n  

n    “Was everyone else really as alive as she was? … If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”n  

n

This was a book I never thought I would ever pick up - or, at least not anytime soon. When I was younger, I watched the movie because a friend said it was her favorite movie (and also because I loved James McAvoy). I was too young to understand the beauty of the story - of all the things that made it real and raw and made parts of younger me shy away. I ended up really disliking the movie being a lover of … a different kind of ending. (I also distrusted and disliked Saoirse Ronan for years but that’s not important). I forgot about the movie and the book until years (we’re talking years) later, I ended up staying with that best friend for a few nights and she, once again, mentioned her love of not just the movie, but the book. She called it her favorite book. Naturally, I had to give it another try.

I’m so glad I did. This book was slow and painful and frustrating and just so real in a way I haven’t experienced with a book in a very long time. I’ll admit (and this is important to note!) the book starts out incredibly slow. I mean painfully slow. I think the main reason this isn’t five stars (jury’s still out, I’m tempted to change my mind update: I did indeed change my mind) is because of how slow it was. Already colored by my childhood dislike of the movie, I nearly put the book down. But then I came onto Goodreads and saw so many people mention the same complaint and telling readers to push through. And here I am. There’s a reason the book starts off so slow (to the point where I was constantly putting it down. It was engaging but also not. It was confusing to feel all this but I wanted to keep going). When you finally understand why the book starts the way it does, it makes you appreciate it (and hurt a little … no, a lot). Briony is trying to remember everything, every single detail, to make up for the time she didn’t but also to prolong the time before it gets to her unspeakable deed. You feel the dread as the moment comes closer.

“The interminable pages about light and stone and water, a narrative split between three different points of view, the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen—none of this could conceal her cowardice. Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream—three streams!—of consciousness?”

Basically what I’m saying is, push through the first third, it gets better.

I woke up super early this morning and found myself tempted to go back to sleep. Somehow I ended up picking up Atonement instead. I figured I’d read a few pages in bed and fall back asleep. It’s 2:37 pm and I’m writing this review shortly after finishing the book. Yeah. Somewhere during my reading, towards the end, it started to rain (it’s still raining as I type this). Somehow, this feels really fitting. I can’t tell you why or how, but the feeling that rain brings to the world is how I felt finishing this book. Atonement is artfully written in a way that I’ve never seen another book do. I never thought I could stop hating or forgive Briony after watching the movie so long ago. I don’t know if I forgive her, but I don’t hate her and, at the very least, I actually understand her. It is entirely different watching the movie vs. reading it happen and I started reading with my anger already in place. Every section and perspective was unique and painful and raw. I felt the emotions. I felt Briony’s self-righteousness, Robbie’s anguish and constant need to survive in order to get back to Cecelia, and I felt Cecelia’s love and anger and bitterness. I felt all of it and actually knew what happened before Briony tells us in the end. That was beautifully done. I remember finishing Robbie’s section, shutting the book, and pretending I was okay. I remember the anxiety and stress and terror and horror I felt when the soldiers were brought into the hospital Briony was at. I felt all of that. And more. Atonement also ends in a way I never thought I would like but was left pleasantly appreciative of (and by that I mean there are tears in my eyes).

Atonement was real, even in the parts where it wasn’t. Especially then. You’ll understand what I mean when you read it. And the way it sort of came full circle had me in tears. The book left my heart aching but also hoping. It makes you really really think about life and the decisions one makes in it and how it all impacts everything.

I’m so glad I decided to pick up this book. I look forward to other novels by this author. (Update from future Sara: On Chesil Beach did not disappoint.)

Atonement is a post-modernist interpretation of historical fiction. How historical fiction is a kind of double fiction, a fiction within a fiction. Not that McEwan’s intellectual mischief detracts from his gift for storytelling. For this is a compelling and moving story and it’s not until the end that we are called upon to question the roots of storytelling. How all the stories we tell require a measure of illusion to sustain them. And how narrative itself is a selective process – brilliantly exposed here when Robbie sends the wrong letter to Cecelia.
The atmospheric ideal drift of life on a country estate replete with overly familial class divisions quotes early/middle 20th century historical fiction themes with a slightly troubling fidelity to clichéd tropes. For a while it’s almost as if McEwan has gone soft in his old age. But it’s as if he is working his way through 20th century British literature in this novel whose subject, beneath the ostensible one of guilt and atonement, is essentially narrative itself. To the clichéd backdrop of the country estate he brings in Virginia Woolf’s floating impressionistic technique of creating biography, Lawrence’s use of the repressed sex instinct as plot crucible and catalyst and Forster’s showdown moment in the Maribor cave when deep seated submerged prejudice and crowd contagion convince everyone of guilt. It’s almost as if McEwan is playfully writing himself into British literary history.

