Atonement by Ian McEwan Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Atonement
Book Review: If God were a novelist
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Mesmerizing Experience
Summary: 5 Stars
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!
Book Review: A Leisurely Pleasure
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
Book Review: A Nietzschean novel
Summary: 4 Stars
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.