always taken for granted the strangeness of these names? Even this question was hard to hold for long. He had so much unfinished business here in France that it seemed to him sensible to delay his departure for England, even though his bags were packed, his strange, heavy bags. No one would see them if he left them here and went back. Invisible baggage. He must go back and get the boy from the tree. He had done it before. He had gone back where no one else was and found the boys under a tree and carried Pierrot on his shoulders and Jackson in his arms, across the park. So heavy! He was in love, with Cecilia, with the twins, with success and the dawn and its curious glowing mist. And what a reception party! Now he was used to such things, a roadside commonplace, but back then, before the coarsening and general numbness, when it was a novelty and when everything was new, he felt it sharply. He cared when she ran out across the gravel and spoke to him by the open police car door. Oh, when I was in love with you,/Then I was clean and brave. So he would go back the way he had come, walk back through the reverses of all they had achieved, across the drained and dreary marshes, past the fierce sergeant on the bridge, through the bombed-up village, and along the ribbon road that lay across the miles of undulating farmland, watching for the track on the left on the edge of the village, opposite the shoe shop, and two miles on, go over the barbed-wire fence and through the woods and fields to an overnight stop at the brothers’ farm, and next day, in yellow morning light, on the swing of a compass needle, hurry through that glorious country of little valleys and streams and swarming bees, and take the rising footpath to the sad cottage by the railway. And the tree. Gather up from the mud the pieces of burned, striped cloth, the shreds of his pajamas, then bring him down, the poor pale boy, and make a decent burial. A nice-looking kid. Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence. And where was Mace to help with the digging? That brave bear, Corporal Mace. Here was more unfinished business and another reason why he could not leave. He must find Mace. But first he must cover the miles again, and go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plow, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths. For one can assume too much sometimes, in fits of conceited self-blame. She might say no—the Flemish for no. You tried to help us. You couldn’t carry us across the field. You carried the twins, but not us, no. No, you are not guilty. No. There was a whisper, and he felt the breath of it on his burning face. “Too much noise, guv’nor.”
Briony leaned back against a wall and stared unseeingly down the nursery’s length. It was a temptation for her to be magical and dramatic, and to regard what she had witnessed as a tableau mounted for her alone, a special moral for her wrapped in a mystery. But she knew very well that if she had not stood when she did, the scene would still have happened, for it was not about her at all. Only ...
2020-10-18 15:42
Briony leaned back against a wall and stared unseeingly down the nursery’s length. It was a temptation for her to be magical and dramatic, and to regard what she had witnessed as a tableau mounted for her alone, a special moral for her wrapped in a mystery. But she knew very well that if she had not stood when she did, the scene would still have happened, for it was not about her at all. Only chance had brought her to the window. This was not a fairy tale, this was the real, the adult world in which frogs did not address princesses, and the only messages were the ones that people sent. It was also a temptation to run to Cecilia’s room and demand an explanation. Briony resisted because she wanted to chase in solitude the faint thrill of possibility she had felt before, the elusive excitement at a prospect she was coming close to defining, at least emotionally. The definition would refine itself over the years. She was to concede that she may have attributed more deliberation than was feasible to her thirteen-year-old self. At the time there may have been no precise form of words; in fact, she may have experienced nothing more than impatience to begin writing again. As she stood in the nursery waiting for her cousins’ return she sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself. She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols, unfurling at the nib’s end. She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. Six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way through a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European tradition of folktales, through drama with simple moral intent, to arrive at an impartial psychological realism which she had discovered for herself, one special morning during a heat wave in 1935. She would be well aware of the extent of her self-mythologizing, and she gave her account a self-mocking, or mock-heroic tone. Her fiction was known for its amorality, and like all authors pressed by a repeated question, she felt obliged to produce a story line, a plot of her development that contained the moment when she became recognizably herself. She knew that it was not correct to refer to her dramas in the plural, that her mockery distanced her from the earnest, reflective child, and that it was not the long-ago morning she was recalling so much as her subsequent accounts of it. It was possible that the contemplation of a crooked finger, the unbearable idea of other minds and the superiority of stories over plays were thoughts she had had on other days. She also knew that whatever actually happened drew its significance from her published work and would not have been remembered without it. However, she could not betray herself completely; there could be no doubt that some kind of revelation occurred. When the young girl went back to the window and looked down, the damp patch on the gravel had evaporated. Now there was nothing left of the dumb show by the fountain beyond what survived in memory, in three separate and overlapping memories. The truth had become as ghostly as invention. She could begin now, setting it down as she had seen it, meeting the challenge by refusing to condemn her sister’s shocking near-nakedness, in daylight, right by the house. Then the scene could be recast, through Cecilia’s eyes, and then Robbie’s. But now was not the time to begin. Briony’s sense of obligation, as well as her instinct for order, was powerful; she must complete what she had initiated, there was a rehearsal in progress, Leon was on his way, the household was expecting a performance tonight. She should go down once more to the laundry to see whether the trials of Jackson were at an end. The writing could wait until she was free.
