Atonement

Rating:
Summary: Patience Rewarded
Review: Here's how I can best illustrate the feeling of reading this book: imagine Game 7 of the World Series, top of the ninth, the home team up by a run, bases loaded, the count is 3-2 to the hitter at the plate. Everyone is waiting for that last pitch to decide the game one way or another. The pitcher gets ready to throw, the crowd holds its breath...and the pitcher throws to first base. Then he walks around the mound to gather his thoughts, has a meeting with the catcher, gathers his thoughts again, shakes off a few signs, and then just as the crowd can take no more, he rears back and gets that last strike and the crowd goes wild.

McEwan is like that pitcher on the mound--so slow and deliberate with the first part of the book that it's like Chinese water torture. The night when everything changes in Briony's life unfolds so slowly that any reader who isn't patient is going to get tired of the book before it really hits its stride. I had to force myself to keep going on faith alone that it was going to get better, that things would start HAPPENING soon, that all this Victorianesque society garbage (where the high drama is what to wear and whether or not to cook a roast on a hot day) would be worth it.

And like the pitcher in my analogy, it is worth it when McEwan throws a perfect strike. The writing is solid, the important characters are well-described and have real flaws, and once it gets going there's the drama pulling me in. I always wanted to know what would happen next. What would happen to Robbie and Cecelia and Briony?

What really got to me was the end. I won't spoil it for readers, but it was so touching that I almost cried. As someone who writes, I can see a lot of Briony in myself and my own work, and her thoughts about writing at the end really gave me pause to take a good look at myself and what I'm doing. The end took me so by surprise and was so satisfying, that I can easily look past any small flaws with this book and give it the five stars it deserves.

If you can get through the first 150 or so pages, the rest is worth it. Don't take my word for it, find out for yourself. You'll be glad you did.

As a little aside, I have to say I'm surprised this book did not win more awards. I read many recent Pulitzer winners like "Middlesex", "Empire Falls", and "Kavalier and Clay", but none of them satisfied me on such an intellectual and emotional level. If you wanted to go find my reviews of all those (which you don't), you'd see that all of them, while great books, had minor problems that couldn't be overlooked. Other than the slow beginning, however, "Atonement" has no real problems for me in its plot or writing style. If my opinion mattered for anything (which it doesn't), I would have given it a Pulitzer without question.

Rating:
Summary: Unforgiven Atonement
Review: Unforgiven Atonement

Atonement \e-ton-ment\: To do something to make up for a wrong done. Ian McEwan's Atonement is a wonderful novel of childhood and adulthood, guilt and forgiveness, love and war. He ties all of this together in an extraordinarily ambitious way. He grabs the reader's attention and keeps it throughout the novel with imagery that is luminously real. With brilliant imagery, McEwan depicts life during WW11 to the closing of the twentieth century.

This novel is true to its title. It's about actual Atonement. The main character, Briony Tallis, sees a crime as a youthful girl. Her overactive imagination and longing to mature leads her to make up a story, instead of telling what she really saw. This crime brings about chaos in her life, as well as the lives of the family and friends surrounding her. This crime lives on in the hearts and minds of everyone. This one incident splits the family down the middle. As Briony ages, she spends the rest of her life trying to atone her crime.

The novel opens up in "another beautiful day in London" of 1935. McEwan starts out describing the mansion where the Tallis family lives. Briony's thoughts on the house are very detailed. "Their room was a pitiful mess of clothes, wet towels, orange peel, torn-up pieces of a comic arranged around a sheet of paper, upended chairs partly covered by blankets and the mattress at a slew." With this gratifying depiction McEwan leads the reader to believe they are in the very room. In the second part of the novel, the setting changes to the heat of WW11. Here, the author depicts the horror of war. "When they reached the level crossing, after a 3-mile walk, along a narrow road, he saw the path he was looking for meandering off to the right, then dipping and rising toward a copse that covered a low hill to the northwest." Vigorous detail like this makes the novel interesting, and somewhat moving. At the closing of the tale, the story jumps forward into the end of the twentieth century, where the story comes to a close.