The second part is all gritty realism – a high definition account of the brutalities of war. One effect of war is to scramble formerly sustaining narratives. This is what happens to both Robbie and Briony. His experience of blame and hers of guilt change. War provides Briony with the possibility of atonement in the form of self-sacrifice and bullies Robbie into understanding that holding one individual to account for his wretched fate is absurd. Both begin to construct a new narrative, no more true perhaps than the former. Because this is a novel about the enormous power but, at bottom, creative inauthenticity of narrative. We believe in what it is necessary for us to believe.

"I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life."
Atonement by: Ian McEwan


Note goodreads requested me to add date finished April 27, 2024 I was able to fid this date in my cloud library history ebook returned!

A spiteful, scheming and vindicative sister, or a naïve, overimaginative, and pubescent teenager, who did something unforgivable?

My first time reading this, I believed Briony to be the former. A clear case of sister rivalry and jealousy that led Briony to make deplorable accusations about her sister, Cecelia’s, boyfriend that would change the course of her sister’s life, and his forever. On reading the second time, I am inclined to be more open-minded to the cause but not the effect and the need for repentance and atonement.

However, the brilliance in this story does not stop with the heavy themes of ‘regret and guilt’. It is a tragic love story, where the grave reality of war is in sharp contrast to the delusional youthful mind wanting to create fiction, where the protagonist seems oblivious to the consequences of her actions. Then again nor did we as readers see the gut-wrenching twist at the end that makes this one of the more powerful novels I have read.

A multilayered complex story of ‘atonement’.

The Plot

The book is told in three parts and opens in the idyllic countryside where a house party is about to begin, and it is our first glimpse of the dreams that the young Briony possesses of becoming a writer. It is also the first time we come to realise that Briony also harbours a childhood crush on her sister’s boyfriend. However, when she stumbles into a room where they are making out and later reads the explicit notes that Robbie writes about her sister, Briony’s underdeveloped emotions and youthful melodrama see her make the most devastating decision when asked who she saw assault her cousin Lola. Unable to make out the real figure, in the garden, and piece together the sexual mystery she has witnessed between Robbie and Cecelia, Briony answers - Robbie. And the result – well Robbie is imprisoned and eventually sent to war.

It is at this point the book switches into a deeper reality and darker mood on the beaches of Dunkirk where Robbie is stationed among the dying and the injured, but his love and Cecelia’s family’s betrayal is never far from his thoughts…

“My story will resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man who once crossed the Surrey Park at dusk in my best suit, swaggering on the promise of life ... I will return, find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame."

Meanwhile, the woman who has stood by him through everything has taken up a post to help the war effort but has never lost faith in Robbie or their relationship.

Years later, we loop back to Briony who has had time to reflect on her accusations and full of remorse wants to put things right with her sister and atone for what she did to her and Robbie. However, can anything this grave ever be unsaid and undone? Will Briony ever get to atone?

Review and Comments

On reading this the second time, I have tried to understand Briony and her actions more. A young girl living in a home where her mother spends endless days in her bedroom and her father whose work takes priority means she is often left feeling isolated and lonely. It is during these impressionable years that parents need to be mindful of the childhood crushes young girls can possess. Yet Briony has no such moral guidance. Add to that the erotic scenes she observes that her young mind is ill equipped to process, understand, and appreciate. So, when she sees the sexual attack on her cousin, she pieces together what she thinks she knows and wrongly accuses Robbie.

This story within a story, brings a powerful message that some things cannot be undone or unsaid and the consequences of either naivety or immoral actions are still the same and it is with this sentiment that I applaud the ending and treasure this book.

A literary feast, a cinematic representation of wrongdoing, a complex multilayered story with incredible messaging. A story that is as innocent as it is condemned, a book about guilt and absolution, naivety, and dishonesty but most of all a tragic love story where atonement is not just about reparation and cleansing, it is also about ‘time’, of not having enough of it.

