Atonement

Rating:
Summary: A story of a lie
Review: This is the story of a lie told by a young girl, a lie that is seemingly more the product of an adolescent and hyperactive imagination rather than any malice or enmity of heart. The story tells of the momentous and lasting impact of this lie on the life of a young man whose life from his childhood has been linked to the family of this young girl and has become romantically and tragically linked to a particular member of this family only by a mere few hours before the lie is actually uttered. Altogether there are three separate strands to this novel, each in its own right captivating the reader's attention, parts that are finally twined together in an epilogue, that though brief by comparison to the other parts of the novel serves its purpose well. As to the quality of the writing this is undeniably that of a seasoned master sensitive to the magical qualities inherent within the written word and the manifold ways in which both reality and imagination can be captured and pictured on the page so as to eventually be relived by the reader. I would recommend this novel without hesitation to any person who is willing to follow and partake in the experience of the characters trapped within a situation that is simultaneously utterly convincing yet captivatingly removed far beyond the daily reality of most of people living today about 60 years after the events that are described within the novel actually occurred.

Rating:
Summary: Expertly executed novel on childhood and war
Review: Told from the perspectives of three of its protagonists, "Atonement" is both a family drama set on an English estate during the 1930s and a novel of World War II, with elements of postmodern fiction thrown in. Think "Saving Private Ryan" meets Iris Murdoch's "The Bell" (another psychological drama set in the British countryside and told from three contrasting points of view), with a twist of John Fowles's "French Lieutenant's Woman" at the end.

Because the first half of the book (about how a young girl's misperceptions and wrong-headedness ruins the lives of those she loves) is so different from the second half (about the war experiences of two of the novel's characters), some readers may feel that they are reading two radically different novels. I didn't find the dichotomy bothersome, however. Wars don't exist in a vacuum, and neither do family dramas. Instead, the tensions between the two sections graphically contrast the harsh realities of the war with the ambling, if disturbing, portrayal of familial strife. Everything ties together in the end, and the novel succeeds, I think, both as two disparate stories and as the sum of its parts.

McEwan is a masterful writer, but he does have an occasionally vexing tendency to get carried away with his metaphors. His account of a migraine, to cite just one example, reads, in part: "Once this lazy creature moved from the peripheries to the center, then the knifing pains would obliterate all thought.... It bore her no malice, this animal, it was indifferent to her misery. It would move as a caged panther might: because it was awake, out of boredom, for the sake of movement itself, or for no reason at all, and with no awareness." I half-expected him to describe the wildcat's quivering whiskers.

Much attention has been paid to the "surprising" plot twists, but as the epigraph from Austen implies, McEwan is writing a character novel (as well as a book about the art of writing); he is not a mystery writer. The "whodunit" aspect (which I won't give away) is effectively exposed midway through the first part, and many--if not most--attentive readers will expect the revelations in the novel's epilogue by the time they finish chapter 3, in which the young girl speculates how she can use an incident she witnessed as the basis for a novel told from the perspective of three characters.

No novel can live up to the kind of hype this book has generated, and certainly no work of fiction will satisfy the tastes of all readers. I do think, however, that "Atonement" will be immensely satisfying to many readers of literary novels (and the emphasis here is on the word "literary") if they ignore most of the accolades and approach the book "con tabula rasa."

Rating:
Summary: A Deeply Moving and Beautifully Written Book
Review: This is an amazingly good book. The narrative begins at a manor house in England in the mid-1930s, subsequently shifts to the battlefield and to London during World War II, and briefly ends with a family reunion in 1999. Each of these settings is vividly and movingly presented, but even more significant is McEwan's ability to convey the rich internal lives and differing perspectives of his characters. The book might seem a bit slow at first, as McEwan elaborately sets the stage for everything that follows. But once the first critical event occurs, it is almost impossible not to wonder and care about what will happen next. Almost every scene is perfect and affecting, and the ending (which I will not spoil) is exactly right.

Rating:
Summary: magical prose, provocative themes
Review: One of the best of the year, hands down. McEwan has such a mastery of words: lyrical, evocative, beautiful. Each sentence is the craft of a master. He is able to evoke rich characters and to convey the nuances of unspoken feelings.

The story and structure raise the questions that for my money, make reading worthwhile: what is an author? what is fiction? how does an author deal with the immense pressure of having total control...of being "god"?

reviewers caution: This is not an "easy read". It challenges the reader and demands that the reader has an appreciation of language and the role of fiction. If you are that reader, this is your book. You won't be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Among McEwan's best
Review: I've read most of McEwan's novels, and Atonement is among the strongest.

