Atonement

Rating:
Summary: Fleeing the thriller genre,McEwan creates a literary marvel
Review: A PIVOTAL MOMENT OCCURS IN ATONEMENT WHEN Robbie, a family friend of the Tallises, decides to search for their young missing cousins. He does not want the Tallis family to know yet of his love for their daughter, so he separates from her and sets out through the extensive family grounds on his own.

It is a choice that alters the rest of his life. Part one of the book, that the author builds slowly and carefully, ends with Cecelia Tallis's teenage sister, Briony, testifying that during the search, she witnessed cousin Lola's rape. Robbie is suspect number one.

Atonement finds author Ian McEwan turning from the restrictions of the thriller genre to create a literary marvel. He chooses an initial setting in and around an English Country Home occupied by the Tallis family. It is Pre-WWII.

McEwan ferrets out the anima of his main characters, most of whom undergo radical change by book's end, and not because of the World War. Emily is head of the household, mother to 13-year-old Briony (who is an emerging writer,) Cecelia, and older brother, Leon. Significant guests that fatal weekend include Paul Marshall, who is Leon's wealthy friend, a beautiful cousin named Lola, and the bratty mischievous young cousins. Also present: Robbie, a friend to the family since childhood.

In a romantic episode, McEwan writes an unhackneyed, and appealingly-fresh scene of Robbie and Cecelia making love for the first, awkward, but passionate time. Elegantly done.

Part Two narrates the characters' war service. Part Three concerns Briony's adult life.

In course of the book, McEwan subtly reveals a sibling rivalry theme, and shows the dangers that can spring from snobbery and racism. He also deals with how a writer can attempt atonement for their own misdeeds through writing fiction: surely an unusual theme.

A rich and profound work.

Rating:
Summary: Has McEwan reinvented the novel?
Review: Okay, so now we know that Atonement hasn't won the Booker Prize, but Atonement has won the popular vote. Atonement is a far better novel than McEwan's own Booker winning Amsterdam, and so the publishers must have thought that they had a very good chance of winning (although the bookies correctly opted for Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang). The Booker Prize panel does have a tendency of awarding the gong to writers they feel should win (and not necessarily for the best book). Margaret Atwood has written some fantastic novels, and although The Blind Assassin is very good, it is definitely not her best. The same could be said for Ian McEwan's Amsterdam: Enduring Love was much better, but McEwan won the Booker for his paltry follow-up. Maybe McEwan has been trying to atone since then? Atonement has received a great deal of praise, if only "because it's the kind of novel that wins the Booker Prize", but other critics have suggested that he has done no less than reinvent the novel. But can you really make the 'new' more 'new'?

The novel kicks off with a passage from Northanger Abbey (for which I recommend the Everyman paperback edition, edited by my cousin, Elisabeth Mahoney), although Ian McEwan omits the scenes that prove incontrovertibly that Jane Austen created baseball. You immediately get the sense that this could be a novel about a young girl on the cusp of womanhood who goes around in a state of near paranoia, so vivid is her imagination. It helps Atonement very much that Briony Tallis, the young girl in question, is a wannabe novelist. She has migrated from fairy tales to plays, although her playwrighting career is not destined to last very long (and there may be a few playwrights out there gnashing their teeth at McEwan's apparent denigration of their art, the screenplays he has written notwithstanding). One immediately notices how polished the text is: McEwan has worked very hard on Atonement, and it shows. Amsterdam closely followed Enduring Love and was poorer in comparison. Although the novel starts off in 1935, McEwan seems to be aiming for the timeless, classic touch, rather than just period detail.

Since it's 1935, most of the characters know that something ominous is on the horizon. Jack Tallis is doing his best to prepare for it; Emily Tallis doesn't want it to happen, and Paul Marshall, true to his name, is bellicose and seeks to profit from it, by selling his Amo chocolate bars to the Army. The name of Amo, of course, is derived from the Latin for 'I love', but it sounds like Ammo and looks good in khaki. Briony has her mind totally set on the play she's writing - The Trials of Arabella - and in this, she seems just as opportunistic as Paul Marshall, as she seizes upon the arrival of her cousins to stage her play, never mind that they are distraught by the rather public divorce of their parents. It's here that Briony first encounters the haughty Lola, the older sister of twin brothers Jackson and Pierrot. The twins, it turns out, can't act for fake chocolate, and Lola is indifferent. Also in the house is Cecilia, Briony's sister, and Robbie Turner, the son of the family help, and both these young adults have just graduated from studying literature at Cambridge. Cecilia has always been a bit patronising towards her younger sister's literary talents, but is unaware of how potent Briony's dramatic skills really have become...

