Atonement

Rating:
Summary: Demanding, Detached, Maybe Too Clever
Review: I was really looking forward to reading this novel, after hearing so much about it & liking the title (and presumed subject matter). I'd read McEwan's 'Amsterdam' earlier and while it had also had a surprise ending, I found it just way too clever. 'Atonement' has much more substance to it than 'Amsterdam,' but I was left with the feeling that McEwan may be too clever for his own good. I WAS really surprised at the end, and it made me think, and I haven't forgotten the book, but the huge twist in the last few pages seemed just a little too contrived.

I also feel that I probably should have read the book much more slowly. It's complex, and demands a lot of the reader. But one of the reasons I was reading it fast, in the first part particularly, was that I disliked the young 13 year old narrator, Briony, in the extreme--I found her so self-indulgent and histrionic. If only she had been more likeable! I didn't mind the details in Part One or the slow moments there, but I did get a little bogged down in Part Two, war stories at Dunkirk where nothing much happens, though I did understand (I think!) why McEwan was including this section.

I think probably McEwan isn't my type of author--he's too academic (though I do love good literary fiction!), too clever and dry, and just way too detached, for me. I felt as if I was being held at arm's length during this whole book, that it didn't draw me in emotionally (and I long to be emotionally involved with a book's characters, like to be pulled into a story, another world). I felt more like I was on the outside all the time with 'Atonement', looking in, face pressed against the glass, and thus distanced.

I'm not sorry I read this novel, though--it's well-crafted, and I can see from the reader's guide that I obviously missed some of the symbolism in it or text that I didn't get sorted out. I've thought of rereading it, but don't think I will--I don't think I could stand the young Briony again, for one thing!

I do see how some people could give this novel 5 stars and why others gave it 3 (but not less than that! This is a serious and ambitious book...). McEwan's style isn't for everyone, and not everyone should be reading this book either; I myself wonder if I want to try some of his earlier novels, and think, to be fair, that I ought to try one more before I give up on him entirely.

Rating:
Summary: Makes You Think for Days and Days!
Review: Wow! I've never read a book where, after I finished, I was so conscious of how the book's structure was absolutely perfect, so good, so important to the effect, in fact, that the structure is what makes the book stand out. It makes you think so much after you've finished, makes you wonder about a thousand things, about life, about the consequences of our actions, about the inspiration for art, about perception, comprehension, integrity, and of course, about redemption and the difficulty we have in achieving absolution, and even how its pursuit might be considered selfish.

I read McEwan's "Amsterdam," which won the Booker prize a few years ago, and I was underwhelmed to say the least. But after reading glowing reviews about "Atonement" in Time magazine and in a couple of other publications, I decided to give McEwan a second chance. I'm so glad I did. For me "Atonement" is one of the great works of fiction from this brand new century.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful exploration of post modernism
Review: I loved this novel. McEwan beautifully experiments with points of view and blends modernist styles with both realist and romantic. While Briony does misinterpret the pivotal scene by the fountain, it is because of her romantic views of life. She is unable to understand adult passion and relationships because she is too naive. The remainder of the book is her search for forgiveness from the people she hurt the most, Cecilia and Robbie. The only problem I had with this book was the relationship between Cecilia and Robbie. It seemed forced after he was released from jail but this may have once again been the result of Briony not fully comprehending the relationship. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a great novel.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written, but preposterous plotline
Review: The writing is luminous, no question about that. But the plotline is most troubling. A promising young man - who has recently graduated with first-class honors from Cambridge - of humble origin is sent to prison on the unsupported and false testimony of a hyperimaginative 13 year old girl? McEwan doesn't even allude to the trial, which could have been a fabulous opening for some real drama. And Cecelia, the thwarted older sister who suspects the truth, stands mutely by and allows this to happen to her lover, after her own privacy has been monstrously violated and she has been grievously wronged? Instead of dragging Briony into an empty room and slapping the truth out of her? And what kind of ludicrous police investigation would allow such an injustice? Didn't the accused have a solicitor at trial? Is this merely class bigotry writ large? Not in 1935. All of these issues are problematic. The middle section of the book, concerning the BEF evacuation at Dunkirk, is much too long and overdone, a digression from the central theme. And the conclusion is intellectually dishonest and unsatisfying after such a build-up. In the end, there's no atonement at all, which makes the title a misnomer.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Believe The Hype
Review: This book was a waste of my time. I've never written a review here before, but I feel the need to warn you all. I don't know why people were slobbering all over themselves to hype this book, but don't believe a word of it. It never connected with me at all. None of the characters were believable, and none earned my sympathy. The inner dialogues were confusing and seemed a bit off, at best. In a book in which only 1 thing really happens, this dialogue is the most important part of the book and must be executed flawlessly.
Joyce and Proust are confusing at times, but also succeed wonderfully at capturing this inner life that we all lead. And this success is what creates the connection between the reader and the books that those authors wrote. McEwan, in my opinion, tried in many places to achieve a similar result.
Unfortunately, there is no connection with the reader. The actions the main characters take seem without any reason, and without any recognizable motive - and this seems a failure rather than a point McEwan is trying to make. This failure is magnified by dialogue that is forced and seems pointless. While I respect his high ambitions, in this case it ends in spectacular failure. His failure to connect results in an apathy that I have not felt in reading a book for some time.
For those of you who insist on reading the book, read up until the incident where Cecilia jumps into the fountain. McEwan never makes the reader care about that vase, never makes the reader care about Cecilia, and never makes the reader care about Robbie. The whole scene, much like the book as a whole, just never rings true. People don't act, think, or talk as Mr. McEwan describes and his book fails as a result.