5 heartbreaking, guilty, remorseful, pubescent, and unforgiving stars.

**NOTE: Spoilers included: I like the experience of reading a book and then seeing the movie, which is why I read this book. Both the book and the movie are highly acclaimed, so what could be a better choice?

I haven’t yet seen the movie since I just finished the book today, but perhaps I should have read "No Country For Old Men" instead.

100 pages into this book, I wanted to just give up. It felt like something that would have been forced on me by high school English teachers, with all the descriptive, flowery language about British aristocratic characters, scenery, and architecture in 1935 that I just couldn’t bring myself to care about. Were it not for the knowledge that Briony was going to commit a crime (based on the back of the book), I would have definitely put it down. Even so, I thought the crime would have been something worse than perjury – taking approximately 170+ pages to build up to the crime better damn well be murder! (joking) – but nonetheless, her crime tore her family apart, which was bad. But still, taking up 170+ pages to describe one afternoon (as many people on this site have noted) was unnecessary. And even though the writing style was beautiful, elegant, etc., it seemed like nothing really *happened;* it was mostly thoughts, memories, and physical descriptions, much of which were irrelevant to the actual plot. Maybe that’s just my preference for reading books in which the characters actually DO something and TALK to each other. I mean, don’t get me wrong, a little description is ok and necessary, but this just took it to the extreme. I know McEwan was just trying to show the depth of the characters at play, thus getting the reader to care more about them and make the impact of what was about to happen more forceful, but he overdid it to the point of making me not care at all. I didn’t think the plot of this book really needed such in-depth description.

However, Parts 2 & 3 changed gears and definitely picked up; it was like reading a completely different book! I enjoyed reading about Robbie’s traumatic escape from France during the Battle of Dunkirk, and Briony’s experience as a nurse tending to the wounded/dead of World War II. Both sections were a refreshing contrast to the superficial, snobbish feel of the first section of the book (not that war is refreshing).

One thing I thought the book was missing and should have elaborated on more rather than the tedious Part 1 was the immediate aftermath of Briony’s crime. After the crime occurs, the plot immediately jumps to Robbie in France during the war, and we are told very little of what happened in the 3 year period of time between the crime itself, Robbie’s prison sentence, and his eventual deployment. We know that Robbie had aspired to go to medical school, but was the outcome of the novel a result of Briony’s crime or World War II? Even if Briony committed no crime, wasn’t Robbie’s being drafted to the war and eventual separation from Cecilia inevitable?

Despite being unsure if the novel’s outcome was the result of war or a childhood crime, unlike what some posters on this site have written, I actually liked the ending. I liked the revelation that the story was a novel within a novel, and an attempt at atonement that never happens in (Briony’s fictional) reality. If Briony had went on to talk to her family, lawyers, and legally retracted her false statement, and then Cecilia and Robbie lived happily ever after and forgave Briony, the novel would have been merely a glorified version of Briony’s juvenile The Trials of Arabella. Maybe it’s just me, but happy, neat endings in movies, books, etc. sometimes just get old. Life is just not that perfect, and the fact is, seemingly innocuous actions in the present may lead to consequences that can never be redeemed.

Overall, the length and weightiness of the first part of the book is why I only gave it 2 stars, but if that section had been condensed into, say, 50 pages or less, I would have given it 5 stars.

4.5-5 stars*

Wow!!!
What a joy and a heartache this book was!
Full Review to come!!!

"Atonement" is a gorgeously written book about perception, social class, love, war, guilt, and forgiveness. The main character is Briony Tallis, a precocious 13-year-old girl, who is already dabbling in writing. With her overactive imagination, she misinterprets the interactions between her older sister, Cecilia, and the brilliant but lower class neighbor, Robbie. When Briony's cousin is sexually assaulted in the dark night, Briony jumps to conclusions and blames it on the man that her sister loves.

As Briony grows older, she realizes her guilt in harming Robbie's and Cecilia's lives. She volunteers as a nurse during World War II as a punishment to herself. Briony writes about her experiences as the broken soldiers are brought to the hospital from Dunkirk. The book also describes Robbie's horrific experiences as a British soldier during the retreat as he marches to Dunkirk.

