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That I can remember, I've never before disliked the start of a book so thoroughly, and by the end, gone on to think so much of it as a complete work.
The last 2/3 of this novel are as good as contemporary fiction gets. The first 1/3 is like reading a Jane Austen plot trapped in amber.
As the title indicates Atonement is about a future artist's massive effort to redeem herself for ruining the character of a young man when she is a younger girl. There are parts of this novel that are disjointed - or if they aren't they appear so because the opening act moves so slowly that one is barely conscious and later unable to recall that anything much happened at all.
Halfway through this novel, when its greatness starts to happen, a reader almost laments his earlier opinions of it. But whose fault is that? The beginning is such an act of endurance that the later parts make a reader wish that McEwan had moved things more quickly in the beginning - and used those words for more character development in the middle - so the reader could declare this novel, unequivocally, one of the five best novels he's ever read.
McEwan is at the top of the art form throughout, though, whatever a reader opines of the product. He knows what he's doing every step of the way, right down to an allusion to the disjointed narrative methods employed by Virginia Woolf.
The ending is brilliant, unexpected and harsh. But unlike the case of the returning Baxter character in the third act of Saturday, this ending is consistent and at once surprising and inevitable.
After a person has read a few hundred novels, he grasps the art form well enough to know when an author is writing - usually it's when the author's employing some top-heavy descriptive technique that makes the water droplets gathered on a rose petal somehow more important than the protagonist's motives for anything she's done to that point - and it fairly well cries out, "Look at me, my creator is a writer!"
Knowing when an author is writing means knowing that if there's a surprise coming, it's either going to be predicted about 50 pages out or done in such fantastically poor form that its inconsistency mars the rest of the work.
McEwan is fine enough at his craft that the ending is both unanticipated and perfectly consistent. That alone makes this novel excellent.
The last 2/3 of this novel are as good as contemporary fiction gets. The first 1/3 is like reading a Jane Austen plot trapped in amber.
As the title indicates Atonement is about a future artist's massive effort to redeem herself for ruining the character of a young man when she is a younger girl. There are parts of this novel that are disjointed - or if they aren't they appear so because the opening act moves so slowly that one is barely conscious and later unable to recall that anything much happened at all.
Halfway through this novel, when its greatness starts to happen, a reader almost laments his earlier opinions of it. But whose fault is that? The beginning is such an act of endurance that the later parts make a reader wish that McEwan had moved things more quickly in the beginning - and used those words for more character development in the middle - so the reader could declare this novel, unequivocally, one of the five best novels he's ever read.
McEwan is at the top of the art form throughout, though, whatever a reader opines of the product. He knows what he's doing every step of the way, right down to an allusion to the disjointed narrative methods employed by Virginia Woolf.
The ending is brilliant, unexpected and harsh. But unlike the case of the returning Baxter character in the third act of Saturday, this ending is consistent and at once surprising and inevitable.
After a person has read a few hundred novels, he grasps the art form well enough to know when an author is writing - usually it's when the author's employing some top-heavy descriptive technique that makes the water droplets gathered on a rose petal somehow more important than the protagonist's motives for anything she's done to that point - and it fairly well cries out, "Look at me, my creator is a writer!"
Knowing when an author is writing means knowing that if there's a surprise coming, it's either going to be predicted about 50 pages out or done in such fantastically poor form that its inconsistency mars the rest of the work.
McEwan is fine enough at his craft that the ending is both unanticipated and perfectly consistent. That alone makes this novel excellent.
