National Bestseller Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose. On a hot 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 … Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’ s incomplete grasp of adult motives–together with her precocious literary gifts–brings about a crime that will change all their lives. As it follows that crime’s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.
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I never did sort out my feelings about this book. It was so morbid, I wanted to stop reading. Yet, I could not stop reading. They say that forgiveness is for the forgiver. I guess she deserved the cloud under which she lived and the misery that surrounded her. Jumping to conclusion and having an overactive imagination are terrible things and can ruin lives, which Briony (?) does: Misunderstanding after misunderstanding.
It was gloomy. I didn’t allow myself to feel sorry for her.
The atonement in this book is reserved for the hopeful reader rather than for the villains. The highly-talented author makes us atone for our sins of too-often accepting contrived, happy endings by delivering a contrived, sad one after first ensnaring us in hopefulness. There seems to be no place for neutral readers, who appreciate a natural realism, in a work that strikes me ultimately as a well-executed war against optimists. The moral I come away with is the same one voiced in Barry Manilow’s song “Copacabana” (don’t fall in love :-). But Barry’s catchy, short story was a lark for the audience, rather than a large, doomed, emotional investment.