I’m going mad, I told myself. Let me not be mad. But I couldn’t really believe it. Perhaps I was nothing more than a victim of modern diagnostics; in another century it would have been said of me that I was old and therefore losing my mind. What else would I expect? I’m only dying then, I’m fading into unknowing. However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve alwa...
2020-02-28 21:04
I’m going mad, I told myself. Let me not be mad. But I couldn’t really believe it. Perhaps I was nothing more than a victim of modern diagnostics; in another century it would have been said of me that I was old and therefore losing my mind. What else would I expect? I’m only dying then, I’m fading into unknowing.However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve always been. Hard to explain that to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we’re not a separate tribe.
Ironic ending of Lola:
But there was also something comic about her—or was I clutching at straws? She was heavy on the makeup, quite garish around the mouth and liberal with the smoothing cream and powder. I’ve always been a puritan in this, so I count myself an unreliable witness. I thought there was a touch of the stage villain here—the gaunt figure, the black coat, the lurid lips. A cigarette holder, a lapdog tucked under one arm and she could have been Cruella De Vil. I always thought the high life, the cigarettes, would see her off. Even in our fifties I thought that. But at eighty she has a voracious, knowing look. She was always the superior older girl, one step ahead of me. But in that final important matter, I will be ahead of her, while she’ll live on to be a hundred. I will not be able to publish in my lifetime.He laughed politely, though he must have thought me profoundly stupid. It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
Prologue of Briony's first play:
For that fortuitous girl the sweet day dawned
To wed her gorgeous prince. But be warned,
Because Arabella almost learned too late,
That before we love, we must cogitate!You may only libel yourself and the dead. The Marshalls have been active about the courts since the late forties, defending their good names with a most expensive ferocity. They could ruin a publishing house with ease from their current accounts. One might almost think they had something to hide. Think, yes, but not write. The obvious suggestions have been made—displace, transmute, dissemble. Bring down the fogs of the imagination! What are novelists for? Go just so far as is necessary, set up camp inches beyond the reach, the fingertips of the law. But no one knows these precise distances until a judgment is handed down. To be safe, one would have to be bland and obscure.There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I’ve made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions.how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible.
“Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do...
2014-11-15 14:02
“Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained.
What have you been judging from?
Remember the country and the age in which we live.
Remember that we are English: that we are Christians.
Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.
Does our education prepare us for such atrocities?
Do our laws connive at them?
Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?
Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”
They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, when she burrowed in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, and made her heard thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon. But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harm...
2018-03-19 16:34
There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, when she burrowed in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, and made her heard thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon.
But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel....Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but on one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.引自第4页
乖女孩的悲哀
Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out that she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moments she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself...Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune...引自第4页
But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure wa...
2017-08-28 23:20
But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have?引自 One
What excited her about her achievement was its design, the pure geometry and the defining uncertainty which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility. The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of charact...
2020-10-18 16:09
What excited her about her achievement was its design, the pure geometry and the defining uncertainty which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility. The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer’s morning, the sensations of a child standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow’s flight over a pool of water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. She had read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation was being worked in human nature itself, and that only fiction, a new kind of fiction, could capture the essence of the change. To enter a mind and show it at work, or being worked on, and to do this within a symmetrical design—this would be an artistic triumph.
Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion? Yes, indeed. And having done so, might she obscure the fact by concocting a slight, barely clever fiction and satisfy her vanity by sending it off to a magazine? The interminable pages about light and stone and water, a narrative split between three different points of view, the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen—none of this could conceal her cowardice. Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream—three streams!—of consciousness? The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella—and was necessary to it. What was she to do now? It was not the backbone of a story that she lacked. It was backbone.
There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I’ve made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham and enraged and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love. The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. I’ve been standing at the window, feeling waves of tiredness beat the remaining strength from my body. The floor seems to be undulating beneath my feet. I’ve been watching the first gray light bring into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake. And the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away, into the whiteness. I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible. But now I must sleep.
The intricacies were lost to him, the urgency had died. Briony would change her evidence, she would rewrite the past so that the guilty became the innocent. But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the stateme...
2020-10-18 16:03
The intricacies were lost to him, the urgency had died. Briony would change her evidence, she would rewrite the past so that the guilty became the innocent. But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts. The witnesses were guilty too. All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die? Down here in the cellar we’ll keep quiet about it. We’ll sleep it off, Briony. His sugared almond tasted of her name which seemed so quaintly improbable that he wondered if he had remembered it correctly. Cecilia’s too. Had he always taken for granted the strangeness of these names? Even this question was hard to hold for long. He had so much unfinished business here in France that it seemed to him sensible to delay his departure for England, even though his bags were packed, his strange, heavy bags. No one would see them if he left them here and went back. Invisible baggage. He must go back and get the boy from the tree. He had done it before. He had gone back where no one else was and found the boys under a tree and carried Pierrot on his shoulders and Jackson in his arms, across the park. So heavy! He was in love, with Cecilia, with the twins, with success and the dawn and its curious glowing mist. And what a reception party! Now he was used to such things, a roadside commonplace, but back then, before the coarsening and general numbness, when it was a novelty and when everything was new, he felt it sharply. He cared when she ran out across the gravel and spoke to him by the open police car door. Oh, when I was in love with you,/Then I was clean and brave. So he would go back the way he had come, walk back through the reverses of all they had achieved, across the drained and dreary marshes, past the fierce sergeant on the bridge, through the bombed-up village, and along the ribbon road that lay across the miles of undulating farmland, watching for the track on the left on the edge of the village, opposite the shoe shop, and two miles on, go over the barbed-wire fence and through the woods and fields to an overnight stop at the brothers’ farm, and next day, in yellow morning light, on the swing of a compass needle, hurry through that glorious country of little valleys and streams and swarming bees, and take the rising footpath to the sad cottage by the railway. And the tree. Gather up from the mud the pieces of burned, striped cloth, the shreds of his pajamas, then bring him down, the poor pale boy, and make a decent burial. A nice-looking kid. Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence. And where was Mace to help with the digging? That brave bear, Corporal Mace. Here was more unfinished business and another reason why he could not leave. He must find Mace. But first he must cover the miles again, and go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plow, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths. For one can assume too much sometimes, in fits of conceited self-blame. She might say no—the Flemish for no. You tried to help us. You couldn’t carry us across the field. You carried the twins, but not us, no. No, you are not guilty. No. There was a whisper, and he felt the breath of it on his burning face. “Too much noise, guv’nor.”
Briony leaned back against a wall and stared unseeingly down the nursery’s length. It was a temptation for her to be magical and dramatic, and to regard what she had witnessed as a tableau mounted for her alone, a special moral for her wrapped in a mystery. But she knew very well that if she had not stood when she did, the scene would still have happened, for it was not about her at all. Only ...
