What happens in Part Two of Atonement?
Part Two begins not in the drawing rooms of Tallis country house but in the mud and chaos of northern France, 1940. Robbie Turner, now a private in the British Expeditionary Force, marches toward Dunkirk alongside two corporals, Nettle and Mace. He is feverish, nursing a shrapnel wound in his side that he refuses to acknowledge as serious. The section moves through a devastated landscape—bombed villages, dead horses, and columns of refugees—as the army's retreat teeters on the edge of collapse. In Chapter 2, a flashback shows Robbie's release from Brixton Prison after three and a half years, conditional on his enlistment; Cecilia has been waiting, and their brief reunion in a London café reveals both their love and the damage Briony's accusation has inflicted. Chapters 3 and 4 return to the present march: the trio notices the RAF's apparent absence from the skies, fueling the soldiers' bitterness, while Robbie hallucinates or half-dreams of Cecilia’s face during moments of lucidity. The section concludes with the men reaching a rise to see the Channel and the vast, improbable armada assembling offshore—salvation made almost unreal by exhaustion.
Analysis
McEwan's structural break serves as a moral statement: plunging the reader into Robbie's perspective mid-march, without any introductory context, captures the disorientation of war and reflects the suddenness with which Robbie's civilian life was cut off. The writing style shifts dramatically — sentences become shorter, sensory details overwhelm inner thoughts, and free indirect discourse wavers as Robbie's fever distorts his perception. This uncertainty carries significant weight: a man wrongfully convicted has already seen his version of reality dismissed once; now, reality itself seems unstable.
The motif of wounds runs quietly alongside the injury of the false accusation. Robbie hides both — from the corporals and from himself — and McEwan uses this duality to imply that survival, both physical and psychological, relies on a conscious suppression of truth. The flashback to the London café is portrayed in a cooler, more controlled tone than the surrounding war scenes, making it feel almost fictional within the narrative — a memory so cherished it has been polished to a shine.
Nettle and Mace act as a deliberate Shakespearean balance: their everyday banter and dark humor root the section in a shared working-class experience, ensuring that Robbie's suffering doesn't become solely individual or literary. The missing RAF emerges as a recurring point of frustration that McEwan employs to illustrate institutional betrayal — a structural echo of the failures (police, family, class) that originally imprisoned Robbie. The Dunkirk armada seen at the end is depicted with careful ambiguity: neither victorious nor hopeless, just oddly, exhaustively present.
Key quotes from Part Two
“He kept his mind on the next step, and the one after that, and tried not to think about his side.”
Early in the march, McEwan establishes Robbie's survival strategy — radical presentness — as both practical discipline and psychological defence against the wound he refuses to name.
“It was not guilt exactly, more like the memory of guilt, which was almost worse.”
During the café flashback, Robbie reflects on his years in prison and the distorted emotional residue that outlasts the original injustice, complicating any simple narrative of exoneration.
“The soldiers who had seen the Stukas come in low and the Spitfires nowhere — they would never forgive it.”
Nettle voices the infantry's fury at the RAF's perceived absence, and McEwan uses free indirect discourse to let collective resentment bleed into Robbie's own consciousness, dissolving the line between individual and communal grievance.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Part Two
- billets
- Temporary lodgings assigned to soldiers in civilian buildings or homes; a military term for makeshift accommodation during a campaign.
- salient
- A section of a military front line that bulges outward into enemy territory, making it exposed on three sides; a term from First and Second World War battlefield geography.
- enfilade
- Gunfire directed along the length of an enemy line from the side, rather than head-on; a military term for a particularly devastating angle of fire.
- ordnance
- Military weapons, ammunition, and equipment; here used specifically to refer to artillery shells and the materiel of modern warfare.