Time's All-time 100 novels: "Atonement" by Ian McEwan

I was pleasantly surprised by this one, going into it and through the first 50 pages or so thinking it would be a rather boring slog. I’m not sure why I thought that. Perhaps it was the cover of the book featuring a fountain in front of a big, old English house. Perhaps it was McEwan’s technique of psychological realism, in which the narrator explores the inner motivations of his characters through exposition rather than dialogue or action.

 

After all, I liked Brideshead Revisited, also taking place in a big, old English house, and McEwan’s writing skill was so great that the expositions, which I regularly don’t care for, were insightful and believable enough to keep the story moving, even though McEwan occasionally backtracks to explore how multiple characters viewed the same event.

 

The plot is simple enough, with 13-year-old Briony Tallis walking in on a sexual liason between her older sister Cecilia and a friend of the family named Robbie and mistaking it for a sexual assault. Later, a cousin of the Tallises is raped, and Briony gives evidence against Robbie, sending him to prison for a few years.

 

Flash forward to the early days of World War II, and Robbie is fighting in France, and both Briony and Cecilia are estranged, though both serve as nurses at separate hospitals. Briony, having grown up, realizes what she’s done and wants to make it right somehow.

 

Going all metafictional on us, McEwan reveals that Atonement was written by Briony for precisely that purpose, explaining why she did what she did and making Cecilia and Robbie heroes for making sure their love survived through imprisonment and war. Or did it?

 

The final section has Briony writing as a 77-year-old in 1999, having finally completed Atonement and waiting for all the principals to die so it can be published without risk of libel. (The United Kingdom has a far less-developed sense of freedom of speech and of the press than the United States has.) This section is a bit of a come-down, but necessary to explain the metafictional device. Now I’m going to watch the 2007 movie version to see if it measures up to this substantial and satisfying work. A solid four stars out of five for this one.

 

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud

Atonement - Ian McEwan
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

 

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1 star

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon