Fictional characters who shaped my life (not in any order): Briony Tallis
I think people are scared of Briony, y’know. She failed to grasp the notion that other people were as real as her, that was her big mistake, and we’ve all been there. She thought she was doing right, or at least not doing wrong, but she messed up badly and we’ve all been there. She lived in a society where a man can rape a teenage girl and suffer no negative repercussions at all, and…
…we’ve all been there.
Anyway. James McAvoy thinks she’s rotting in hell, which causes me to wonder where exactly Paul Marshall is in that case. And also to wonder what Luc Cornet would have thought of that, because Briony was a good nurse and she lied to him when he was dying, the good comforting kind of lie. Briony went on to marry another Frenchman, actually, her marriage didn’t make it into the movie but got one sentence (one sentence!) in the book. I wonder how much her husband knew. I bet he loved her anyway. I hope he did.
Briony’s telling of Robbie and Cecilia’s story was also the good comforting kind of lie, and one that casts her (or did she cast herself?) as the architect of their destruction – but it wasn’t all her fault. Most of it is Paul Marshall’s fault, although he seems to get a pass for reasons Benedict Cumberbatch himself would be very disappointed in. Briony accused the wrong man, yes, but Cecilia and Robbie themselves came close to doing the same (“I suppose we owe an apology to Able Seaman Hardman”) and she was a child, thirteen years old, not even old enough to understand what she saw in the library.
Briony could have been anyone; could have been me. One fuzzy memory, one fear, one moment of ego and it’s all over. She was so busy being the hero of her own story she forgot she was also the supporting character of someone else’s. Scary, isn’t it?
She’s eventually punished in what must be the worst way imaginable for her: she’s a writer, a storyteller, but the dementia she’s been diagnosed with will cause her to lose all her stories- all her memories will fade away, and slowly. She was punished disproportionate to her crime, I think. She had a massive god complex- that was what caused her to try and give the characters Cecilia and Robbie a happy ending, while she could do nothing for the real people- but she tried to atone for it. To people like Luc and Fiona (do you know, I actually ship Briony/Fiona a little) she was a good person. And she never forgave herself for what she did, not even in her retelling of events, where she could have twisted the truth and didn’t.
She was arrogant and selfish and in many ways she wasn’t brave, but I don’t think she’s in hell. Or she’d better bloody not be.