Atonement

Rating:
Summary: This year's THE CORRECTIONS, except even better!
Review: On March 31, 2002, Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT debuted at #4 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction bestseller list, ranking just behind distinctly non-literary fare by Patterson, Grisham, and Steele. The fact that people are buying such a beautiful book as ATONEMENT, in such HUGE numbers, almost single-handedly has restored my faith in the reading tastes of the American public.

READ THIS BOOK, AND LEARN WHAT TRULY GREAT LITERATURE IS ALL ABOUT!!

Rating:
Summary: Youth, time and perception
Review: Atonement is a magical novel, at once a perceptive romp through the lives of several young people one long hot summer in pre-war England, a close examination of the realities of war, and a suspenseful drama. McEwan is at his best in the first half of the book, when he keeps the entertainingly literate thirteen-year-old girl at center stage; his descriptions of her consciousness blooming against the backdrop of a large country estate are a joy to read and the social nuances of the household are exquisite. But time speeds ahead, children grow up, war breaks out and choices are made, particularly as to how a moral dilemma will be resolved. Readers are sure to have different opinions about the ending and I will not give anything away here by commenting on it. While I would not call Atonement a perfect novel, I far preferred it to Amsterdam, which won McEwan the Booker Prize. Here, he is much more playful with his characters and takes additional chances with the narrative structure over the course of its several sections.

Rating:
Summary: Caution: You'll Read It Twice!
Review: Never before have I finished a book and then immediately returned to page 1 to read through the entire thing again. That is what this book forced me to do. The delightful story was worth another trip through to see it again.

I highly recommend this book to anybody who enjoys a great story whether they think that the subject matter is for them or not. Because it consists of interesting and well-developed characters, the resulting story is one that I am confident in saying anyone would be glad that they experienced.

Whether you are propelled through the book by the master craftsmanship of the prose or the suspense of the story, you may read it again to catch what you missed. A fun read, but one you will respect in the morning.

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece
Review: Ian McEwan has sometimes seemed a writer of greater talents than the books he chooses to write allow him to express. His early work, slim, psychologically dense novels of macabre intensity, is powerful and upsetting, but one occasionally wished that he might allow his beautiful writing a wider canvas.

Atonement does this in spades -- it is a love story of heartbreaking intensity, rendered in luminous prose, that simultaneously forces the reader to confront how exactly one responds to fictions of "heartbreaking intensity." Without a hint of ivory tower post-modernism (every bit of this story radiates a devotion to narrative and character), the novel is very much about the nature of fiction. It is as wonderful and powerful a book as I have read in recent memory.

Which isn't to say that McEwan has gone soft on us. Immediately upon finishing the novel I hated it, infuriated and disturbed by the final turn of events. It took a couple days of reflection to realize how much richer this made the book, and I've been pondering it ever since.

Atonement is a masterpiece, a richly imagined and written fiction that probes confidently into the essence of fiction, rending hearts, drawing tears, and prompting much thought and discussion in the process.

Rating:
Summary: A tour de force of characterization and introspection
Review: Ian McEwan's Atonement renders the story of the Tallis family during a crucial epoch-- the interwar period, 1935, just before WWII. The spotlight shines most directly on Briony, the early-pubescent daughter whose household will soon swell with the arrival of new family members. Briony has the insecurity and longings that remind a reader of Holden Caulfield, along with the latter's desire to set things right in her own preconceived way. Briony dreams of becoming a novelist but will later become a nurse to "atone" for the sins of her actions that lead to unintended consequences. In fact, true to the book's title, its characters in general atone in various ways for the often disastrous outcomes of their actions.

Besides the depth of character development in the book, we the readers are also treated to a marvelously vivid set of images of a world gradually hurtling toward war. There is Briony's stripping in the fountain for Robbie Turner, and the latter's desperation several years later at Dunkirk, waiting in terror for an uncertain rescue as the Nazi death trap closes in around him and his compatriots. A worthy and in some ways superior follow-up to McEwan's Amsterdam.

