Briony Tallis, dreamer and writer, a very charismatic and charming person. One of the best writers that ever lived. One of the very first things we learn about her is that "She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so" (1.1.4). So much so, in fact, that in the entire upstairs of her family's enormous house, her bedroom is the "only tidy […] room" (1.1.4).Briony's passion for neatness is where her love for writing and creation comes from. In stories, you see, she can control everything—she gets to tie off all the loose ends and make sure everything fits. She's at first enthralled with the idea of writing plays because "a universe reduced to what was said in it was tidiness indeed" (1.1.10). Eventually though, she realizes that putting on a play means dealing with other people's messes.

 

Briony likes the idea of a world controlled by her own thoughts and imagination. A world in which everybody has their own thoughts and imagination, though, is… well, it's a mess, with "two billion voices and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance" (1.3.18) and it "offended her sense of order" (1.3.18). Even as a child, though, Briony realizes that a world in which she is the only person with a consciousness would have its downsides. Her first long story, based on her vision of Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain, is based on a "pure geometry," but also on "the defining uncertainty which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility." With some triumph she concludes, "The age of clear answers was over" (3.23). Growing up, in other words, is to accept messiness. It's also something Briony's eager to do.

 

Briony's job as a nurse isn't to accept mess, after all; it's to scour bedpans and clean and clean and clean until everything is more sparkling and ship-shape than her bedroom ever was. Learning to be a nurse is a "narrowing" (3.13). Briony doesn't expand her consciousness to include others, but instead erases her own interior life, turning from Briony Tallis into Nurse Tallis—no first name, nothing special.

But what about Briony's writing? She's still writing after all, even after assuming her nurse identity. Her writing has changed, though, and the editor who rejects her story tells her it lacks "the backbone of a story" (3.226). He quite literally wants her to tidy the piece up.

 

The problem for Briony is that her effort to clean up messes in childhood created a huge, whopping, massive, gargantuan mess to end all messes. Learning to clean up messes as a nurse isn't going to fix that. Learning to accept messy stories in which nothing much happens isn't going to help either. Nothing's going to sort that mess out. It's more unfixable than an old chocolate stain on your favorite white tee shirt. Yet Briony does fix the mess she made of Robbie and Cecilia's lives… at least she tries to. In the last section of the book, written by Briony on her 77th birthday, we learn that she has made a novel out of the mess—the novel we've just read.

 

Briony is dying of vascular dementia at this point. The disease will slowly destroy her memory and consciousness before she dies, and she faces "an incoming tide of forgetting and then oblivion" (4.45). She'll be gone and the book will survive, carrying its tidy ending forward.

There's a bit of a trick going on here though. By telling us that the clean ending isn't real, Briony makes a bit of a mess. While asserting that an author has "absolute power of deciding outcomes" (4.46), Briony undermines her own fix. It's an interesting moment.