2020-10-18 15:42
Briony leaned back against a wall and stared unseeingly down the nursery’s length. It was a temptation for her to be magical and dramatic, and to regard what she had witnessed as a tableau mounted for her alone, a special moral for her wrapped in a mystery. But she knew very well that if she had not stood when she did, the scene would still have happened, for it was not about her at all. Only chance had brought her to the window. This was not a fairy tale, this was the real, the adult world in which frogs did not address princesses, and the only messages were the ones that people sent. It was also a temptation to run to Cecilia’s room and demand an explanation. Briony resisted because she wanted to chase in solitude the faint thrill of possibility she had felt before, the elusive excitement at a prospect she was coming close to defining, at least emotionally. The definition would refine itself over the years. She was to concede that she may have attributed more deliberation than was feasible to her thirteen-year-old self. At the time there may have been no precise form of words; in fact, she may have experienced nothing more than impatience to begin writing again. As she stood in the nursery waiting for her cousins’ return she sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself. She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols, unfurling at the nib’s end. She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. Six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way through a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European tradition of folktales, through drama with simple moral intent, to arrive at an impartial psychological realism which she had discovered for herself, one special morning during a heat wave in 1935. She would be well aware of the extent of her self-mythologizing, and she gave her account a self-mocking, or mock-heroic tone. Her fiction was known for its amorality, and like all authors pressed by a repeated question, she felt obliged to produce a story line, a plot of her development that contained the moment when she became recognizably herself. She knew that it was not correct to refer to her dramas in the plural, that her mockery distanced her from the earnest, reflective child, and that it was not the long-ago morning she was recalling so much as her subsequent accounts of it. It was possible that the contemplation of a crooked finger, the unbearable idea of other minds and the superiority of stories over plays were thoughts she had had on other days. She also knew that whatever actually happened drew its significance from her published work and would not have been remembered without it. However, she could not betray herself completely; there could be no doubt that some kind of revelation occurred. When the young girl went back to the window and looked down, the damp patch on the gravel had evaporated. Now there was nothing left of the dumb show by the fountain beyond what survived in memory, in three separate and overlapping memories. The truth had become as ghostly as invention. She could begin now, setting it down as she had seen it, meeting the challenge by refusing to condemn her sister’s shocking near-nakedness, in daylight, right by the house. Then the scene could be recast, through Cecilia’s eyes, and then Robbie’s. But now was not the time to begin. Briony’s sense of obligation, as well as her instinct for order, was powerful; she must complete what she had initiated, there was a rehearsal in progress, Leon was on his way, the household was expecting a performance tonight. She should go down once more to the laundry to see whether the trials of Jackson were at an end. The writing could wait until she was free.
I’m going mad, I told myself. Let me not be mad. But I couldn’t really believe it. Perhaps I was nothing more than a victim of modern diagnostics; in another century it would have been said of me that I was old and therefore losing my mind. What else would I expect? I’m only dying then, I’m fading into unknowing. However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve alwa...
2020-02-28 21:04
I’m going mad, I told myself. Let me not be mad. But I couldn’t really believe it. Perhaps I was nothing more than a victim of modern diagnostics; in another century it would have been said of me that I was old and therefore losing my mind. What else would I expect? I’m only dying then, I’m fading into unknowing.However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve always been. Hard to explain that to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we’re not a separate tribe.
Ironic ending of Lola:
But there was also something comic about her—or was I clutching at straws? She was heavy on the makeup, quite garish around the mouth and liberal with the smoothing cream and powder. I’ve always been a puritan in this, so I count myself an unreliable witness. I thought there was a touch of the stage villain here—the gaunt figure, the black coat, the lurid lips. A cigarette holder, a lapdog tucked under one arm and she could have been Cruella De Vil. I always thought the high life, the cigarettes, would see her off. Even in our fifties I thought that. But at eighty she has a voracious, knowing look. She was always the superior older girl, one step ahead of me. But in that final important matter, I will be ahead of her, while she’ll live on to be a hundred. I will not be able to publish in my lifetime.He laughed politely, though he must have thought me profoundly stupid. It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
Prologue of Briony's first play:
For that fortuitous girl the sweet day dawned
To wed her gorgeous prince. But be warned,
Because Arabella almost learned too late,
That before we love, we must cogitate!You may only libel yourself and the dead. The Marshalls have been active about the courts since the late forties, defending their good names with a most expensive ferocity. They could ruin a publishing house with ease from their current accounts. One might almost think they had something to hide. Think, yes, but not write. The obvious suggestions have been made—displace, transmute, dissemble. Bring down the fogs of the imagination! What are novelists for? Go just so far as is necessary, set up camp inches beyond the reach, the fingertips of the law. But no one knows these precise distances until a judgment is handed down. To be safe, one would have to be bland and obscure.There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I’ve made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions.how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible.
