Atonement

Rating:
Summary: McEwan's Masterpiece of a Love Song
Review: This novel is an inspired confluence of traditional English novel with a deft and underhanded post-modernist fiction. At the core is an involved tale of a young girl's mistake and how it irrevocably ruins the lives of two lovers. But the novel is, above all, about an act of writing itself, as it is revealed that the events are also fictional constructions of Briony, the elderly writer. This conceit might have turned out facetitious in the hands of a lesser fictioneer, but in the hands of McEwan, it becomes a magisterial, and terribly moving tale of unrelenting love, and how art preserves such a virtue.

Many might complain of the slow beginning. The set up of the novel accounts for 1/3 of the book. For readers expecting white knuckle-inducing turns of plot, the first section will indeed seem tedious. However, McEwan's subtly overlapping narration of disparate characters is masterful, as it captures impressionistic moments distilled through different eyes. He effectively blurs what can reliably be deemed as 'fact', and slyly delves into the process of creating a story. This aspect is enhanced later as we discover that the first part is Briony's submitted novella based on her account of what happened that afternoon.

Then follows the war sections, of the British retreat to Dunkirk in 1940, and the hospital scenes. It is absolutely one of the best and most vivid war-writing I've read. It is mind-boggling how a writer born after the WWII could write with such devastating insight about a war he's never witnessed. The terror of the war, the pain that the soldiers endure are written with sober, but sublimely elegant prose.

The final section of Briony's return to the old house of her crime, in 1999, is slight in page number, but utterly moving. I won't give the story away, but the story reaches an inevitable, moving conclusion, and the last three pages of the novel are the most heartbreakingly beautiful closing pages of a novel I've read in at least ten years. Not only does McEwan give us the conclusion to the story of the characters, but he also validates and rarefies the art of writing as a reason to live, to preserve what is singly important to all of us: love.

McEwan writes all this with grace and understatement. His indictments or blessings are never overt. Whether he's writing about a minute process of cognition, a visual detail, or a contemplation of art itself, his prose is always beautifully measured, intelligent and protean. This novel is a tribute to love. The love between Robbie and Cecilia endures a child's grave mistake and ravages of war, and only through the process of telling a story, McEwan intimates unflinchingly, such a love is preserved in immortality. You won't read a finer, or more moving novel than "Atonement" in 2002. It's a hell of a book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Read
Review: I agree with a previous reveiewer-don't read too many reviews because it may spoil the fun. I read this book quickly and was thoroughly engrossed and enthralled with McEwan's precise, descriptive prose. Even the simplest sentences are strewn together so craftily that I had such solid images in my mind and was lost from MY world for hours. The "war" section was especially gripping, but even the begining, which some think is slow, has beautiful moments of interior dialogue.

It is also a thought provoking novel. It's surprising ending raised more questions than it answered, not just about the characters and plot itself, but also about the nature of writing and narration. "Atonement" lingered in my head for some time after and that's what a good book should do. After having survived "The Corrections" I realized this novel has a perfect pace and length and it's just really well written.

Rating:
Summary: McEwan at his best.
Review: Atonement could possibly go down as one of the best English novel in the 21st century and this will not be an overstatement. The novel is of average length but yet so much was conveyed -- love, jealousy, foolishness, brutality, and of course atonement. The novel itself feels epic because of the scope covered -- from the idlyllic countryside lives of the Tallis' family to war-ravaged France and Britain, and finally to England right before the 21st century.
The central character of the novel is Briony Tallis who, on one hot summer night, committs a crime out of jealousy and foolishness to the hero Robbie Turner. From that day onwards, the lives of Briony, her sister Cecilia, and Robbie are forever altered. Briony attempts to make amends for her mistake but the outbreak of war made it difficult if not impossible.
It's difficult to describe any more without spoiling it for readers. The ending was shocking and sad but ultimately necessary for Briony to atone for her actions on that fateful hot summer day.

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece is too strong a word
Review: This book has been hailed as a masterpiece but I found it a bit disappointing. Sometimes I wish the 'hype machine' would go away ... I found the first part of the novel to be too long, a lot of build up that I don't think was necessary. The story itself is a good one and does leave one pondering truth and lies and how our actions affect others ...

Rating:
Summary: Should have won the Booker
Review: Winner of Britain's 1998 Booker prize for "Amsterdam," Ian McEwan narrowly missed winning again for "Atonement," a novel of breathtaking reach and grasp, power and subtlety, as perfectly structured as a Michaelangelo sculpture. Last year's Booker winner, Peter Carey's "The True History of the Kelly Gang" is a fine, entertaining, really good novel, but not a patch on "Atonement." It's difficult to reign in the hyperbole in discussing this masterful, riveting, incisive book, but I'll try.