Unlike some of McEwan's work that starts out strong and then loses momentum (Enduring Love and The Child in Time stand out as examples) Atonement grows in weight and tension as the novel unfolds.

The book's long and somewhat slow opening - a homecoming at the Tallis manor in the 1935 English countryside - sets the stage for all that follows and paints a picture full of McEwan's familiar threads: class in English society, love and jealousy. The most important theme concerns the complex and ultimately terrible nature of a child's psyche - passionate and conflicted but unsophisticated due to lack of experience and therefore dangerous if given a moment to exercise its power. The 13 year old Briony Tallis is precocious and self absorbed, but to a degree so are all children - the tragedy in this situation is that via a series of coincidences, blunders, and misunderstandings, an opportunity is created for Briony to wield her power over the adults around her. This is a wrong which can never be undone and destroys the lives of two of the people closest to her.

This opening section, heavily detailed and expertly staged, is in my opinion among the best that McEwan has written - all of the many details contribute to the scene's conclusion and build toward the rest of the novel. From there the book changes gears considerably; we're taken through WWII both via the battlefield in France and hospitals in London, and ultimately back to the Tallis country manor in 1999. The pacing is brisk and eventful.

The London section work less well than those of the other sections, and some of the hospital scenes struck me as overly melodramatic while adding little to the plot and the development of the characters. Overall, however, Atonement is a masterful piece of storytelling. This is a better novel than McEwan's Booker Prize winning Amsterdam which preceded it. Excellent. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning Literary Art
Review: I finished reading Atonement two days ago, and it's still with me. The drama of the first portion, the grim view of war in the second, but especially the shifting perspective of the storyline and the surprise at the end keeps me entertained and puzzling over "what really happened" on that summer night in 1935. But my narrator Briony tells me not to do this. Perhaps what happened is less significant than the reality of the fiction writer's desire of control--and lack of it--over life. This book belongs in a course of contemporary British fiction or narrative point of view, but also belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who loves to read.

Rating:
Summary: A marvelous book
Review: Still under it's spell - I only finished the book a while ago - I want to share my impressions with my co-readers. The beauty of the book. Ian McEwan belongs to the blessed few. Twice blessed he is, not only is he capable of conveying in the most exquisite language that what he sees, but the richness of what he sees, the subtleties in people and nature, is a gift of the priviledged. To the others it remains invisible.

The plot is perfect. Of course Briony saw the perpetrator at the crime scene. With her mind's eye, prompted by her unconscious, she did. Remember she had been in love with him, and although, at some point, she says she forgot all about that feeling, how could she have forgotten?

And the ending is food for thought. When fiction and reality -thin partitions do their realms divide- finally overlap and blend into one and only phantasy. Our mortal destiny.

Rating:
Summary: Loved This Story!
Review: I don't care what some of the 'BAD REVIEWERS" say about "Atonement" by master writer Ian McEwan, I thought this book was exceptional! It had me glued to my seat throughout the entire read! (No-doubt they are jealous of this author's success and ratings!) Pity they can so easily slam a wonderful writer and his hard earned labors so casually because of the green-eyed monster inside themselves!

Buy the book and see for yourself this is without fail one of the best books out so far this year!

Rating:
Summary: Worth a second read
Review: I read it once and had some time to reflect. I'm now reading it for the second time and getting even more from it. For my money, it's a masterpiece..

Rating:
Summary: A novel of substance disguised as a bestseller...
Review: The comparison with Nabokov captures this novel best. Not only because MacEwan's prose does rise very near to the level of the Master's, but also because the structure is so similar to that of Lolita. (The comparison to Hartley's The Go-Between is also dead on, and I second the recommendation). In Atonement, as in Lolita, the real clue as to what's going on is knowing who is telling us this story, and why, and when. The novel itself is the final draft of a story one of the characters has been writing and rewriting since page one. Only when you know the ending do many details of the earlier sections take on their full significance. Fans of twentieth-century British fiction will catch other intertextual jokes. Cyril Conolly makes a guest appearance, as does Elizabeth Bowen, who offers qualified praise of an early, highly Bowen-esque, version of the story. (As for the probability of the central events of the story -- it's questionable, but then so is Humbert's version of what went on at the Enchanted Hunters. But in the end that's not the point. Long live the unreliable narrator!!)This is ultimately a novel about novel-writing, fiction that celebrates the making of fiction. Shelve it with Nabokov, Calvino, and Garcia Marquez.