The Expiation of Marczin Rafalowski

Beginning and ending in the recent past, the story is set partly in London and Poland in the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties. Elizabeth, the grand-daughter of a Scottish engineer working in London during the First World War meets Peter, a blind man and fellow law student at Oxford; they marry. Her parents' marriage is very difficult and her life as an only child with a mother incapable of loving anyone and a father who confides in his daughter about his serial infidelities will, in later life, trigger her manic depression. Elizabeth begins a career in academic law whilst her husband remains uninterested becoming depressed at his unemployment. Two Poles come into their lives, Marczin the immigrant who has a history of depression and Magda, a blind student (and closet Lesbian) from Lublin. Ignorant of Elizabeth's mental health history and Peter's role in supporting her since under-graduate days, they demonise him, mistakenly blaming him for Elizabeth's most recent and subsequent breakdowns, citing his fecklessness and indolence as causal factors. Her father, a (similarly closeted) transvestite since childhood, leaves her mother and marries his mistress. Her mother moves to Walsall to live near them after heart surgery but is so demanding as to make Elizabeth ill. She is taken advantage of by the Poles, buying a flat in Lublin for Magda and putting Marczin through university in England at her own expense. Peter, alienated and estranged from his mad wife and tormented by Magda and Marczin, has a crisis of sexual identity and seeks liaisons with men online after Marczin tells him that his marriage is failing because he must be homosexual. Marczin is secretly reading Peter's emails and makes a recording of one such liaison and gives it to Elizabeth. Peter tries to kill himself. Marczin's much older, married ex-lover had been murdered by her husband who then killed himself. This pricks his conscience when Peter attempts suicide and he seeks absolution from a Polish priest whom he has befriended. The priest is one of three sent to Birmingham by the church in Poland to attend to the pastoral needs of Polish immigrants in the West Midlands. He fights shy of confessing, witnessing the priest's decline into alcoholism as the months pass. There is a glimmer of hope with a burgeoning relationship with the priest's young Polish housekeeper at the end of the novel. The girl's mother is Marczin's psychiatrist whom he has seen in Lublin for his own depression, having learned that his mother's husband is not his biological father. He has spent much of his life wondering if his mother had been raped and if so, by whom. He feels unable to ask her about the circumstances of his conception.