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Atonement
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Atonement
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7 journalers for this copy...
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The first half of Ian McEwan's Atonement takes place during a heat wave in the summer of 1935, on an estate in the hills of Surrey, England. As the novel begins, thirteen year old Briony Tallis -- an aspiring writer -- is awaiting the arrival of her northern cousins, fifteen year old Lola Quincey and nine year old twins Jackson and Pierrot, intending to cast them in her new play. The play, a florid morality tale called The Trials of Arabella, is to be performed as a homecoming gift for Briony's brother Leon, 25. Her sister Cecilia, 23 (recently home from "three years at Girton"), mother Emily and guests Robbie Turner and Paul Marshall are to round out the audience. The play is never performed. Through a combination of accident, misunderstanding, perfidy and Briony's early-adolescent desire to place herself at the center of every drama (staged and real-life), a crisis occurs -- or is alleged to have occurred by Briony and her mysteriously complicit cousin Lola -- which will affect the lives of each of the characters for decades to follow. In the second part of the novel the action moves from Surrey in the mid-1930s to the British Expeditionary Force's retreat at Dunkirk in 1940, where Robbie Turner -- having negotiated an early release from Wandsworth Prison -- has ended up as a soldier. He maintains contact with Cecilia, now estranged from her family, through regular correspondence. In the third part, a guilt-ridden Briony has become a nurse in a London hospital during the Blitz. A brief fourth part of the novel takes place on Briony's 77th birthday in 1999, at a celebration being held in the old family estate, now sold and remodeled as a hotel. Having tried -- and failed -- to finish this book two years ago (see previous journal entry), I was delighted to find that this time I couldn't put it down. Atonement has rehabilitated my opinion of Ian McEwan as a novelist (I found his novellas Amsterdam and The Comfort of Strangers somewhat overrated), so that I'll once again keep an eye out for more. Others seem to feel the same way -- you can read the Guardian's review of Atonment here, New York magazine's here and the San Francisco Chronicle's here. In addition to the Booker-winning Amsterdam (1998), McEwan's other novels include: First Love, Last Rites (1975), In Between the Sheets (1978), The Cement Garden (1978), The Imitation Game (1981), The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Or Shall We Die? (1983), The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985), The Child in Time (1987), The Innocent (1989), Soursweet (1989), Black Dogs (1992), The Daydreamer (1994), Enduring Love (1997) and Saturday (2005). |
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I'll be mailing Atonement to alsgal in Burien, Washington on January 31, 2005. Happy trails, little book! (Photo at left: window display on Hastings Street in Vancouver, February 2004.)
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Journal Entry 7 by
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Journal Entry 8 by 
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Journal Entry 15 by
Trade paperback, 372 pages From the back cover: 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, their childhood friend. By the end of the day Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and Briony will have witnessed mysteries and committed a crime that resonates through the war and through the characters' entire lives. A #1 international bestseller, Atonement is Ian McEwan's finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the book has at its centre a profound—and profoundly moving—exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and the difficulty of absolution. |
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Journal Entry 16 by
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Journal Entry 17 by
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