English Literature, AS Level: 'In crime writing there are always victims.' Explore the significance of the way a victim is presented in a crime text you have studied.

Atonement is an unusual crime writing text insofar as the perpetrator of the major crime (namely Briony who wrongly accuses Robbie of rape) is also one of the text's key victims. Briony is the narrator of the crime stories, and although she never describes herself as a victim the reader can see that she is a number of ways. Firstly, she is a victim of her childish imagination and her resultant inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Secondly, she is a victim of a society which privileges male heroism and aggression (particularly in the context of war) over female nurture and imagination. Thirdly, she is a victim of the crime she herself committed as a child, condemned to repeat it again and again through her writing, unable to forget it. Overall, Briony's final crime (tricking the reader in the novel's postscript) illustrates the blurring of the criminal-victim dichotomy. In McEwan's postmodern novel, no one can be neatly categorised as hero or villain, innocent or criminal; rather we are all engaged and complicit in an act of retelling, shaping and shifting the stories that define us and our society.Firstly, Briony's inability to distinguish between imagination and fantasy illustrates the blending of criminal and victim; in her childhood world, there are neat villains (in her perception Robbie) and clear victims (Lola). However, as the text goes on, Briony herself becomes a victim of her own imagination. For example, she is a victim of her over active imagination, an imagination that is creative and invents stories (her play The Trials of Arabella is a precursor for the trials of Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner). The scene between her sister and Robbie at the fountain baffles her (she sees it having 'an air of ugly threat') and the letter she reads excites her imagination more: it is 'something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal'. In focusing to heavily on Briony's childhood imaginings, writings and perceptions in Part 1, we see that ways in which Briony will become the victim of one of her major crimes; lying to the police about Robbie's rape, when it was in reality Paul Marshall. Thus Briony's inability to distinguish between her own imagination and objective reality shows the in crime writing there are always perceived victims and criminals, yet McEwan deliberately blurs the boundary between the two. Briony is both victim and criminal.