Importance of The Motor-Car

The Motor-Car represents the first arrival of industrialization to the town, it shocks the residents with it's beauty and strangeness. It is completely different than anything they are used to, and as a result they are somewhat drawn to it. Briony fails to grasp the correlation between the car and the draining of the swamp until the very end of the novel, but when she does she understands the inevitability of the swamp, and how the motor car is a large part of that.