Atonement is a novel about 'meaning', in all the perambulations of the word, especially since novels are always supposed to mean something. This is where Ian McEwan is very clever, especially in the way he shows how perceptions change over time, as we grow up. If I do read Atonement again, then I'm sure that I will see new things in it, is an obvious observation. But central to the plot is how limited and personal perception is. There's the young Briony standing at the window, seeing the extraordinary scene of her sister Cecilia stripping down into her undies in front of Robbie Turner, and diving into the fountain. And there's yet another and another scene where Briony observes, but does not see. That our perceptions can be so human, so inaccurate, does tend to throw doubt on the whole nature of reality, and on the very basis of human communication. A literary novel is evident of the human desire to communicate at the highest level. Yet McEwan guides us very carefully - he lets us see what Briony does not. However, there's an unsettling "B.T." within this book, and we're not talking about telecommunications. As Cyril Connolly might have put it, Ian McEwan has put a lot into the narrative concerning the development of the novel in the twentieth century. A lot of critics have read this, and because they like logical conclusions, they believe and state that Ian McEwan has reinvented the novel, and that he's finally found a new valid model to replace that magic realism and 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' stuff. The Author is not dead, since he was God all along, and had a neat line in resurrection, is what they seem to be saying. Yet I would contend that Ian McEwan has ended with a parlour trick along with a parlour entertainment. If critics really believe that what McEwan is doing is all that particularly novel, then they'll get a nasty shock if they ever come across the similar resolution to James Hoggs' 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner'. Atonement is a fantastic, highly stylised read, with a potent erotic charge, and highly ambitious - but McEwan has not reinvented the novel - he's just written a fantastic book.

Rating:
Summary: Very mixed
Review: This novel grew on me. It's the story of Briony Tallis and the central part she played in the injustice done to Robbie Turner - also of the guilt Briony carries with her for the rest of her life.

The first half of the book is set in England during 1935. It then jumps to wartime, and finally to modern London. While there is a great deal to enjoy in this novel - the passages set during World War Two are finely written (both harrowing and moving) - I struggled with the the first half. Initially, I thought that McEwan was writing a satire, either of the Evelyn Waugh type of "upper class angst" novel, or of the Agatha Christie kind of "murder in a country house" thriller. I fully expected to turn the page and find the lady of the house uttering something like, "Oh very well, call the police if you must, but make sure they don't ruin the parquet floor with their muddy boots."

As I read on, I discovered that I'd been mistaken, and that McEwan was (or seemed to be) writing seriously. Although the latter half of the book tries to redeem the former, I still couldn't shake off the feeling that the first half still lets down the novel as a whole.

I suppose that on reflection, you could regard "Atonement" as a very traditional English novel: tragic and important events happen to the well-heeled (even Robbie is accepted into this milieu, as he shook off his poor origins by getting a first at Cambridge, which gives him an automatic entry to "acceptable society"). The working classes do intrude occasionally into the plot, but only as largely unsympathetic two-dimensional characters - the only exception to this is a young French soldier, but being French his exoticism outweighs his ordinariness.

There are interesting examinations of perceptions woven into the plot - chiefly about how we perceive or invent "reality" in our own terms rather than being truly objective, and the dangers this causes, particularly when we act impulsively on our impressions.

In summary, a mixed bag of a novel, with too many faults to deserve the acclaim it's received in the UK.

Rating:
Summary: If God were a novelist
Review: I picked up this good-looking book with no advance knowledge of its plot - just a liking for other works of its author - and I'm grateful for that, and won't give away the story here. I was grabbed by its first description, and held closely throughout. McEwan has created characters who are so fully realized that I felt as if I had known them for years. It's an amazing story, though not at all far-fetched. It's slyly easy to read - think "page-turner" - but it is about vitally important things. In addition considerable historic research went into it, and that's a delicious plus.

