Ian McEwan, Atonement
Briony Tallis is a thirteen-year-old girl, living a sheltered childhood with her upper-middle class family, in England, during the thirties. A writer in the making, she loves to create fictions that satisfy her taste for order in a disorderly world, stories in which the villain is punished and the hero rewarded. During the warm summer of 1935, she will learn two lessons the hard way: First, that she is not a playwright, and second, that there is such thing as an unequivocal world.
As we are made to expect from the beginning, Briony’s taste for drama and her misreading of a complex environment will make her commit a terrible act which will destroy the lives of people close to her and whose repercussions will follow her her whole life.
Years later, renouncing a Cambridge education, she is training as a nurse during World War II. Growing up, she has realized the terrible mistake she has made by interpreting facts the wrong way, and she will have to find a way to atone, if atonement is possible…
Atonement can be read on different levels. On the first level it is a story about guilt and facing the consequences of one’s acts. It is also a reflection on fiction, its status and its power. Ian McEwan writes beautifully, the characters are believable, true to life, which makes the novel even more powerful. Atonement raises the question of point of view in a very effective manner: defining scenes are perceived by various protagonists, showing that Briony is not the only character guilty of misinterpretation…
I can guess why some critics compared Ian McEwan to Jane Austen (Atonement bears a very remote resemblance to Mansfield Park). Atonement reminded me at times of Virginia Woolf, at other times of Ruth Rendell’s The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy and also of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.
I wouldn’t recommend Atonement to readers who are looking for a fast-paced or traditional story, some could find it slow going or unsatisfying. Atonement is a formal exercise, a metafiction which could become a classic…
Rating: 4,5/5
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