Divinely Human--The Best Book in this Century or the Last

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	• Atonement Ian McEwan Anchor, 2007 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 794 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Nothing extra-ordinary

Let me first be clear about this book. There are good books that become popular and there are badly written ones that sometimes become popular. This book tends to fall somewhere in the middle. I'll not go into too much details of the story.
Briony a thirteen year old girl who fantasizes and desires to be a great writer has an elder sister Cecilia. Her house is a mansion on a big estate. Her father stays away on business and elder brother Leon just returns with his friend Paul Marshall. Author describes the estate in great detail but I failed to `see' it.
The char woman's son Robbie had been looked after by Briony's father and had been Cecilia's friend. Briony watches Cecilia's encounter with Robbie where she emerges wet out of a fountain.
Then Robbie happens to make a mistake and hands over the letter with wrong (ugly) words to Briony to give it to Cecilia. Here, the motivation of the character is a problem. I couldn't understand why he at all did it. The explanation that he wanted to prepare a ground for the party at night felt a little flimsy -contrived.
Briony at her age 13 is jealous of Cecilia and Robbie's closeness.
At dinner time the twin cousins disappear and everybody is out searching for them. While the search party breaks into groups only 13 year old Briony is left alone. A coincidence again? But it was essential to leave her alone because she was the one to see in near total darkness a man molesting her cousin Lola. So another teenager was left in the dark alone for molestation to occur.
Briony never really saw who molested Lola but assumes he was Robbie and becomes the star witness when cops investigate. By the way cops never visit the scene of crime to see how dark it was there.
Cops don't take Robbie to any doctor to perform a physical examination. Instead of going to medical college he goes to jail and then he is a soldier in retreat in world war two.
I loved the graphic description of violence in WW2 but all of us have read and seen WW2 violence in movies so often that it feels like a cliché (except shooting of the horses). In the next section again we read about the hardship Briony has to go through her training as a nurse. But going through the rigors of training to become a nurse could hardly be called a torture of penance. Again, there are so many details that don't seem important to the story. For example, though Briony talking to a dying French soldier is very touching it doesn't do anything for the story. The whole description of what Briony sees on the road when she is walking to meet Cecilia is a lot but it achieves nothing.
On occasion the descriptions of war and rigors of nursing feel like a documentary - a nicely written documentary. Briony's repentance never feels real.
If I focus my attention to the three pillars of fiction - setting, character and the story, I feel the author has done very good job at setting but failed to keep the balance with the other two -65% on setting, 20 % on character and 15 % on story.
Characterization is mediocre and Briony feels like a two dimensional character.
The story is a collection of far fetched coincidences. I was intrigued by the ending. Basically writer wanted to end the book with a tragedy, had second thoughts, so turns it into happy ending, then had third thoughts and so turns it into a tragedy.
And come on. A girl marries her rapist because he is moneyed. Who is going to buy that.
Ian McEwan is good at language. His language flows smoothly. But page after page of a narrative, with very little dialog, made a daunting task to finish the book.Some paragraphs are more than half a page - not acceptable by most editors in this era. I planned to read it in one week but it took three weeks. And I had a lot of time at hand.

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Atonement: A True Story of Love

The book Atonement by Ian McEwan is a riveting story of love and lies. The book's plot is about a young girl named Briony witnessing flirtations between her older sister Cecilia and their gardener Robbie Turner. Witnessing these events unfold a crime that effects every character for the rest of their lives. The author did a wonderful job with the sentence structures and the flow of the book. Each sentence gave a burst of images of what was happening. Reading Atonement gave me the feeling like I was standing right there and I overall enjoyed it.
In the story, Briony sees her cousin getting raped, and because of a previous encounter of witnessing what she thinks as her sister getting raped, she then concludes that it was Robbie who committed the crime. Briony's persistent fantasy then changes the characters futures. Atonement is unlike most romance books. There is somewhat a twist in the end where McEwan grasps the feelings of Briony and how she feels she took away Robbie and Cecilia's life together. This turn of events is unlike any book I have read. The reader never suspects the ending which makes this book an intriguing read for anyone, not just romance novel junkies. In this novel, the readers need to know the characters to fully understand the story. McEwan introduced the characters perfectly where I fully understood every character inside and out. This build up is crucial to fully grasp and interpret the story.
Even with the marvelous attributes, the book does have some flaws. The author uses a style where he jumps around from each characters view. It can get confusing and hard to understand at first, but because he uses it throughout the book the reader learns to comprehend it. I was only confused with part two. McEwan does not tell you that the plot is three years into the future at this point until late in the chapter. For readers like me, this was confusing and lost me until I finally understood what was happening.
I enjoyed Atonement immensely and recommend it to anyone who likes reading romance or drama. I personally see girls liking this book better than boys, but I still recommend it to all. When reading this novel, the reader feels like he/she is standing right there and can relate to the feelings of some of the characters.