McEwan invites you into an English world that you will smell, hear, feel, and taste - and your mind and emotions will be fully engaged. The family has money and servants but this is nothing you've seen on television or the movies. The story is told with discipline and control, and from several points of view. The people are palpably real. It's a tightly organized and satisfying assemblage of the things that matter, among them family life, childhood, debt and obligation, loyalty, imagination, faith and hope, innocence and guilt, love, desire, varieties of destruction - and the urge to make a difference. Finally: war and peace. (In fact, you might be reminded of Tolstoy in more than a few ways.) In addition it's a fierce and moving meditation on the life of the mind and creativity. At the same time, McEwan's powers of description are such that all of your senses are never anything but fully engaged. English country life in the 1930's - a heat wave, and the fragrance of wildflowers, the feel of a silk dress that is sticking to skin, the thick dark of a moonless summer night - through the horrors of the Second World War (Dunkirk most dramatically and effectively) and beyond. It is either sheer brilliance, or a deeply humane urge, or maybe just a workmanlike sense, but McEwan takes full responsibility for each of his characters- and sees them through to the end.

Nearly every page has something unselfconsciously remarkable to think about - or to reconsider. I used my pencil throughout; there is so much that is wise or just plain awe-inspiring in this book. McEwan has accomplished something amazing. I'm telling friends to read the book first, reviews second. The story is so terrific, and so moving and important - and might unfold best for the reader who comes to it blissfully uninformed. It's not very often that I've felt transformed by a novel. Read it as soon as you can.

Rating:
Summary: Mesmerizing Experience
Review: Ian MdEwan quotes a paragraph from "Northanger Abbey" in the front of "Atonement" which is in effect a messaage to his character, Briony, warning her about the poisonous consequences of unfair judgments and suspicions. I might add another quotation from the same Jane Austen novel: "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
I would not only concur in this statement, but apply it to this novel, which I found an enchanting, kaleidoscopic picture of an English family just before and during World War II, with a brief astonishing addendum in 1999. McEwan uses a broader brush than in "Amsterdam," entering into the inner thoughts of a wide range of characters with such skill and imagination that the reader feels intimately involved with their lives.
It is amazing how McEwan is able to delve into the feelings of a 13-year-old girl - and her vivid imagination - and periipherally into the thoughts of her older sister and mother, as well as the emotions and fears of Robbie as he flees the French countryside to reach the Dunkirk beach for evacuation back to England. Then McEwan moves on to Briony as a student nurse with powerful images of injured and dying soldiers. Here and, in the short afterword, with Briony a woman in her 70s, he captures her with unusual verisimilitude.
McEwan's descriptions of people and places are striking and believable. This is one book I really hated to see end - and I found it hard to stop reading at any point in the narrative. I have been talking about it with friends and my Book Club members - and we'll want to read it as a group and discuss all its ramifications. This certainly should be a Booker Prize winner!

Rating:
Summary: A Leisurely Pleasure
Review: One of the most eagerly anticipated releases of the literary year, McEwan's newest novel once again shows him to be among the most skilled users of the English language alive today. Structurally it is in fact a single story told through three distinct novellas and an epilogue, for reasons that only become apparent at the end, as does the reason for the reminiscences of Woolf. Characterization is another field McEwan excels in, and most of the book's players are superbly believable: Paul Marshall in particular displays a sort of casual venality which would have placed him in good company among those who inhabited McEwan's previous novel, "Amsterdam". And just as he kept us waiting till the end before revealing why that novel was titled "Amsterdam", McEwan makes us wait to learn the exact nature of Briony's atonement.

To some degree, the telling outweighs the tale: this book is a pageturner not because of breakneck action or cliffhanging suspense but because of the care and artistry with which the author crafts it. In the hands of a less talented writer the storyline might prove a bit thin; yet it is the power of the gifted to weave such color and character into a story that its reading can be a leisurely pleasure.

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Summary: A Nietzschean novel
Review: Thanks to graffitti artists of the 1960s, everyone's familiar with Nietzsche's quip that "God is dead." But commonplace as this line once was, almost no one ever went on to note what Nietzsche was really saying. God is dead, he explained, because humans have slain God through indifference and cynicism. On the one hand, that death is an opportunity for great liberation. On the other hand, its enormity can paralyze us with fear and guilt, because now that God has been slain, who will forgive God's slayers? Nietzsche's solution is that the slayers of God must take God's place and recognize themselves as godlike. But this is easier said than done. Divinity doesn't fit most of us very well.

