Atonement

Rating:
Summary: The Rules of the Game
Review: Atonement, Ian McEwan's ninth novel, is split into three very definite phases.

The first phase is very much pastoral modernism (by which I mean that it reads like Renoir's La Regle du Jeu rewritten by Virginia Woolf). Briony Tallis, a precocious thirteen year old has composed a play (The Trials of Arabella) for her brother Leon, only the preparations for the performance are disrupted by the arrival of her cousins Lola, Jackson and Pierrot from the abstract North ("refugees," McEwan writes, "from a bitter domestic civil war."). With the play thrown into disarray, Briony sulks in her room - a sulk that allows her to glimpse a very peculiar scene involving her sister Cecilia [taking] off her clothes in the garden before her childhood friend Robbie Turner. The ambivalent feelings stirred in Briony by the soundless scene she witnesses bring the tiny, polite country world crashing down around their ears before the day is out.

The middle of the book occurs sometime later, in the midst of the Second World War. Robbie Turner has served the jail time visited upon him as a result of Briony's claims, and now finds himself in France making the perilous journey towards the beaches at Dunkirk. He and Cecilia are in love. She writes to him: "They turned on you, all of them, even my father. When they wrecked your life they wrecked mine. They chose to believe the evidence of a silly, hysterical little girl. In fact, they encouraged her by giving her no room to turn back." Cecilia vows that she will "never want to speak to (Briony) again." Both of the sisters have become nurses but their relationship will never be as it was.

The brief coda (that runs to a length of no more than twenty pages) changes all that we have read up this point. It is London, 1999. Briony Tallis is a celebrated novelist, and what we have read has been adapted by her for our consumption. Yes, these events took place, but not as described here. This has been a novel. What truth there has been is outweighed by a tidy neatening of events. "Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love?" she writes. "No-one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel." Her atonement, when it comes, is the attempt to make a better world for the people she was party to the destruction of. And yet, and yet, "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no-one . . . that can forgive her."

What you have, what this successive redrawing of boundaries achieves, is both a novel (there are characters, there is a compelling story, there is vivid writing that peels off the page the way the soldier's bandage peels back to reveal raw brain) and a meta-novel (a discussion of the very idea of what a novel could and should constitute, all of which is both enormously thought-provoking and enormously compelling). While it is untrue to say that McEwan has not written as well elsewhere (Enduring Love, Black Dogs and The Child in Time all spring immediately to mind), there is a certain abstract something to all of this which suggests he has raised his game: Atonement is that rare beast we all look forward to at the beginning of each year: that book which sets the bar for all of the others, that book which says THIS IS A NOVEL, that book which says COMPETE WITH THIS.

This is the book that should have won the 2001 Booker Prize.

Rating:
Summary: The Past Is a Foreign Country...
Review: This is a stunning book, which echoes in many ways one of my all-time favorite novels, L. P. Hartley's The Go Between.

Both works unveil the catastrophic consequences of a cross-class sexual passion, and both paint the story through the eyes of a child (in Atonement, a 13 year old girl, and in The Go-Between, a twelve year old boy). Both works present the events through the eyes of an adult reflecting on incidents that happened decades earlier. And both account the life-shattering impacts of simple twists of fate.

I'm an avid fan of Ian McEwan's work, and this novel is a huge step forward for him. I was thoroughly drawn into the world he creates here. The scope of this story is magnificent. He dives deeply, profoundly, and beautifully into "simple" events of British aristocratic life, and, in contrast, paints a moving portrait of the horrors of WW II by detailing a few human survival dramas.

Unlike some reviewers here, I love the structure of the novel and found nothing boring in the introduction. I understand the frustration about the conclusion; still a romantic after all these years, I would have preferred a "happy ending." I think that the choice McEwan made fits the character of the protagonist/antagonist, Briony, and aligns with the theme of "atonement."

It is rare that a novel can envelop you, draw you in, move you, and leave you changed. I have not stopped thinking about this story and these characters for days. I keep thinking "if only..." and wishing that fate had been kinder to certain characters (and crueler to others). For me, this is the impact of a great novel.

I strongly recommend this book. And if you enjoy Atonement, then try reading The Go-Between, which is also a spectacular film with Julie Christie and Alan Bates.

Rating:
Summary: good, but perhaps not his best.
Review: Ian McEwan doesn't write little happy tomes. That's what I like about him. And while this wasn't his best (I'm still partial to his early work) it was an entertaining read. The characters are not overly sympathetic (they rarely are) but the story is a good one and although you can see some of the twists coming, not all of them are apparent.

I enjoy the pace of his narrative, and I don't find chapter breaks bothersome if they leave me hanging, because I've come to enjoy McEwan's style and pace. The layers of his story come together in an almost dreamlike fashion, and sometimes it's not until after an event has come and gone that you sense that things are maybe not what they seem. Again, it's not quite the same creepy level (psychologically or otherwise) as his other books, as you pretty much see what is happening as it happens.

