Sex and death

The bodies in the library

Atonement (2007) 

What's it about?  
Upper-class schoolgirl Briony (Saoirse Ronan) misunderstands a series of encounters between her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and servant's son Robbie (James McAvoy). In her jealousy and confusion she tells a lie about the latter, which leads to the lives of all three being crushed during the early years of the Second World War.

What's it got to do with libraries?  
What is it about sex and libraries? Serial controversialist Professor Mary Beard would have us believe that sex in libraries is an almost everyday occurrence. I recently attended a conference at which both keynote speakers hinted at sexual activity in their libraries. Being librarians, they were far too polite to say the S word - the first referred to "hanky-panky", the second to nocturnal activities on library beanbags (some might say that having beanbags in libraries is worse than having sex in them). Searching for the collocation on Google is not something I would advise - the extent of human perversions disturbs even the liberal mind.

Atonement tops Entertainment Weekly's list of 18 Wild Trips to the Library. The piece begins: "A sex scene in a library that is scorching hot? It seems so wrong - and it is - but it's also amazing." The bad writing warns us of the journalistic poverty to follow, for among the other 17 "wild" films are the racy Lorenzo's Oil, A Beautiful Mind and Disney's Beauty and the Beast. The list neglects the only other film I am aware of to feature a library sex scene - Kevin Bacon's Loverboy. Sex is just a hook for a badly-written general feature about libraries and movies.

If libraries are places of quiet and order, sexual activity is an obvious transgression. The first playwrights knew that transgression had dramatic potential, and the inheritance of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides is so deeply embedded in Western culture that we're primed to expect tragedy to follow such transgressive activities. As a classicist Beard knows this - as she knows that the dramatic presentation of Oedipus bonking his mother drew huge audiences to the Athenian theatre, and that library licentiousness will draw readers to her blog too. Atonement's director Joe Wright also knows about hubris, and this association partly explains Cecilia and Robbie's tryst as the turning-point of the film. Wishing for the impossible may also partly explain the "sexy librarian" archetype of popular culture and advertising campaigns, one that Knightley herself seems keen to manipulate, both in her poster for the American Library Association's "Read" campaign, and in a recent fashion shoot for Italian Vogue.

Like some zany version of Cluedo, a transgressive act, by a sexy girl, in a gentleman's library, initially appears to be present in Agatha Christie's 1942 novel The Body in the Library too (filmed in two televisual adaptations, in 1984 and 2004). A blonde is found in Colonel Bantry's library. The villagers of St Mary Mead gossip about the girl's state of undress, and what it might mean. But Christie was a postmodernist ahead of her time. Like Knightley, the girl is actually wearing a satin evening gown. She died, the prurient village doctor tells us, virgo intacta. She's not even blonde and ultimately, she's not even who we think she is. Christie gently mocks village attitudes (the villagers would have tutted at, and delighted in, Atonement), the absurdities of class, and her own use of the private libraries of murderers great and good. Her foreword reveals that the novel is a conscious parody of the detective genre.

Christie is toying with opposites - the body and the library are improbable compliments, as are the village and its countless murderers, the sweet old lady and the detective. She has fun undermining her own genre, softly mocking her life's work, her readers and her previous use of libraries. The library is the natural end of a detective story between the wars, not the start of one. The various would-be murderers are gathered there and arranged like the books on the shelves. The quirky sleuth then picks out the villain through an act of weeding, cataloguing, collection management - Miss Marple is a glorified librarian.

It's interesting to compare and contrast the confluence of the upper classes, libraries and transgression (not only the sexual kind) in Atonement and Christie's novels (and their 30+ film and 80+ television adaptations). Atonement handles this transgression awkwardly. The library scene is more successfully used to convey a mood rather than advance the plot. It is remarkable for its artificiality in an otherwise naturalistic film (the naturalism of the set piece on the Dunkirk seafront is a tour de force). For a film in which two lovers are kept apart (partly) by class, it doesn't use the library in the interesting ways that the space invites. Robbie, defying the role he was born into, has just returned from Cambridge, but this is hardly ever alluded to.

Atonement uses the library as filmatic wallpaper, trading on various cultural associations old and new (the photograph demonstrates the link between private libraries and the upper classes in the window display of an upmarket clothes shop I pass on my walk to work). It focuses on the heavy petting and leaves the heavy lifting and subversion to the echoes of Christie's libraries. In doing so it misses a trick. For the upper classes in Christie's books, the library is an extravagance, and nobody ever seems to take a book off the shelves. Books were costly objects in the nineteenth-century world that so many of her characters inherited. In 1851 the average house servant earned just over £24 pounds annually. At the end of that decade the cloth-bound edition of Darwin's Origin of Species was published at 15 shillings, more than one of those servants earned in a week. The upper classes filled rooms full of expensive books they never read because they could. Cecilia and Robbie have sex there because their sex lives are circumscribed by social convention, so if breaking the rules they may as well do so in the most improbably place.

You end the film cursing Briony and the Germans for keeping these two lovers apart. Its opening scenes have been praised for evoking a pastel-coloured vision of Edwardian England, a place that exists only in storybooks. It glosses over the social history Christie had lived through. And for that is is a much lesser film. 

Is it any good? 
Am I the only one who feels like I'm being manipulated when reading an Ian McEwan novel? Or that he concentrates too much on the incidental, and neglects his characters? The process of atonement is too excruciatingly cruel here, and too cold. The three leads are too narrow, and Knightley's accent too clipped (this might merely be my dislike of the actress, her character and her class). And the evocation of a lost, idealized England is as fictional as the novel within a novel that is Briony's final, deathbed atonement.

Director: Joe Wright

Written by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan

Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey

Editing: Paul Tothill

Original music: Dario Marianelli

Cast includes James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, Juno Temple, Benedict Cumberbatch

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