This is the fundamental dilemma that Ian McEwan wrestles with in his new novel *Atonement*. The primary character, a novelist, has spent her life inventing fictional lives and plots. She feels herself possessed with a mighty power, the power of creation--the power, in one way of speaking, of a god. But how can a god find atonement or reconciliation or forgiveness for a deed of hatred and destruction? As the novelist-character says at book's end: "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms." (p. 350)

The plot of *Atonement*, which revolves around the lives of a handful of characters before, during, and after WWII, is the stage upon which McEwan works through the dilemma he poses. Appropriately, perhaps, he offers no resolution. For his implication is that the dilemma is still being lived by our culture: in a day and age in which we've taken ourselves as the ultimate setters of terms and limits, to whom can we possibly appeal for atonement?

This is a novel in the great tradition of philosophical fiction popularized a couple of generations ago by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. Good writing, provocative reflections.

Rating:
Summary: One of his best
Review: This story about the actions of a hurt child stays with you as you see the far reaching and horrific consequences on all invloved. A young girl makes a decision in a moment of selfishness - but hey, what adolescent hasn't? - and this small unretrievable act has momumental affects. No matter what she tries to do - for the rest of her life - she can never undo her wrong. Makes you stop and think. Atonement is beautiful and emotionally haunting novel.

Rating:
Summary: That Girl, That Chapter
Review: This was my second book by McEwan, the first being Amsterdam, which I enjoyed for its topic more than its precision.

What one chapter led me to believe all vanished in its last sentence. For that alone it is worth the read.

However, the book in its entirety is brilliant, with Briony becoming legendary in her childhood event and its lifelong reprecussions.

Read this and ask for forgiveness, or at least write for forgiveness.

Rating:
Summary: Fiction masterclass
Review: _Atonement_ is fascinating curio, not wholly successful but noble in the attempt: a compelling, self-reflexive tale about compelling, self-reflexive storytelling. Its centrepiece is Briony, a shy, withdrawn child who lives in a world of her imagination, and who continues - even after she has left her childhood behind - to make the world around her conform to that imaginary construct. The novel deals with the devastating consequences of her self-delusion, and eventual quest to make amends for her "crime" - to achieve atonement.

The story is masterfully told, from the slow, tense build to the "crime" itself (one fateful night in 1935, Briony self-righteously interposes herself between her elder sister and her newly-discovered love for the son of the family's charlady) to the exploration of its fallout in the subsequent lives of the characters. Occasional false notes (the dubious misture of sophistication and childishness in younger Briony's thoughts, for example) are made neatly explicable by a final reveal, to which I shall return.

There are two points on which the novel snags. The first, to judge by many of the reviews here, lies in what some have seen as a twist: the blurring of identity during the pivotal incident in 1935, and the subsequent (far too late) revelation of who was truly at fault that night. This, at least, seems to me to be a criticism that arises from a misunderstanding of authorial technique. The point is not the sleight-of-hand, but the fact that the characters wilfully deceive themselves into falling for it; to the reader, unhampered by the social and ethical assumptions of the upper-middle class interwar, the truth is surely obvious before the incident even occurs, simply by virtue of the things Briony observes without considering significant. The function of the 'twist' is to be a twist for the characters, not the reader; for the reader, it gives the measure of these people, who are so set in their prejudices that they do not even question the various conclusions they jump to.

The second problem, and to this reader much more serious, lies within the 1999-set coda, and the very title of the novel. Without wanting to give too much away, it is here, not earlier, that authorial sleight-of-hand puts the whole thing in doubt. Briony, now in her 70s, has just finished another (final?) draft of the fiction she has constructed out of the events of 1935, and after; the final reveal of the truth, it is to be her atonement (likely posthumous). Yet even as she acknowledges the impossibility of the author seeking atonement within a story of her own making, she seems blithely unconcerned by the fact that what she has produced is neither atonement, nor the truth. She strives to bolster the veracity of her literary world (even corresponding with a WWII veteran over soldierly turns of phrase in 1940), but alters the emotional truth at its heart. As ever, she obsesses over the details, and misses the larger truth.

Even at the end of her life, Briony is still driven to make life into fiction, to provide a "neater end" - and in doing so, perhaps, misses her atonement. Whether this hollow ending marks success or failure of the novel is hard to judge without knowing what McEwan intended, and perhaps wishing for anything else is simply to fall into Briony's trap of fictionalising life; but, rightly or wrongly, it may be dissatisfying to the reader.