Rating:
Summary: Slow Story, Boring Descriptions, Empty Characters
Review: Though I agree with many other reviewers that Atonement displays McEwan's talent for crafting beautiful sentences, I was terribly disappointed that such language was wasted on a slow, boring plot and completely empty, one-sided characters that I never got to know.
In the beginning I had to keep flipping back to try to remember who was who as he intoduced several of the book's characters without providing the reader any features with which to distinguish them.
After somewhat monotonous descriptions that, while providing some insight into setting, provided very little into the mind and heart of the charcters, I was so grateful when ONE somewhat interesting event finally occured. But my excitement that there was some sort of action vanished when, after MANY more pages, it became clear that this one event would encompass the entire plot.
The characters remained completely one-sided. Each pretty much had one fault and/or one virtue.
The book focuses on a girl's transition from youth through adolescence and into old age, but I was unconvinced that this was how such a character would behave in these stages of life. Because her emotions and reactions were so odd, it was too difficult to identify with her on any level, and the transitions were unmoving.
The middle section describing the horrors of Dunkirk was an exception to the overall sense of stagnation the book inspired, and I appreciated the historical accuracy and details. Though this part also got somewhat monotonous at time, overall it was one of the few times the book evoked real feeling and presented a complete enough picture of what was going on to allow the reader to actually become involved in the event.
The end was disappointingly sappy and trite. I would have liked to hear more about Briony's internal struggle and why she chose to lie again about what happened to Cecilia and Robbie and less about the family reunion.
I think that the concept of the book as Briony's lifelong effort at atonement was awesome, but the book lost me so many times that I just didn't care that much by the end.

Rating:
Summary: Midwest Book Review
Review: Reading Atonement is a luxury I promised myself when it was first released. I purposely procrastinated and did not intend to review it. After all, what can any reviewer of humble origin say about an international best seller that received rave reviews from every major review source in the world? Any possible superlative has already been applied.

We meet Briony Tallis when she is an imaginative 13 year old in 1935. Her thought processes are frenetic; she's a secretive adolescent with "a strange mind and a facility with words." Her inexperience visits a horrible injustice on Robbie Turner, decent and gifted son of a Tallis family servant. Robbie has grown up with the Tallis children. Despite his lower class standing, he falls in love with the elder daughter Cecilia. That affection is mutual, until Briony mixes in. She tells an awful lie about Robbie that has heart sickening results, then spends the rest of her life trying to atone.

McEwan captures perfectly a time and place, and the class distinctions that set his characters apart. The Tallis clan is wealthy, impatient, bored, restless. Robbie Turner is intelligent, loyal and confident, with focused plans for a grand future that fails because of Briony's cunning lie.

Atonement is a beautifully written but grim story of injustice. It speaks to wrongs that can never be reversed down through the generations, and portrays a slice of life that is not always sweet or palatable. Briony atones for her self serving lie, but was it enough?

Atonement is written in the late 19th and early 20th century style. McEwan's vocabulary is expansive, his prose wonderfully crafted. Readers of literary fiction will appreciate his work.

Rating:
Summary: Atone for My Wasted Time
Review: Perhaps I'm the wrong kind of reader for this kind of book. I'm not the action-thriller type at all, but this book fails to move. Instead it is full of over-long descriptions of nothing. It takes nearly 200 pages for anything to happen. I enjoy 'getting into' characters, but after this much introduction, I should care about them. I didn't know the characters & I didn't care about them. I found I could quickly scan many pages and not miss a thing. (I almost never do so.) One thing finally happens, which is the unresolved theme of the rest of the book. By the time it's resolved (or rather, NOT resolved) I didn't care any more. The only interesting part was 50 pages in the middle describing the horrors of Dunkirk during WW II.
I know this got all kinds of awards, but I'm sorry - no plaudits from me.

Rating:
Summary: A Case of the Blahs
Review: "Atonement" has two distinct parts: The first, and more successful, covers one summer day in rural England in 1935 where a certain tragedy unfolds. Descriptions of the characters are excellent: Briony, the youngest daughter - a late arrival to her parents, and a combination of spoiled and neglected child inhabiting her own fantasy world; the upper-class English family and its open and hidden frustrations and tensions; Cecilia, the daughter who is returning from college and who becomes a mother surrogate for the Briony. This part of the book builds up the tension to a crime of which Robbie, the man Cecilia is in love with, is accused.
In the second part, the book begins to drag: set five years later in World War II, Robbie is at the front in France. Although this part describes Robbie's shattering and brutal journey to Dunkirk, it is incidental to the plot and rather monotonous. Meanwhile, Briony, to assuage her guilt for blaming Robbie rather than the real perpetrator in a false testimony, has decided to train as a nurse in London.
An epilogue is set 55 years later in which Briony reflects on her life. Don't we all? I found the entire work a difficult read. . .but then, I sit comfortably with my guilt. In any event, it is too late, I fear, to recapture the readers' interest.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent but not flawless
Review: Unlike some readers, I do think this book was quite predictable. Certain little nuances in the text intimated what was to come.
That is not the point.
McEwan gives no implication that he wishes to surprise the reader with an unpredictable ending.
His merit is in his ability to create an extremely psychologically challenging book.
Good art makes you question.
McEwan did so.
Having said that, there is an element of the contrived in this novel, and if you are looking for something completely novel, you will be disappointed (excuse the pun).
It should have won the Booker over Vernon God Little.