Review: Atonement by Ian McEwan

What can I say about Atonement that hasn’t been said already! Ian McEwan is an author I already knew I enjoyed, but his other novels – although extraordinarily good when judged by most other authors’ standards – are left in the shade by this epic story.

Opening in the years before the Second World War, Atonement follows the lives of Briony Tallis, her older sister Cecilia and Cecilia’s contemporary, Robbie Turner, the son of their housekeeper. Shifting the narrative between characters and often telling the same story from different viewpoints allows McEwan to build a complex web of a story, fleshing out seemingly innocent actions and showing the reader how the disposition of the observer can dramatically alter their meaning and have lasting implications for those involved.

The understanding McEwan has of his main characters psyches is all encompassing, they are all individually fully realised and could almost walk off the pages as living beings. Briony, an emotionally immature teenager, given to introspection, who reads distorted meanings in to circumstances. Cecilia, a young adult – torn between rebelling against her upbringing and duty to her family – and coping with separation from her lover. Robbie, supported by his mother’s employer financially, but remaining steadfastly divided from them by rules of class, whose life is destroyed on one fateful evening. All are nuanced and – even given how utterly frustrating I found Briony’s attitudes in the first third of the book – sympathetic.

Equally, his adeptness at describing the settings for the action in the story enables the reader to completely immerse themselves into the period – whether it is the oppressive, hot summer of the opening chapters; the desperation of the Allies retreat through France to Dunkirk; or the horrors experienced by Briony training to be a nurse in one of the London hospitals that dealt with those same wounded soldiers.

It is hard to review Atonement without seeming to pour for a stream of praise for it, although, to my mind, none of the eulogising is unwarranted. This is simply one of the best books I’ve ever read.