But the fun is in the telling. If you're a McEwan fan you'll enjoy this a bunch. If you are not a McEwan fan (yet) I'd still suggest reading this, but make sure you also read Cement Garden and Comfort of Strangers (and perhaps The Innocent).

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent Story Telling
Review: This is one of the most engaging stories I've encountered in some time -- and beautifully told. It's a little slow going at first, but well worth the effort. Once it gets going, it's compelling reading that's almost impossible to put down. The ending was very controversial among my friends, but I found it a brilliant, perfect way to end the story. It's a terrific read.

Rating:
Summary: Total disappointment!!
Review: Suprisingly dull, completely unsatisfactory! I really wish I had saved my money and my time!

Rating:
Summary: Mesmerizing!
Review: I have always been an Ian McEwan fan, from early works such as "Child in Time" and "Enduring Love" to "Amsterdam", which I believe won the Booker, but in "Atonement" he reaches a new level. I devoured this book in a day! McEwan has always been a master of plot, but here he goes beyond plot, recreating an English country summer in 1935 from the point of view of several members of an upper middle class family. The languor and restlessness of summer, the tedium of an empty middle aged life, the confusion and fear of a young girl on the verge of discovering the mystery of sex, are woven together beautifully, all leading up to the "crime" which nevertheless is a shock. The plot quickly shifts to wartime England, with a riveting telling of the disastrous retreat by the British from France to the beaches of Dunkirk, and the scene at home when the bloodied soldiers return. Fast forward to many years later when the story is finally ready to be told. McEwan is fond of plot twists and little tricks, but the depth and vividness of description makes this far more than a well-written page turner. I won't say more; to reveal anything of the plot would be unfair. Tastes differ, but I cannot imagine ANYONE being bored by this book. I loved it!

Rating:
Summary: Terrific, yet sometimes bloated
Review: Although the author could have lessoned his lenghty descriptive pros in many instances, shortening the middle of the book, it is still a terrific read. I would highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A beautifully crafted downer
Review: "Atonement" is, as noted in the other reviews posted online, a beautifully written novel. The three distinct sections are really set pieces, capturing events that resonate throughout the lives of the main characters. The images of English country life, pre-blitz London and the hospital in which much of the action takes place are as vivid as cinema. (The love scene is hauntingly captured, too.) But this is perhaps the most depressing novel I have read since "Of Human Bondage." Next time I crave an onset of the blues, I'll pick up else something by this craftsman and see if he bludgeons his characters again as he did here. Geez...

Rating:
Summary: False and thoroughly over-rated
Review: Rather than artfullly tell what would be an interesting story, McEwan jerks the reader around. The crux of the novel--a young man's life is ruined by a dreamy 12 year-old's false accusation--is compelling. But the way McEwan spins the story out is at times tedious (full of uninteresting description falsely attributed to the point of view of characters who would be inured to their surroundings and never notice such things) and at other times a tease--he stops chapters and sections just short of what you most want to know to create false suspense. The last section is ridiculous and undermines any interest created in the bulk of the novel preceding it. Atonement is sheer hackery, all the worse for the skillful writing sometimes placed in its service.

If you want to read an interesting and honest novel along the same lines, try Alice Elliott Dark's Think of England, which employs a similar three-part structure to tell the story of a woman coming to terms with a tragic childhood event.

I do understand the appeal of Atonement--it makes the reader feel smart by telegraphing its ideas and enlisting you in its shabby fakery. Word-of-mouth and reviews have fed the frenzy. But don't be fooled into thinking this is anything near a great book.

Rating:
Summary: Atonement:
Review: I approached this book with great enthusiasm and finished it, not without difficulty, with great disappointment. It was boring to say the least. The first 170 pages covered a play, that was not to be, and a migraine headache. Then the grand crime was, at best, the actions of a spoilt brat. The description of the Tallis family was so cliche. The sick wife and mother who accepted her unfaithful husband in return for living the upperclass life. The oldest, too perfect son, who was adored by all, including his siblings. The two daughters, the oldest who struggles with being an academic in the 1930's and the youngest a brat.
After the first tedious part of the book that concludes with "The Crime ". We then have to suffer another 60 pages which are basically a walk of 40 miles through France as Robbie esacapes during the occupation of France by the Germans.
The third part of the book mostly covers nurse training in a London hospital. The now 18 year brat is having second thoughts and wants to make ammends.She punishes herself by training as a nurse, a noble profession, far to lowly for a brat like her.
The book concludes with a soppy chapter about the brat who is now 77 years old. Eventhough she has been told she has vascular dimentia she soldiers on to go to a family birthday party in her honor at, no less , her family home which is now an hotel. Lucky for her it did not become an amusement or safari park like so many other run down manor houses in the U.K.
Boring, boring, boring!!!!