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- Edition:
- Abridged (Phoenix Audio)
- Length:
- 6 hours, 1 minutes
- File Size:
- 165 MB (5 files)
- Published:
- May 2006
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Review by Sam Adams, eMusic
Ian McEwan’s lapidary novel hovers just on the edge of being too beautiful. Set mainly in the run-up to and during World War II, the story opens in a sprawling, dusty English country estate, and then moves to the front lines, both at home and abroad. McEwan’s writing is immaculate, as pretty as a period piece, but you don’t always feel the sweat and blood seeping through the pages.
The simmering romance between Cecilia Tallis a priggish, pampered artistocrat, and Robbie Turner the son of her family’s housemaid, however, does not fail to get other juices flowing. Their furtive coupling in a darkened study is powerfully erotic, and the surest sign that McEwan does not feel bound by the rules of the story’s era. (Surest, that is, until the book’s startling coda, about which one shall henceforth keep schtum.)
Every Eden has its snake, and theirs is 13-year-old Briony, Cecilia’s smart, sullen sister, a precocious tyrant who writes novels and plays for her own amusement. When her playmates decline to act their assigned parts in the play she’s written, Briony creates her own drama, unfairly pinning a horrendous crime on Robbie and ushering in an era of bloody reprisals.
Intriguingly, McEwan’s villain acts as his surrogate. Briony may be a monster, but she is also an author, and her arrogance is that of a creator who expects her puppets to do her bidding. The sin that occurs in the novel’s first part provides for the attempted expiation of its second, but the true nature of Briony’s penance is hidden in the space between words. Whether her contrition amends her crime or compounds it is a question that lives on after the book’s covers have closed.
Quotes from the Critics
"As well as being a superb writer of place, McEwan is also among the finest practitioners of the free indirect style in English, and each phrase in ATONEMENT vibrates with the voice of the character it is so discreetly ventriloquizing....The dust jacket proclaims ATONEMENT his finest achievement, and although publishers are prone to this...view of their authors' talents, in this case they are triumphantly right." - Times Literary Supplement
"Reading McEwan's work, we often find it impossible to slow down, so powerful is the pull of 'What's next?' In ATONEMENT that pull lures us through the first section at breakneck speed, and reasserts its sway in the last. But in the second and third segments of the book a strange and fine thing happens: we are free to linger in the moment, to savor the exquisite, agonizing aptness of McEwan's images and the delicacy of his touch as he records, in fiction, the true horrors of war, and makes new the ordinary realizations those horrors force upon us...." - Atlantic Monthly
"[T]here is nothing self-conscious or mannered about Mr. McEwan's writing. Indeed, ATONEMENT emerges as the author's most deeply felt novel yet--a novel that takes the glittering narrative pyrotechnics perfected in his last book, AMSTERDAM, and employs them in the service of a larger, tragic vision. It is a novel that attests not only to Mr. McEwan's mastery of craft and virtuosic control of narrative suspense, but also to his knowledge of the human heart and its rage for symmetry and order." - New York Times
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