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Summary: Can a writer achieve penance and atonement through writing?
Review: While Ian McEwan's novel seemingly centers around one day and evening when a series of unfortunate events cascades into tragedy for one family, this is only one layer in this mesmerizing book. Below the surface are questions about sin, human fraility, love and, finally, atonement. At the heart of the book is a young girl names Briony and her unformed views of the world which lead her to unfortunate conclusions. As McEwan describes her perspective: .."her life now beginning had sent her a villain in the form of an old family friend...that seemed about right- truth was strange and deceptive, it had to be struggled for, against the flow of the everyday..."
Until I encountered this book, I had begun to wonder if there was truly anything new and original to be read in literature - or only a rehash of themes that had already been worked to death. But McEwan's book not only kept me glued to my seat until I'd finished every last page and read every single word (but slowly, so I could savor the best lines), but made me rethink my beliefs. It made me think about not only love, family ties and betrayals and truth versus fiction but left a reverberation that continues to echo through my days. If this sounds overblown and sentimental, I urge you to read this book yourself before coming to any judgments.

Rating:
Summary: Be prepared to stay up late!
Review: Though this book is only of average length, it has the feel of a big family saga, so completely does McEwan delve into the consciousness of his main characters as they attempt to cope with the long-term repercussions of a "crime" committed by a Briony Tallis, a naïve 13-year-old with a "controlling demon." Briony's "wish for a harmonious, organised world denie[s] her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing," so it is doubly ironic that her attempt to "fix" what she sees as wrongdoing involving her sister and Robbie Turner, a childhood friend, becomes, in itself, a wrongdoing, one she feels compelled to deny and for which she will eventually attempt to atone.

Opening the novel in 1935, McEwan creates an intense, edgy, and almost claustrophobic mood. England is on the brink of war; Briony, a budding writer, is on the edge of adolescence; her newly graduated sister Cecilia is thinking of her future life; and Robbie is about to start medical school. The summer is unusually hot. Troubled young cousins have arrived because their parents are on the verge of divorce; Briony's mother is suffering from migraines; her father is "away," working for the government; her adored brother Leon and a friend have arrived from Cambridge; and Briony, an "almost only child," with a hypersensitive imagination, finds her world threatened.

Step by step, McEwan leads his characters to disaster, each individual action and misstep simple, explainable, and logical. The engaged reader sees numerous dramatic ironies and waits for everything to snap. When Briony finally commits her long-foreshadowed "crime," the results are cataclysmic, and the world, as they know it, ends for several characters.

Giving depth to his themes of truth, justice, honesty, guilt and innocence, and punishment and atonement, McEwan uses shifting points of view and an extended time frame. Part I is Briony's. In Part II, five years after the crime, Robbie, now a footsoldier retreating from the French countryside to Dunkirk, continues the same themes, seeing the crimes of war, not only between the combatants but against civilians and, at Dunkirk, by the Brits against each other. In Part III, Briony, atoning for her earlier crime by working as a student nurse, rather than studying to be a writer, brings the past and present together, tending the casualties of war. The ending takes place in 1999, at her 77th birthday party.

This is a totally absorbing, fully developed novel, the kind one always yearns for and so rarely finds! The characters, the atmosphere, the lush descriptions, the sensitively treated themes, the intriguing and unusual plot, and the rare entrée into the mind of a writer, both Briony and McEwan, give this novel a fascination few others achieve. It's hard to put this one down!

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Summary: POSSIBLY McEWAN'S FINEST WORK...
Review: ...and that's saying a lot, because this author has produced some of the most well-constructed, intelligent and -- my opinion -- lasting works of our time. I knew after reading his last novel, AMSTERDAM (winner of the 1998 Booker Prize), that the follow-up would have to be something special -- and this incredible novel is definitely that. I've read that this novel just missed winning the Booker Prize for 2001.

McEwan's characters are, as his readers have come to expect, expertly and completely developed here -- even without one of them acting as the narrator (until the last short section of this novel), it is as if we are INSIDE them, experiencing everything that they experience. Placing these characters within as story that spans more than 60 years of the 20th century, a story that is simultaneously timeless and excruciatingly evocative of its setting in place and time, he has delivered a work that is both immediately entertaining and filled with insight into the human character and struggle.

The author's research into the times covered by the book -- especially of the British experience of World War II, both at home and in the European theatre -- adds immense vitality and meat to his story. The horrors and emotions, the physical and mental suffering, and the pain and death of WWII are brought to life in such a way as to break your heart. The characters' actions -- and their consequences -- played out in these surroundings bring out facets of their humanity that have many revelations and lessons for us.

The young girl who sets things in motion -- thirteen years old at the outset of the book -- is Briony Tallis. Her family is well-off enough for them to live comfortably in a large house in the Surrey countryside. The youngest of three children, she is adored by her siblings and parents (although her father is a rather distant, frequently absent figure). She is intelligent and precocious, writing stories as a form of personal expression, which are well-received with kudos from her family. One day in the summer of 1935, she witnesses events she does not understand -- she is a child, after all, and lacks the emotional tools with which to deal with adult situations. Her reaction to the event is understandably skewed -- but it is her subsequent lie that sets the story rolling. The consequences of her actions change the lives of all those around her -- and her own as well -- forever. McEwan skillfully employs Briony's writing efforts to show us -- and Briony -- the power and responsibility that it embodies. By the story's end -- and I'll give away no more about the plot, you should savor it for yourself -- I was incresingly unsure what was real and what was a product of her fantasies and imagination.

The book is of moderate length -- at 300 pages -- but a quick, stimulating read. While it is very revelatory about human nature and the struggle -- internal and external -- of good and evil, it is extremely entertaining and compelling, another lasting literary contribution from this talented writer. Some of his other novels -- all of which I highly recommend -- include THE CEMENT GARDEN, THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS, THE INNOCENT, and THE CHILD IN TIME (winner of the Whitbread Prize in 1987). His writing is filled with darkness as well as light, always intelligent -- one of my favorite writers.

Rating:
Summary: so disappointing
Review: I was so excited by the prospects for this novel, I ordered it from Amazon.UK. What a disappointment.The McEwan prose style is in full flower but the composition of the novel left me underwhelmed. The three principal aspects of the story are interesting in themselves but the novel felt like three novellas put together to form not a coherent story but something like a pastiche. The ending (I won't commnet!) has a bit of a contrived POMO feel to it...

Rating:
Summary: A Virtuoso Work
Review: I think, at first, some people may be put off by the protagonist of Ian McEwan's wonderful novel, "Atonement." A precocious, privileged, thirteen year old dramatist may not seem like the perfect person to narrate this story, but believe me, she is.

Briony Tallis is an overly-imaginative young woman who keeps her eye glued to too many of the happenings in the large English country house where she lives. And there is a lot going on in this house which Briony doesn't completely understand. When she falsely accuses an innocent man, both his life and hers will be forever changed.

Briony can't really be blamed for her overly active imagination or for her propensity to see things that really are not there. She is the offspring of a mother who spends most of her days in bed and a father who can't be bothered to leave London and his mistress. Briony's older siblings are the "adored" children in this family and the ones who get what meager attention their divorcing parents dole out. Briony turns to the writing of plays to gain attention and gain attention she does, though not in the manner in which she expected. This book is, most certainly, a first-rate page-turner.

"Atonement" is a book written in three sections that cover a span of sixty years. The first takes place on a hot summer's day in 1935. It is in this section that a crime occurs and lives are forever changed. There is so much tension in this first section (and, strangely enough, this is the longest section), that the pages simply fly by. Before you know it, you are reading the second section, which takes place several years later and in a different setting (Northern France) and focuses on the primary male character of the novel, Robbie. The third section brings us to an elderly London writer on the eve of her birthday and offers several surprises.

The second section of the book, which takes place during WWI, details very graphic images of war. Having never been in a war, I can't vouch for the accuracy of these images but they certainly seem alive enough. There are horrific images and heroic images alike and both seem equally integral to the story being told.

McEwan has devised an ingenious ending for "Atonement." I am not sure all readers will like it. I think some will wish it had been a little different than what it was. I had mixed feelings about the ending and the surprise it afforded. On the one hand, I enjoyed it, but on the other, it made me distrust the entire story...just a little.

"Atonement" is a more complex work than McEwan's previous books. There are more strands interwoven into the braid of the plot. Yet, McEwan resists the urge to become dark and melancholy; "Atonement" is a book that contains all the energy and fire of his earlier achievements. It is a wonderful book, filled with believable characters and meticulous research. If you choose to read it, I don't think you can go wrong.