The final part of the novel shows Briony as an older woman in 1999 who has written a book about her misunderstanding of events when she was a girl. It's to be published after the deaths of all of the participants during that fateful day. Briony has us thinking about the power of the imagination, perception, deception, and the responsibility to make things right. She is using her literary gifts at a third stage in her life to tell us more about the tragic story. "Atonement" is both a superb story about guilt and the need for absolution, and a wonderful homage to the art of storytelling.

Wow, this book was really good but on different levels. The first half gives us an intense story about a family who lives in some kind of a mansion in England. Briony, Cecilia and the other family members are peculiar characters that give you a feeling that trouble is stirring under the surface.
The second half of the book takes a turn for the more serious, and while this part had its enchanting moments, it was the first part I loved the most. Maybe it's because I've watched the movie (which seems to follow only the first part of this novel).
Things wrap up beautifully and leaves you with a feeling of being cheated of the truth. I liked it a lot and found Ian McEwan's story-telling compelling and highly interesting.

n  “The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.”n

It has been a rather turmoiled couple of weeks, and of all reasons other than the second wave of covid, because of this novel. I again took a day off just to recover from the numbness, though every time I glance at the book, which incidentally is right on my lap as I write, I am unsure whether I really overcame it.

Where to begin? I think it will be safe to say this is one of the best written novels that I’ve read, which’s written in this century. And the characters…damn. Though it is looked upon by most as of romance-war genre, (or at least Google says so) I think it’s basically a very microscopic study of the inner turmoil of a precocious pseudo-intellectual and rather stupid adolescent. Well, Briony won’t be called precocious in this century, but suffice it to say it’s quite flabbergasting how much her thinking process is developed at a mere thirteen, though we could’ve done with a similarly well-developed conscience, at times she did seem like a smaller yet masculine version of Ronald Weasley, in the ways she showed off her protectiveness for her elder sister.



The prime focus is on the storytelling, obviously. Just like the numerous references to the classicists, all the words are like a brilliant fusion of the typical styles of Austen in her sarcastic undertone, Virginia Woolf in her stream of consciousness, Conrad in the delineations of the horrors of the battle-field and hospital beds, whereas the atmospheric built-up is certainly a homage to Thomas Mann (I got confirmed by McEwan’s influences’ list). And quite expectedly, there’s multiple shifts in tonality, though it gets significant in the transition from one Part to another. And herein lies the only flaw of the novel: it’s too flawless for its own good, kind of reminds me how Hemingway told after finishing his The Old Man and the Sea that there ain’t a wasted word. Well, I could’ve done with a couple of wasted words in a novel of this size. Anyway…

The interior monologues is another standing point for the novel. However, given that an entire section was devoted to the almost Kafkaesque devastations in Dunkirk and the blood and guts and excrement in the hospital, which is rather splatterpunk too, I feel Cecilia’s character deserved a bit more room, though that thought won’t cross anyone’s mind twice. The coincidences Robbie shared with his Freudian psychology, more than once, are similarly astounding.

n  A bit from my experiencen:(Skip if you feel like it) Just like I had done with Virginia Woolf’s or rather any other novel that’s just as brilliantly written, after reading just a page or two and already been dumbfounded by the fabulous storytelling, I decided that I will read only a bit a day so as to savor the brilliance. That does work most of the times, but after a point, I just gave up and read the remaining 250+ pages within two days.

However, a part of me still wishes that I haven’t read the last three pages. Just because… you know. There’s a sort of feeling, like from the very start of a novel you start to apprehend that the blow is about to come. Then you wait for it for ages, all prepared, and it never comes in a hard-hitting way, so you give a big sigh of relief for a not-so-happy-but-not-too-devastating-either-ending to come, but when it comes, you want to just chuck the book away as far as you can. That almost happened with me, I got numb. I couldn’t fully understand what just happened, and when I did…

I wish I had the spoilers; you know. I was recommended the movie almost since it ever came out, and I hadn’t watched it, or read anything about, well anything at all, so that I have the exact experience of those who read it when it came out at first (the year I was born, more precisely

Sometimes when I write these reviews, especially when they're of novels with widespread popularity and critical acclaim, I start to feel like a real curmudgeon. Is there anything really wrong with Ian McEwan's “Atonement?” Is it not a compelling story well told? Is the writing not clear, succinct, and free of pretentiousness? Does McEwan not draw the reader into a well-imagined world and hold him there until the last page? The answer to all these questions is yes. Yet still, yet still...

