Forgivable, I suppose. (Atonement - Ian McEwan)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Atonement - Ian McEwan
Date:	19/02/02 (559 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Superb writer.

Disadvantages: The first ten chapters.

Atonement is certainly a lot more substantial than McEwan's last novel, Amsterdam, for which he was awarded the Booker Prize in 1998. No-one is going to read it in an hour, whilst simultaneously conducting a bank transaction over the telephone, as Will Self said he did with Amsterdam.

There are three parts to Atonement. Part One is set in the country home of the Tallis family, on the hottest day of the summer of 1935. Leon Tallis is returning home with his friend Paul Marshall ('the chocolate millionaire'). In honour of this, his thirteen-year-old little sister Briony intends to stage a play wot she has wrote, and hopes to get her cousins 'from the North'
(Lola, who is fifteen, and nine-year-old twin brothers Jackson and Pierrot) to perform it with her. But they aren't enthusiastic - their parents may be getting a divorce. None of this really matters though.

The key characters are Briony's older sister Cecilia and her old schoolfriend Robbie Turner. Cecilia and Robbie have just graduated from Cambridge. Robbie, the son of the Tallises' cleaner, has been assisted financially in his studies by Mr. Tallis (who never quite manages to put in an appearance.)

In the early chapters of the book McEwan explores the points of view of all the characters, setting the scene in a 'thoughtful' (i.e. ponderous) way. For the first eighty-five pages my eyes were glazing over, and I was trying not to nod off while waiting for something to happen.

Virginia Woolf has a lot to answer for.

But when Robbie mistakenly sends a graphically worded note to Cecilia, nosy go-between Briony reads it, and later uses it to devastating effect - doing the dark deed for which she will spend her lifetime trying to atone.

Ian McEwan is a terrific writer, but the themes here seem oh-so familiar. Why is he writing about such old-fashioned stilted English tripe? I asked myself at one point.

Part Two
takes us forward to the evacuation at Dunkirk in World War II, and the terrible chaos as troops tried to make it to the beach.

War. What is it good for? Absolutely millions of novels. If there's one thing as hackneyed as writers writing about writers, it's writers writing about the war. Doing both is asking for a slap in my opinion.

In Part Three, Briony is training to be a Nightingale nurse, and finds herself plunged in at the deep end, having to deal with some terrible casualties following the retreat from France. It's pretty gruesome at times, but also quite moving.

So, to sum up:
for Part One think: Virgina Woolf meets The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley;
for Part Two think: Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; and
for Part Three think: Pat Barker's Ghost Road.

You can hear Atonement on Radio Four's Book at Bedtime, every weekday at 10:45pm until March 8th. It probably won't get interesting until Friday, but insomniacs might like it.

Amazon are selling Atonement at half-price. This isn't a bargain though because books are ridiculously overpriced in the first place.

¶ Hardback... £16.99 ¶ ISBN: 0224062522 ¶ pp 372 ¶ 2001 ¶
¶ Audio Tape £12.99 ¶ ISBN: 0007134290 ¶
¶ Paperback... £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0099429799 ¶ pp 384 ¶ 2 May 2002 ¶
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