The characters in the story are unbelievably life like. The reader gets insight on each of the characters inner thoughts and struggles. All of the characters have flaws, some more obvious than others, yet they're all still present. Briony wants passionately to grow up, and be considered an adult long before she is actually ready for the responsibility, making her very confident. "She had no doubt. She could describe him. There was nothing she could not describe." Lola, Briony's cousin was the one whom the crime was committed against. Lola is a strangely interesting character. "Nothing much was ever required of Lola after that, for she was able to retreat behind an air of wounded confusion, and as a treasured patient, recovering victim, lost chilled, let herself be bathed in the concern and guilt of the adults in her life." She hid behind a wall, not wanting to express herself, not letting anything out, just bottling it all up inside of her. Yet, she does not stay this way, nor does Briony. In the second part of the novel, during WW11, Briony is a young nurse. She has matured greatly, and she's ready to atone her crime. "Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream of consciousness?" As the novel progresses, Briony's maturity and longing to be free from this lifetime of guilt also progresses. "How could that constitute an ending? I'm too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion." Briony is a very dynamic character. She has so many different moods and thoughts, all complicated and each intricate making the story believable.

The diction used throughout the novel is extraordinary. The use of extensive vocabulary makes this book an adventure. His use of metaphors and similes makes the book peculiar and textured. "The agreeable nullity of Leon's life was a polished artifact, its ease deceptive, its limitations achieved by invisible hard work and the accidents of character, none of which she could hope to rival." The imagery in this book paints a perfectly detailed word picture in the readers mind. "The island temple, built in the style of Nicholas Revett in the late 1780s, was intended as a point of interest, and eye-catching feature to enhance the pastoral ideal, and had of course no religious purpose at all. It was near enough to the water's edge, raised upon a projecting bank, to cast an interesting reflection in the lake, and from most perspective the row of pillars and the pediment above them were charmingly half obscured bye the elms and oaks that had grown up around. Closer to, the temple had a sorrier look: moisture rising through a damaged damp course had caused chunks of stucco to fall away. Sometime in the late nineteenth century clumsy repairs were made with unpainted cement which had turned brown and gave the building a mottled, diseased appearance." With only words, McEwan has the ability to strongly persuade opinion.

Ian McEwan's style is precarious. He manages to take a story without much plot and make it riveting. The movement of the story is not in the plot; it's in the characters and the way McEwan jumps between the characters and their inner thoughts. The characters themselves reflect his style. Briony changes many times throughout the novel. At one point she works as a nurse, taking long shifts, making her delusional. This makes her narrative unreliable. Most of the characters have an inner conflict, external conflict, or both, making their narrative partial. The book consists of much imagery, with a very subtle, devious plot. The imagery foreshadows the plot, but not the first time the book is read.

The book is very interesting, but definitely not for everyone. The author's extensive knowledge of vocabulary makes the novel difficult to read. The story takes surprising twists and turns, keeping the reader attached, and on edge. The book is hard to follow, but when everything comes together, the story becomes intense.

Rating:
Summary: Intimate Portraits
Review: What amazed me most about this book was the level of intimacy within each narrator-particularly the voice of the adolescent Briony and her skewed perceptions of adult behavior. Once again Ian McEwan illustrates the human condition with great eloquence and precision.

Rating:
Summary: A tremendous disappointment!
Review: I picked up this particular book, because one of my favorite novelist, Chris Bohjalian, recommended it at a book signing. I found the book difficult to get through and considered abandoning it altogether at times. I kept waiting for an unforgivable crime to take place, and when it did, it was hardly unforgivable, as it was committed by a 13 yr old girl. As such, the "atonement" failed to live up to the title. Although the book has literary value, I would not recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Formal and Elegant
Review: "Atonement" isn't the "type" of book I usually enjoy. I'm much more prone to choose a very interior, almost claustrophobic book that takes me deep into the heart and soul of the main character. I found "Atonement" so engrossing, however, that I read the entire book in one day, something I usually don't do.

While most books can be described as either plot-driven or character-driven, I think "Atonement" achieves a wonderful balance between the two. While "Atonement" is definitely not a "page-turner," plot never takes a backseat to character in this book. And, conversely, character never takes a backseat to plot, although, in keeping with the book's cool and formal style, we are kept rather distanced from the characters.