上海译文
上海译文出版社2008版
Evanescence
上海译文出版社2007版
1 有用 Ashley 2012-10-05
感谢有声书的发展，听完一本书~~
1 有用 cuddlebunny 2015-04-19
Love the plot. Love Ian McEwan's writing style
1 有用 Emanuelle 2014-02-09
being a advanced literature major, you know it's a masterpiece when you see it, this Is it! in a modern confessional style. so smooth.
0 有用 梅文女王殿下 2010-08-20
2010.8.20 本来想睡觉，后来还是想一鼓作气看完算了。虽然早就知道结局，看到最后一页仍是伤心不已，眼泪婆娑。电影改编算是很成功——除了结尾，我觉得电影里没有的书中结尾那个小孩演戏的一幕很好，虽然匠气太深，但是充满震撼，并且tie up the ends。中间战争的场面不是我的茶，看得有气无力的。整个小说缺乏杰作的气势，但是不乏一个当下优秀小说家的style & taste. 文笔可圈可点，... 2010.8.20 本来想睡觉，后来还是想一鼓作气看完算了。虽然早就知道结局，看到最后一页仍是伤心不已，眼泪婆娑。电影改编算是很成功——除了结尾，我觉得电影里没有的书中结尾那个小孩演戏的一幕很好，虽然匠气太深，但是充满震撼，并且tie up the ends。中间战争的场面不是我的茶，看得有气无力的。整个小说缺乏杰作的气势，但是不乏一个当下优秀小说家的style & taste. 文笔可圈可点，虽然有的地方有点too mouthful. 我很喜欢这个主题，相当有深度。感觉写作上应该是把很多写作笔记段落piece together, 最终定下的选角度算是一个非常clever idea. 作家的自我剖析应该是写作圈的人比较爱看的东西，在写作上也是手法多变，有点像行内人写给行内人把玩的小品。受众应该在作家(or writers-to-be)圈。 (展开)
9 有用 Nowhere 2014-07-01
從各方面來說都無可挑剔，可問題就是可能太精緻、太完美了。好像作者在說「你看我寫得這麼屌，厲害吧，還不快來膜拜」。
0 有用 #ArtfulDodger# 2021-01-12
因为学生毕业论文要写这本所以又翻出来重看了一遍。这次读完似乎明白了为什么麦老师也会写他也有对小说丧失信心的时候。当小说可以毫不费力地滑进每个角色，从技术上逼近每个角色的内心真实的时候，小说的真实之剩下了纸面上的表演。任何想坚持小说意义的人发现这点的时候都会焦虑吧。读到最后一个部分完全不会去想这是小说家Briony最后的挣扎，只会等着看麦老师如何表演。
0 有用 Y.R.Bin 2021-01-08
看到最后有一种无力感，可能是因为人物成功地传达出那种迟暮之感，或者是因为罪恶成功地被时间洗刷，只剩下平淡的叙述。就在你想当然地这样认为时，结局出现了反转，竟让人错愕到说不出话。
0 有用 辛辣拿铁 2020-12-14
高中时读过的书 storyline 忘得七七八八 所以今天重温了一遍电影[机智]
0 有用 白夜 2020-10-26
“falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance”
0 有用 照叶 2020-10-18
朗读者：Jill Tanner；五星。这是一个由误解和狂想导致的悲剧，也是一篇针对写作的反思。我们究竟在多大程度上可以去自由诠释自身的所见所闻？可以根据“小说的艺术”去尽情虚构事件的前因后果？如果作者能够随意创作或者诠释，谁又能赐他们以救赎？从有声书的角度来说，本书比较“慢热”；但是朗读者非常出色，无论是人物对话还是意识流都处理得准确而丰富；第二遍听的时候便能很好地把握其人物、结构和叙事节奏。