The story is told in four very different segments. The long first section is set on the Tallis family's comfortable country estate in 1935. At its center is Briony Tallis, 13 when the story opens, 77 at the novel's close. The second section jumps to 1940 for a graphic, heartrending depiction of the rout at Dunkirk from the viewpoint of Robbie, a family protégé and gardener's son, and the third returns to Briony, a trainee nurse in a London hospital, awaiting the Dunkirk evacuees. The last section, narrated by Briony, reflects on the past from the vantage point of old age.

As the story opens, Briony, the youngest of three children, and a prolific short story writer, has turned her hand to playwrighting to celebrate the coming visit of her older brother, Leon, and involve some cousins displaced by their parents' impending divorce. But complementing Briony's vivid imagination is a passion for precision and order and directing the recalcitrant, even manipulative cousins, into her meticulous vision proves an unwieldy challenge. "The self-contained world she had drawn with clear and perfect lines had been defaced with the vague scribble of other minds, other needs; and time itself, so easily sectioned on paper into acts and scenes, was even now dribbling uncontrollably away."

While she is wrestling with this frustration, Briony views an incomprehensible scene from the window: her older sister Cecilia disrobing and jumping into the fountain while her old childhood friend, Robbie, looks on. The scene spurs Briony's imagination while the cousins rouse her ire and finally she abandons her play, ticket booth, posters and all and runs outdoors to take her frustrations out on the shrubbery. Wit and despair spark off one another in McEwan's acute portrayal of childhood intensity.

"It is hard to slash at nettles for long without a story imposing itself, and Briony was soon absorbed and grimly content, even though she appeared to the world like a girl in the grip of a terrible mood."

But, tiring of her heroic fantasy with the nettles, Briony returns to herself, more freighted with melancholy than before. She decides to stand on a small bridge until something happens. With perfect irony, McEwan foreshadows disaster: "She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dared to dispel her insignificance."

The reader knows disaster is coming, but what, exactly, remains a mystery. Given Briony's dramatic capriciousness, it could be anything from murder to adolescent embarrassment. We know only that it reverberates down the years through Briony's life. And when at last it stands revealed in all its naked avoidability, McEwan jumps abruptly, jarringly, into the maelstrom of war and defeat.

Where the second section pins the reader in the horror and immediacy of Robbie's every intense moment, the first section roves from one viewpoint to another, riffling through the thoughts and feelings of each character and reflecting the characters in each other's eyes. There's competent, diplomatic Cecilia, flustered and preoccupied with Robbie's stiff behavior, and her mother, Emily, half bedridden, ineffectual and given to fusses but with a sense of herself as the matriarch with an internal finger on the pulse of the entire house, the cousins' bewilderment and insecurity, Leon's easygoing malleability, his tycoon friend's desire for a war to ensure the success of his coated chocolate bar and ardent Robbie's class uncertainties and intellectual confidence.

Psychologically nuanced, there isn't a wasted word, though the writing is not spare. Every sentence furthers the reader's understanding while moving the characters forward in their own groping self-actualization and misapprehension. At the core it's a novel about atonement, about forgiveness and unforgivability, about how some things cannot be undone. It's also a novel about love and war, emotion and intellect, society and the often clueless world of one's own head, childhood and adulthood and the gulf between. It's a novel about the process of writing, of imagination, of misunderstanding. It's an ambitious beautiful book, which succeeds on every level. You won't want it to end.

Rating:
Summary: Quite an achievement!
Review: There was a point, as I was reading this novel, where I fully realized what it was that McEwan was doing -- an "aha" moment. It happened for me when Briony receives a letter from a prospective publisher ... McEwan's brilliance as a writer is that he helps me, and other readers, understand the importance of fiction for the writer, and there is no book that does it better than this one. Since I don't want to spoil the realization for those who haven't read it, let me put it this way: if you write, or want to write, fiction, then read this book.

As to the story, there is a building menace all through part 1 of the novel, and then each succeeding part adds to the consequences of the first act. Briony's interference in other people's lives causes every other action in the book, and, in a way, this novel reads like a classical tragedy. Except perhaps, that as an audience member myself, I felt exhilarated rather than cathartic at the end.

I disagree with those who see this as a departure from McEwan's other work -- I see it as the logical endpoint of it. I'll be very curious to see where he goes next. Another sidenote: As much as I admired The True History of the Kelly Gang, it is a travesty that Atonement did not win the Booker Prize (yes, I liked Seiffert's work, but this is the best of the group).

Rating:
Summary: S-l-o-w beginning splendidly overcome
Review: The first 50 pages or so of this excellent novel move at a snail's pace, but this is readily forgotten (and forgiven) by the end. McEwan just keeps getting better and better. Captures the flavor of England at various times and in various places (country house, hospital, with the BEF in France at Dunkirk). One of the best books of the year. Fluently written, excellent characterization and dialogue, explores larger themes without pontificating about them.

Rating:
Summary: Speachless
Review: Buy this book and find yourself a well lit corner and start reading. Do not read any more reviews; too much information. I had no idea what I was getting into and as I turned each page I had to train my eye to stick to the sentence I was reading and not skip ahead. I won't say another word. The author should feel very proud of his work.

Rating:
Summary: A deep and disquieting novel of unusual power.
Review: Ian McEwan's new novel, "Atonement," starts out quietly. The time is the summer of 1935, and we meet the Tallis clan, a wealthy British family living in the countryside. McEwan skillfully describes how certain key members of the household think and feel about their lives. Thirteen-year-old Briony is lively, imaginative and spoiled. She is desperate to be the center of attention. Her older sister, Cecilia, a recent Cambridge graduate, is undecided about her future. Their mother, Emily, whose husband neglects her, is often bedridden with severe migraines.

Robbie Turner is the son of Grace, a servant of the Taliis family, and he is also a Cambridge graduate. Robbie and Cecilia have always been friends, but their relationship is about to change. This new relationship, along with a series of unfortunate events, leads a member of the Tallis family to commit a terrible wrong. This act will have a devastating effect on the entire Tallis family for the rest of their lives.

McEwan captures small events that speak volumes about the characters. For example, there is an angry scene between the cook and Emily Tallis, in which Emily orders the cook to change a menu that she had slaved over on a wretchedly hot day. The anger and intensity that is generated in this scene says a great deal about the way many wealthy British people viewed their servants in 1935. In another scene, Cecilia changes outfits again and again before an evening party, convinced that what she wears will fundamentally change her in some way. McEwan is subtly showing us that the Tallis clan, in spite of their wealth and privilege, are fundamentally insecure and uncomfortable in their own skins. They know on some level that their lives are shallow and meaningless, but they are powerless to change.

The book moves forward through time, following the Tallis family from World War II until the year 1999. The war scenes are bloody and graphic, in marked contrast to the first part of the novel, which was both quiet and understated. The author is showing the reader how the upheaval of World War II brought about an irrevocable change in both individuals and society. No one could possibly remain the same after this monumental conflict.

However, in spite of the change that war brings, certain realities remain immutable. People cannot always gain atonement for the sins that they commit. Individuals may grow and change, and they may find excuses for their misdeeds, but they cannot undo the past. "Atonement" is a novel of astonishing virtuosity, strong descriptive writing and an ending that will shock you. Read "Atonement" and prepare for a journey that will leave you breathless.

Rating:
Summary: Writer in Control
Review: Ian McEwan's Atonement is ostensibly the story of young writer Briony Tallis's need for the kind of control that places her at the center of her small world. And so, when she finds herself able to supply an accounting of events that will determine the future of a number of people, can she resist doing so?
Eleven-year-old Briony has written a morality drama in honor of her older brother's visit to the family home and is impatient to begin rehearsals with three young cousins who are to live with the family for an unspecified time. Alas, the cousins prove unruly as cast members (one even usurps Briony's leading role) and she rejects drama (the genre in which characters speak in their own voices) to return to fiction. Fiction, after all, is controlled by the narrative voice, Briony's voice, and she exercises her control coldly and deliberately as she shapes a version of a rape. Although she senses that her story has taken on a life of its own, unfettered by reality and untouched by compassion, she chooses not to rewrite. The reader may want to view Briony's testimony to the sheriff as confused, not really what she wants to say. But the dramatic form once again defeats her: "Did you see him? "I know it was him." "I didn't ask what you knew. Did you see him?" "Yes, I saw him." And with this lie, this refusal to relinquish control, she consigns her characters to a future not chosen by the circumstances of their lives but by hers.
Robbie, her sister Cecilia's love, is disgraced and imprisoned, Cecilia is embittered and alienates herself from her family, and Briony herself becomes a wartime nurse, a person of healing in her effort to atone for the evil that she has done.
Exactly where and in what form does atonement become present? Briony grows older and achieves literary prominence. As the years go by, she drafts and re-drafts her story of the terrible night of the rape, Robbie's wrenching wartime experiences, Cecilia's lost youth, and she finally gets it right. True? Not necessarily, but right. The way she wants it to be.
So, what do we know and when did we know it? Did we ever penetrate the words to reach the story's reality or are we still to be numbered among the admirers of Briony's--and McEwan's-- writing? I feel awed and sad, exhilarated and a touch cheated. And so, so sorry for Robbie and Cecilia.
Then again, who made me sorry?