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It's all about the details

Details are key. Anyone can tell you that, in any business. Now, in literature it can go a few ways. Lack of details can spark the reader's imagination to put themselves in place of the characters or to personalize the setting. But the right details, it can bring a book to life in a vivid way. Ian McEwan's Atonement is of the latter genre.

Atonement, for those of you who haven't seen the film, is the fateful tale of three young people: 13 year old Briony, her older college aged sister Cecelia, and their gardener's son, also college aged, Robbie. On a hot summer's day in pre-WW2 England, Cecelia and Robbie realize their love for each other and Briony becomes entangled between them. Her desperate and confused accusation against Robbie of a terrible crime sends the three of them on distinct and hard paths. Spanning from pre-war England to 1999, it is the tragic tale of one woman's journey for atonement, and the people who suffer because of her deliberate crimes and confused passions.

The story, all of its twists and turns, made this book wonderful. But the details in McEwan's writing, make this book exquisite. There is simply no other word. One can hear the flies buzzing in the Tallis' garden, one can feel the silk of Cecila's green dress, and one can hear the bombs over France during the war. To be able to create such a vivid picture enhances the roller coaster of emotions brought forth in this book, making it a cathartic experience in the true sense of the word. I read it in one gulp, and felt physically exhausted after finishing after running the gamut McEwan set forth for me in it Atonement's pages.

This is a book to be savored, not to be read in a hurry. And, because I know you wondering, the film is a quite excellent adaptation and beautiful in its own right, but it does not serve as a substitute for this masterpiece. Note for sensitive readers: It has adult subject matter (mostly contained within a few scenes in Part I) and content, and it is definitely not suitable for younger audiences. Beyond those few points, if you are looking for an amazing read that will change your view on all novels, Atonement is that book.

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Divinely Human--The Best Book in this Century or the Last

Ian McEwan's novel ATONEMENT is so subtly constructed, so beautifully psychological, so gorgeously detailed and plotted and real, that it is hard to believe he didn't somehow fish the story from actual life through some sort of fantastic time-traveling legerdemain. The story is of guilt, passion, love, cowardice, redemption--and the occasional impossibility of forgiveness.
The setting: Summer 1935, the English countryside, a place vivid with sunlight and stone and the scents of "dried grasses and baked earth." Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old playwright living on her rich family's estate, hopes that her newly arrived cousins will act out a play--but when her efforts fail and she flees, disgruntled, to wait for an opportunity to make herself affect the world, she disrupts love in its inception. Her older sister Cecilia and the maid's son Robbie are falling in love against their will; Briony's jealousy, intrusions and misconceptions about adult interactions lead her to make a ruinous accusation, bringing about a disaster of moral conflict and calamity which mars all their lives throughout World War II and all the way to the year 1999, when a penitent Briony is dying.
McEwan's writing unfailingly caters to the senses: "a slanting tongue of light," "the leonine yellow of high summer" and "a flavor of green and silver" from the Tallis family's lake are just a few examples of his sensory eloquence. The hospital scenes with Briony as a nurse are particularly affecting. His characterization is so perfect that Briony seems simultaneously human and yet faintly psychopathic, exactly the sort of contrast a writer of McEwan's talent revels in. There are no possible criticisms I can levy here. This is the best novel I have ever read--world literature should be grateful.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment?s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony?s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

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