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“On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend. By the end of the day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever and Briony will have committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.”

A says:

**Contains spoilers (,incoherence and unmitigated bias)**

What’s the crime here? Perjury? Hardly exciting --- Opening on 30 August 2008: "Perjury". Only in theatres. Yeah, not exciting at all.

It’s tricky: you get sold to read a whole 500 pages by the blurb on the back cover and you don’t even hope the book delivers --- you know it will. You then get further drawn in by the first few paragraphs with their incisive insight into the human mind (and, for me in particular, into a wanna-be author’s) and you don’t even wish the book sustains it --- you know it will. Unluckily, this one doesn’t do either. Only a few chapters on and Atonement changes from mildly interesting to wildly telenovelaic ---

Follow up:

with its self-absorbed drama and generations-spanning storyline, and war-themed things just don’t inspire me, no. (Although... 100 Years of Solitude is also all of those, yet it never made me feel like I was being taken for a ride; I was just taken, and there were no excuses and it was fun and it was funny with its ambulatory suitcases and mercilessness and town-wide insomnia) So I paused when I got to the middle, sorta skimmed through the following what-felt-like-a-thousand-chapters, and then just read the last. And it didn’t feel like I missed out on anything.

But ain’t that the thing with life, in general --- it’s all about luck. I’m lucky I merely borrowed this one from C.

C says:

**borrows heavily from the Bard of Avon (and snickers to herself)**

I was, having read only this work of McEwan’s, unaware of his regularly-employed dramatic devices, character exposures, thematic progress-- but found myself enthralled. The straightforward prose is the ideal foil for Atonement’s non-linearity, abrupt reverses, and blurring of the imagined and the real. There could be criticism that the writing is contrived, but then again what writing is not even moderately self-aware? McEwan’s mastery of atmosphere is a particular pleasure, as are the attention to minutiae, and the slyly crafty (or the heavy drilling) suggestion that something is in the offing. The ravages of and the strange romance native to war likewise appeal, and certainly the sorrowful aftermath leaves an impression.

One feels slightly shortshrifted as the characters are not fully fleshed out but enough is disclosed to establish preferences. I like Robbie’s arriviste arrogance, less so Cecilia’s snobbery and vacillation (yet she charms), but Briony’s singular malice absolutely antipathetic. If the task of literature is to deconstruct, (that it gets one to ask) and rebuild (as it gets one to formulate answers), then Atonement is a triumph.

Literature on moral inquiries is hardly the cozy cup of coffee, the plump down duvet, the sleepy Sunday. Atonement was a bed of pins and needles, a drink of shards of glass, a Monday morning come too quickly. The read is difficult not because of the text, but its implicit correlate- what one is made to confront and address. How does one bear false witness then render recompense? The work allows for the Shakespearean moment of Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio. But for all the meditation on life’s fragility, the sorrow for the error, and the intention of amendment, the trick device’s revelatory flourish, does not satisfy.

If there is indeed a special providence in the fall of the sparrow, then Robbie and Cecilia unreasoningly suffered for it, and Briony’s fifty years of penitence does not convince. In a story where Memory is itself a key character, the onset of Alzheimer’s disease is not condign punishment for Briony. It is (completely undeserved) blessed relief. No atonement is sufficient reparation for the offense, prompted as it is by the ill-considered declaration, the unqualified mala fide. If justice is to be served, and the book underlines that it is, there are not enough sackcloth and ashes in Briony’s province of regret. Ultimately, we are to find that the accusing finger that wrote finis to prelapsarian Eden bears the burden of le paradis toujours perdu.