"Atonement" spans sixty-four years, from 1935 to 1999, yet the book is seamless and flows perfectly. McEwan chose to write "Atonement" in a very elegant and formal style and I think his choice was perfect. Subject matter such as that dealt with in "Atonement" could so easily slip into melodrama. McEwan, however, always keeps everything perfectly controlled and definitely understated.

While I thought the understatement in "Atonement" to be a perfect choice, it did create a barrier that kept me from empathizing fully with Briony or any of the other characters. I didn't find them unlikeable, I just felt I couldn't get to know them. I never really became a part of their world, yet for me, that did nothing to detract from the book.

I've heard several people complain about the ending of "Atonement." Some felt cheated or tricked. Personally, I loved the ending of this book and can't imagine McEwan writing it any other way. What I disagree with is the fact that the book is "multi-layered." If pressed, I don't think many people could explain what they mean by "multi-layered." This book definitely was not "multi-layered." We are given Briony's story and Briony's only.

I have to applaud McEwan for not judging his characters; for not using his book as a forum from which to make moral judgments. This choice left the book a little more open-ended than some readers would have liked, but it added a poignant, fatalistic quality as well that I found lovely.

"Atonement" is a beautiful book. It's elegant, formal and very highly polished. I think it's definitely McEwan's best and most ambitious work to date.

Rating:
Summary: Affecting and thought-provoking
Review: Wonderful! This is a book that must be read to its conclusion to be fully appreciated. I must admit that at several points McEwen had me wondering where he was going, but the ending tied everything together and even addressed some of the more frustrating aspects of the book, to my full satisfaction. I'm still pondering the book's central questions: is it ever possible to fully atone for one's ill-thought-out acts, even if one was too young at the time to fully understand the repercussions? Can story help us heal? Is fiction powerful enough to change the past, for those who remember it? There are no clear answers to these questions, but the author does a masterful job of exploring them.

Rating:
Summary: Mistitled, but an interesting read.
Review: Briony was a very naughty and self-centered girl, and she remained that way into old age. At the end of the novel, I think her idea of atoning her "sin" was just an old woman's way to balm her never-to-be-cleared conscious for what she did to her sister and friend. Briony's just a quarter-inch shy of evil and if she hadn't been so "loved" in the last pages of the book - which I think was a device McEwan used in an attempt to tone down what she caused to happen - we'd all have been audibly cheering her descent into dementia.

The book's first section was difficult to get through; Mr. McEwan got too wrapped up in his command of the English language to make it a good read. The second part was good but an unfair LIE to the reader. The third part made me wish I had never started reading it in the first place since I couldn't decide who I disliked more - Briony for ruining two people's lives and living to a ripe old age, or Mr. McEwan for writing "Atonement." And I do think the book was mistitled - perhaps "Atoning One's Sin by Rewriting History" would have been better, but I guess that title doesn't have the same "punch," does it?

Rating:
Summary: Atonement: Not Reading This Book Would Be A Sin
Review: With Atonement, Ian McEwan proves himself to be a master of prose and a premier storyteller. The book's unexpected ending left me with my mouth hanging open and tears streaming down my face. I recommend this book to anyone who harbors an appreciation for high quality literature.

Rating:
Summary: This Book Won Me Over
Review: At first I wasn't sure how I would react to this story, but what a story it is! The first section of the book that details the happenings of a summer night in 1935 is absolutely riveting. It manages to do it even thuogh it is very hard to find a true hero or heroine in the book. The night is a tragic one that leads to false accusations of rape against an innocent man. The rest of the book deals with the aftermath of the evening for many decades.

As the story moves on to World War II and beyond, the story becomes grittier and it eventually challenges you to think about a number of basic values. Values regarding family, relationships and the ability to move on from injustice.

It's a sad book but it will move you to think even though it takes a few pages to get hooked. Once you meet the main characters and get to the first part of the action, you will find it impossible to put down.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written novel
Review: This book is greater than the sum of its parts. You will be extremely rewarded for the time spent with each of these characters. I can't recommend it highly enough.