Discussion Questions on Atonement

These are the questions Julie found for us on www.readinggroupguides.com:

1.  What sort of social and cultural setting does the Tallis house create for the novel?  What emotions and impulses are being acted on or repressed by its inhabitants? (For example, on page 46, Cecilia lights a cigarette as she descends the staircase, "knowing that she would not have dared had her father been home.")  

2.  A passion for order, a lively imagination, and a desire for attention seem to be Briony's strongest traits.  Why does the scene she witnesses at the fountain change her whole perspective on writing?  What is the significance of the passage in which she realises she needs to work from the idea that "other people are as real as you"? 

(On page 36, during a break in the rehearsals of her play, Briony wonders: "was everyone else really as alive as she was?  For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was?"  Then on page 40, Briony thinks to herself that "[in her stories] 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 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 needed to have.")

3.  What kind of person is Emily Tallis?  Who, if anyone, is the moral authority in this family?

4.  What symbolic role does Uncle Clem's precious vase play in the novel?  Is it significant that the vase is glued together by Cecilia, and broken finally during the war by Betty as she readies the house to accept evacuees?

5.  Why is Robbie's uncensored letter so offensive within the social context in which it is read?  (It is read first by Briony, then Cecilia, then later Briony - without Cecelia's permission - shows it to the police, her brother Leon and her mother.  It is also read by Paul Marshall).  Why is Cecilia not offended by it?  

6.  The scene in the library (page 135 - 138) is one of the most provocative and moving descriptions of sex in recent fiction. (Do you agree?  Have you read anything more 'provocative' recently?).  How does the fact that it is narrated from Robbie's point of view affect how the reader feels about what happens to him shortly afterwards?  Is it understandable that Briony, looking on, perceives this act of love as an act of violence?

7.  Why does Briony stick to her story with unwavering committment?  At what point does she develop the empathy to realise what she has done to Cecilia and Robbie?

8.  How does Leon, with his life of 'agreeable nullity' (page 103), compare with Robbie in terms of honor, intelligence and ambition?  What are the ironies inherent in the comparative situations of the three young men present - Leon, Paul Marshall, and Robbie?

9.  Lola has a critical role in the story's plot.  What are her motivations?  Why does Briony decide not to confront Lola and Paul Marshall at their wedding five years later?

10.  What aspects of Atonement make it so powerful as a war novel?  What details heighten the emotional impact in the scenes of the Dunkirk retreat and Briony's experience at the military hospital?

11.  When Robbie, Mace and Nettle reach the beach at Dunkirk, they intervene in an attack on an RAF man who has become a scapegoat for the soldiers' sense of betrayal and rage.  How does this act of group violence relate to the moral problems that war creates for soldiers, and the events Robbie feels guilty about as he falls asleep at Bray Dunes?  (On page 262, as he falls asleep, Robbie feels guilt for walking past the dismembered leg of a small boy and not giving the boy's remains a proper burial.  He also starts to feel guilty for not saving a Flemish woman and her child, though he sort of talks himself out of that guilt because he did try to save them.)

12. Is Briony's novel effective, in her own conscience, as an act of atonement?  Does the completed novel compel the reader to forgive her?

There are more questions at www. readinggroupguides.com/guides3/atonement1.asp

Atonement - Ian McEwan

This book has been described as "a symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness [which] provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose."

On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment's flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia's childhood friend. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives - together with her precocious literary gifts - brings about a crime that will change all of their lives. Atonement follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

I can't wait to find out if this book lives up to its amazing hype. Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 13 January. See you then!

¿Abuela loca, no?

So, did you like the book?

The start of the story, set in Miami during Ana and Carlos' childhood, I found very unpleasant to read and a real struggle to get through.  

I don't know about you, but I personally did not relish reading about a family of refugees who had chosen to take a chance on a new life in America, but who were not making the most of their chance.  I thought the characters should just get over themselves.  I thought they should stop blaming each other for their unhappiness.  

The only thing that kept me reading was the fact that I had chosen this book from the CAE Catalogue, and everyone was going through this unpleasant reading experience because of me!

Repeatedly, Ana blames her grandmother Dolores for being the poison at the heart of the family.  However, while reading that first section I did not feel any sympathy for Ana or for Consuelo (especially when she got out of Dolores' way to allow her to beat Ana more thoroughly).  At that point I didn't believe that the family's unhappiness was more Dolores' fault than anyone else's.

But once I got past that section, and got to reading more about what happened before they left Cuba, I began to understand the reasons why the family were so unhappy in Miami.  

Consuelo's Lost Love

If you didn't make it all the way through the book (Natalia I'm talking to you) you might not have caught up with the fact that when she was young and astoundingly beautiful, Consuelo fell in love with a rich music student by the name of Daniel.  Daniel was the love of Consuelo's life, and when Dolores violently broke them up, incidentally ruining Daniel's music career by damaging the tendons in his hands, Consuelo decided to forget Daniel.  Instead, she turned to Pedro, a man of her own social class and approved of by Dolores.  However, Consuelo never could  forget Daniel.  She was never happy with Pedro, even in the early years of their marriage when they lived in La Habana before the revolution.

Daniel is the man Ana sees around the place in Miami, the good looking stranger who she wonders about.  (**spoiler alert**) He is, in fact, her father.  At the end of the book, Ana tries to describe what it must have been like for her mother to meet up again with the love of her life after fifteen years apart; to make love to him and become pregnant, and yet decide not to leave her husband for him.  Ana says that Consuelo had no choice but to stay with Pedro because of  Daniel's dangerous life fighting the counter-revolution.

Throughout the book, Ana describes her mother as having 'inertia' and paints her as quite a helpless person, yet it was Consuelo's decision to leave Cuba in the first place, against the revolution and knowing that they would leave at great personal cost.  So she couldn't have been completely helpless, could she?  Do you think Ana makes excuses for her mother?

An Immigrant Story

In the book notes, this story is described as an important 'immigrant story'.  By the end of the book I could understand it best in those terms.   I thought to myself that it was important to tell the stories, even the sad hopeless stories, of what happens when a country is wracked by revolution and its people are given the choice to either stay and suffer or leave and suffer somewhere else.  I appreciated that it was not the purpose of this book to say whether the revolution was right or wrong; it just showed what happened to one family in its aftermath.

Did you think of this most as a story about immigrants?  Or about child abuse?  or mothering? or a story about a political situation?

Do you think it is important to read the unhappy stories as well as the happy ones?

The Rooms in My Mother's House - Olga Lorenzo

Driven from Cuba after the revolution, three generations of women - Dolores, Consuelo and Ana - settle in an old farmhouse near Miami's Little Havana.  With Consuelo's gambling husband, and son Carlos, they rebuild their lives from the foundations up.  But the floors are shifting beneath their feet, shaky as their pasts.  In that hot strange place they do battle from room to room - with each other, with their history, with the ghosts that linger in the space between their hearts.

And from the CAE Catalogue:

...The spirit world blends fabulously with their material one in this vibrant novel.  Some content may upset readers.  Several groups have commented on the 'ugliness' and human cruelty portrayed in this book.

Separated Yet Together  

Click here to read an article (from the Miami Herald in 1998) which mentions Olga Lorenzo and among other emigrants who left Cuba after the revolution.  The article describes Miami as "the official waiting room of exile, where Cubans dream, wait and plot the end of Castro's rule."  

Our next meeting

will be on Tuesday 9 December

Venue to be confirmed

The Dressmaker - Rosalie Ham

After twenty years away, Myrtle Dunnage returns to Dungatar - a small country town whose people's eccentricities are many and varied.  From Sergeant Farrat's predilection for cross-dressing, to pharmacist Almanac's retributive scheme of potion dispensing, not forgetting extra-marital affairs and assorted dark secrets, it seems that everyone in town has a seamier side. But none of these can compare to the sin of Tilly and her mother: to have come from somewhere else.  At first ostracised, the townspeople gradually accept her in order to make use of her extraordinary dressmaking skills and, at last, Tilly feels that she might have found home.

But small towns are strange places where vanity rules, and, once again reviled, Tilly sets out to teach the town a lesson. In the process she faces the ghosts of her past, and wreaks a havoc that provides a most satisfying revenge.

This is a story of love, hate and haute couture. A warm and nasty book, The Dressmaker evokes Drysdale's 'Drover's Wife' dressed in Chanel. 

The above blurb is from the publisher's website.  I think it's more insightful and accurate than the one on the back of the book.  I particularly like the description 'warm and nasty'.  One thing I've wondered is:  for a town so vain and so obsessed with appearances, how come they don't have a beauty parlour?  It could have been a really good setting for vanity, bad taste and bitchiness of the town's inhabitants - not to mention visits on the sly by Sergeant Farrat.

What do you think of the book so far?

Do you know, or have you lived in, a town like Dungatar?

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

Discussion questions

1 Is there a hero in The Orchid Thief? An anti-hero?

2 Which of the characters in the book most attracted or entertained you? Why?

3 John Laroche would not describe himself as an orchid person. To him the orchid is a temporary but very intense passion, a means to an end, not an end in itself. How would you analyze the difference between Laroche's motives in collecting orchids and the regular orchid collectors visited in the course of the book? Or is there no difference?

4 Laroche believes that his actions are ultimately an act of selflessness. That his rape of the Fakahatchee would force the law to be changed and close the loophole that allowed him to poach rare and wild orchids from an Indian reservation, thus protecting the species in the wild, and securing it for the marketplace at the same time. Is this the thought process of an amoral character? Or is he just an everyday charlatan?

5 Laroche makes a very telling statement: "When I had my own nursery I sometimes felt like all the people swarming around were going to eat me alive. I felt like they were that gigantic parasitic plant and I was the dying host tree." Is he playing the role of the victim, the martyr to a (preferably lost, but grand) cause or is he in control of his life by making a living off other people's weaknesses, whether it be a passion for orchids or pornography?

6 The Native Americans on the reservation are entitled by one law to remove protected species from their land. Is this law justified? For any indigenous people?

7 What is the real core, the central character, of the book: Laroche? Florida? Orchids? Native Americans? Darwin? Orlean?

8 As a reader, what did you expect from a book about orchids? How did your experience of reading The Orchid Thief compare to what you expected?

9 The working title of The Orchid Thief was "Passion." What does that suggest about the themes in the book?

10 This story is one of a passion for collecting, one that has become an obsession. Do you have an obsession (that you're willing to share with the group?) And at what point do you think an obsession gets out of hand and turn into clutter that interferes with every life? ARe there different perceptions of passion v obsession v clutter

Romulus My Father by Raimond Gaita

Questions for discussion


1. This story has a very dramatic plot, featuring love affairs, betrayal, fighting, madness and more than one suicide. If the book was fiction, it might seem like over the top melodrama. Yet it is categorised as biography. Did you find it difficult to believe that it was all true? Why? or why not?

2. While reading this book, I was reminded of similar ‘deprived childhood’ autobiographies A Fortunate Life by AB Facey and Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. Did Romulus My Father remind you of any other books you’ve read? Do you enjoy reading this type of true story?

3. The book paints the picture of a very unusual and eccentric man: Romulus Gaita. What did you think of Romulus? Do you think he was a good man? Do you think he was an interesting character? Do you think he was a good father to Raimond?

3. The story opens with a very young Romulus behind the door of his Grandfather’s house, desperate and ready to kill his drunken uncle if his uncle broke the door down. At several points in the story, Romulus seems ready to kill or be killed - for example, when he takes Raimond to Sydney in order to kill Lydia’s husband, and then on the way home considers killing himself instead. Why were things always so life-or-death for Romulus? Did he create and cause all the drama himself? Or was he pushed to extremes by the circumstances?

4. Romulus and Hora were great friends for nearly their whole lives. They met because of shared circumstances, but their friendship was sustained through a shared set of principles which formed the basis for their way of living in Australia as immigrants, their way of caring for their families and their joy in conversing with each other and with Raimond. Did their principles - hard work, honesty, friendship etc - resonate with you? Or did Romulus and Hora seem like strange, inflexible people? Should they have done more to fit in with the Australian way of life in the 1950s and 60s?

5. For Romulus, the principle of truthfulness was all important - not simply that ‘honesty is the best policy’ to keep oneself out of trouble. How important is it to be truthful? Do you ever tell ‘white’ lies?

6. Raimond mentions that as a child he was used to seeing unusual incidents, and that he wasn’t shocked when his mother tried repeatedly to commit suicide, his ‘step-father’ Mitru did, and even his own father attempted it. Do you think that the dramas in this book reflect the broader experience of immigrants in Australia in the at that time? or do you think that it was to do with the situation only within Gaita family?

7. The people of Maryborough seemed to either love Raimond’s mother Christina or despise her. On the one hand, she was beautiful, engaging and charming. On the other hand, she was depressed and troubled mentally, and seemed completely unable to care for her own children. What did you think of Christina?

8. Did you see the movie Romulus, My Father? Was it as good as the book?