Atonement

This amazing book reveals how a single mistaken perception, influenced by jealousy, envy, and the snobbery of social class, can wreak havoc on so many innocent lives.

McEwen writes with great delicacy and passion in constructing a story in which it becomes almost impossible to atone for a terrible accusation that cannot be rescinded. 

Atonement is a historical novel by McEwan, also made into a very fine movie with James McAvoy and Keira Knightley. Before you watch the film though (and even if you have), try the book as it’s a different experience (as books to films often are).

This book is really all about stories, narratives, and lies. Set in 1935 and beyond, the protagonist is a young girl Briony – a budding writer from a wealthy family and highly observant kid – who becomes fascinated by her older sister Cecilia’s relationship with local working-class lad Robbie.

The central romance between Cecilia and… show more.

You know those books where you remember not just the plot or storyline, but the actual experience of reading it? Atonement is of those for me.

A sweeping wartime novel, the fate of its characters is determined by the events of a summer party. This was one of the first novels I read where I was repeatedly struck by the writer’s gift of prose and storytelling, so I often come back to it for inspiration.

In Atonement, McEwan got everything right, both at the sentence level and with the story and characters – except, in my writerly opinion, for… show more.

No English novel from the last hundred years impresses me more than this one.

It’s the story of thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, daughter of a landed British family, and her tangled relations with her older sister—for whom she feels admiration, jealousy, and a precocious but fierce protectiveness. The results are life-shattering.

McEwan shares Hughes’s ability to chart the unruly territory of a child's mind, and he leaves you fascinated and horrified by what can happen when the adult world listens too trustingly to words “from the mouths of babes.”

Atonement is also about writing and the ways written words can both… show more.

Atonement is a heartbreaking portrait of the dark side of an impassioned girl determined to be a writer, who is certain she understands what is going on in the lives of the adults around her, but who makes a terrible mistake.

This novel is constructed for her to tell her story as a way to atone for her naivete and her brutal lie. Devastating and a masterpiece. 

McEwan is a modern master, one of the few we have. And like most true masters, he’s often flawed. Not every sentence is perfect, his plots sometimes have potholes, and he’s been accused, at times, of borrowing without attribution. But I’ve been reading him for forty years and I think Atonement has a fair claim to be his masterpiece. The novel takes place in three time periods – 1935, the Second World War, and 1999 – and traces the implications of child’s misapprehension in witnessing a sexual encounter. The novel was published in 2001 and I suspect that some ideologically-minded… show more.

I have a hard time separating this book from its movie. But despite how visually stunning the film is, it can never do justice to the complicated relationship between precocious, wrong-headed Briony and her older sister, Cecilia in the same way as McEwan’s prose. It’s difficult to understand, until the end, that it’s not just Cecilia’s life—along with that of Robbie, her friend and would-be lover—that is turned upside-down by Briony's accusation. 

Set in WW1 this novel stirred up many emotions and I even shed some tears. There is so much in this storyline that appeals to me, the futility of war, one’s ability to forgive, and how just one lie can change a person’s life forever. The first few chapters might seem a bit slow but life was at a slower pace before 1914 and this is where you become well-acquainted with the characters. The vivid portrayal of the chaos and trauma of war shows that the author really did his research. Long after I finished reading this book my mind… show more.

If you’ve only seen the movie version of Ian McEwan’s World War II drama, you’ve done yourself a great disservice. The 2007 film directed by Joe Wright was wonderful, but the 2001 novel is divine. The sweeping story begins at an estate in the English countryside where two horrific crimes take place: In the first incident, a young girl is attacked; in the second, a 13-year-old girl with great imagination and literary ambitions accuses the wrong person of the crime and thereby sets in motion a series of events that haunts her for the rest of her life. 

I could relate to the character who did something wrong in her past and only later realized its consequences. I think we all have done something we later regret, and the challenge is to find a path to redemption, which I believe requires forgiveness. We may have to forgive someone else whom we blame for our actions, and we always have to forgive ourselves. For most of us that’s not easy.