Maybe it's all the acclaim that “Atonement” received when first published and the literary prizes it either won or was shortlisted for, or maybe it's the comparison I'm drawing – unfairly, to be sure – with some of the classic novels I've been reading lately, but I just don't see why McEwan's book has been held up as one of the great works of literary fiction of recent years. (Or maybe everything else from the last several years is that much worse?) My chief problem with “Atonement” is it just never feels fully real, like great novels do. I could never picture Briony, Cecilia, Robbie and the book's other characters existing beyond their words and actions on the page. They never become something more than characters in a novel – never become real living, breathing people, as is the case with truly great works of literature. The whole book just feels far too mannered, too neatly composed, too written.

Spoilers to follow here, so skip the next paragraph if you haven't yet read “Atonement” and plan to.

Does this maybe speak, though, to McEwan's genius? After all, in his nod to the art of metafiction, McEwan makes the novel not really his novel at all, but rather one written by his character Briony Tallis, so that all but the last section of the book, which is told first-person by Briony, becomes a novel within the novel. A defender of the book who accepts everything I've said up until this point might rightfully argue that the novel-within-the-novel's weaknesses speak to the who the character of Briony actually is, and to her shortcomings as a novelist. If that were McEwan's intention, it's kind of a brilliant move: a good novelist purposely writing in an average way because the character actually telling the story is herself an average novelist. OK, but even if I accept this argument – and even though I made the argument myself, I'm not sure it holds water – I still don't want to read an entire novel that's simply average, even if it's intended to be.

Spoilers over.

Getting back to my original point, though, why do I feel the urge to demand that every piece of literature – even one well-loved, and with critical regard – need be as brilliant as one by, say, Nabokov? (Though, to be fair, McEwan is asking for this comparison, as Nabokov mastered the metafiction toyed with in “Atonement” back when McEwan was just a wee lad.) Can't some literary novels just be an enjoyable read without achieving a place in the pantheon of great literature? Isn't there, alongside Nabokov and Bellow, a place for writers such as John Irving and Ian McEwan? (And is that too insulting to McEwan? Too flattering to Irving?) And, finally, have I become, as a reader, too much a curmudgeon?

This. Book. Drove. Me. Nuts.

Did I sabotage the book by opting to watch the movie first?
Maybe.

Or would it have turned out this way regardless?
I'll never know.


I like the idea of this book. Ian McEwan's definition of atonement is as dazzling as it is strange. I also love the prose. So rich and refined. For these reasons alone, I'm giving Atonement 3 stars.

The rest of this review, I'm afraid, is a jumbled explanation for why this book made me so mad.

I thought the purpose of this book was to tell a story. A story about how a misunderstanding borne out of innocence could tragically alter so many lives. But did it really do that??

It tried to, at least in the beginning. But even then, I did not for a minute believe that it was really happening, that all these people actually existed. It felt like the script of a play - everything was carefully rehearsed and choreographed. Every character from Briony to Cecelia, from Robbie to Leon, was like a caricature, like Arabella in The Trials of Arabella.

Then somewhere past the halfway mark, the story just stopped and Atonement turned into a documentary on the horrors of WW2. Civilians were getting blown to bits, soldiers were being left to die, villages were turning to rubble... I'm not saying it was pointless but it was way overdone. If these characters felt vague before, they ceased to exist for me then - lost in the mess of war tales.

So you see, very little actually happened in the course of 350 pages. So much of it was devoted to overtly descriptive passages that were, for lack of a better word, boring.

And then there's the twist at the end, of course.

(NOTE: Do not peek at the spoiler if you intend to read the book someday.)

Since the entire novel is supposedly written by Briony and not McEwan, maybe the book was deliberately designed to reflect Briony's ineptitude?? If that was what McEwan had in mind, then I think this book is brilliant.

I've spent hours thinking on these lines but each passing minute has only added to my frustration.

So I'm settling for 3.


P.s. I personally prefer the movie. It doesn't screw with your head so much :/

In life, we all make mistakes. Some big, some small, but usually we quickly forget them. But what happens when you make a mistake that haunts you every day and you can do nothing about it?

This book was fantastic. I loved the writing. I loved the characters. They were so well developed I could feel their emotions in myself as I read. I was deeply and truly satisfied by the story and the writing. When I closed the book after the last page I felt like I was sitting back after finishing an amazing meal.

Read this! It is going up on my favorites shelf!