Rubric:

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 her country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge.

By the end of that day the lives of all three will have changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

SkyRider's comments:

I bought this book intending to read it before seeing the film. In the event, I read the book but missed the movie — a shame as I can't imagine how the end could have been filmed without being highly confusing.

In the end though, this book isn't really about the story — the plot is simple, but better discovered than described — but about the characters and particularly the journey Briony makes from being the naïve child living in a world of dreams to the adult having to live with a liftime of guilt. McEwan is a master student of human character, leavign you feeling not just that Briony's actions are understandable but that any reasonable person would have made the same destructive choices in her position.

Ultimately this speaks of a very bleak view of human existence, as do so many of McEwan's other books. But despite the fundamentally depressing nature of the nihilistic, deterministic view of life it paints, the lyricism of this novel more than makes up for it. McEwan is a master of language, describing scenes with a rare sensitivity for the nuances of the language he uses. As such, it's a book which stays with you long after you've closed it.

RELEASE NOTES: