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Ian McEwan

Atonement Hardcover – 20 Sept. 2001

by Ian McEwan (Author)

4.4 7,689 ratings

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A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolution.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Jonathan Cape Ltd
Publication date

20 Sept. 2001
Dimensions

17.5 x 4 x 25 cm
ISBN-10

0224062522
ISBN-13

978-0224062527
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Popular highlights in this book

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Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing.
Highlighted by 465 Kindle readers
From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
Highlighted by 441 Kindle readers

Product description

Amazon Review

Atonement is Ian McEwan's ninth novel and his first since the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam in 1998. But whereas Amsterdam was a slim, sleek piece, Atonement is a more sturdy, ambitious work, allowing McEwan more room to play, think and experiment.

We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama The Trials of Arabella to welcome home her elder, idolised brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins, the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren't up to the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting preoccupations come onto the scene. The charlady's son Robbie Turner appears to be forcing Briony's sister Cecilia to strip in the Fountain and sends her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen for a war to promote his new "Army Amo" bar; and upstairs Briony's migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon, secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present...

The interwar upper-middle-class setting of the book's long, masterfully sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green, but as we move forward--eventually to the turn of the 21st century--the novel's central concerns emerge, and McEwan's voice becomes clear, even personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains and dangers of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling what readers make of your writing. McEwan shouldn't have any doubts about readers of Atonement: this is a thoughtful, provocative and at times moving book that will have readers applauding.--Alan Stewart

From the Publisher

Past Booker Winners from Random House. How Late It Was How Late by James Kelman. Disgrace by J M Coetzee. Life and Times of Michael K by J M Coetzee. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. The Famished Road by Ben Okri. Possession by A S Byatt. Saville by David Storey. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

[1]One
The play for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for only one day of rehearsal be-fore her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash towards a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humour. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished doctor in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on a windy sunlit day in spring.
Mrs Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, at her dressing table, with the authors arm around her shoulder the whole while. Briony studied her mothers face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her daughter in her arms, onto her lap ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its infancy, and still not gone from her, not quite yet and said that the play was stupendous, and agreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girls ear, that this word could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an easel in the entrance hall by the ticket booth.
Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the projects highest point of fulfilment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, burrowing in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, when she made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon. In one, his big, good-natured face buckled in grief as Arabella sank in loneliness and despair. In another, there he was, cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group of friends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, you must surely have heard of her. In a third he punched the air in exultation as the final curtain fell, although there was no curtain, there was no possi-bility of a curtain. Her play was not for her cousins, it was for her brother, to celebrate his return, pro-voke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession of girlfriends, towards the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Brionys services as a bridesmaid.
She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sisters room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Brionys was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way towards their owner as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact, Brionys was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table cowboys, deep-sea divers, humanoid mice suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizens army awaiting orders.
A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fools gold, a rain-making spell bought at a funfair, a squirrels skull as light as a leaf.
But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the sim-ple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possi-bilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrels skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it ap-peared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Jonathan Cape Ltd; New ed. edition (20 Sept. 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0224062522
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0224062527
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 17.5 x 4 x 25 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 731,706 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 16,347 in Romance Sagas
- 16,500 in Family Sagas
- 49,584 in Historical Fiction (Books)

Customer reviews:
4.4 7,689 ratings

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Ian McEwan

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Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

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Lola

The cruelties of war... and people.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 May 2012

Verified Purchase

With this book, my journey of falling in love with Ian McEwan's writing began, and yet I have not written reviews for any of his books... I have read the book in 2007, and just today stumbled upon an email I was writing to a friend 5 years ago, recommending this book. I thought the extract of email would work as an honest review, because I still feel strongly about the book and I keep recommending it, moreover, "Atonement" has become one of my all-time favourite books, and the position has not shifted for 5 years now, and I doubt it ever will. An outstanding book.

So herewith the extract from the email of 5 years ago:

Yesterday I finished the book - 'Atonement' by Ian McEwan, you know the movie I tried to recommend you, the one with Keira Knightly. Well, I haven't watched the film, but now that I read the book, I cannot wait to see the film.

So yeah, yesterday, at about 10PM I was finishing the book, and I started to cry, and couldn't stop, all the last pages. I literary was in hysterics. The novel is amazing, so sad, magnificent and beautiful. For the first time the book about war impressed me so much, the horrific waste of a single human life, the wasted love, desperate, but unfulfilled hope... and wait. Terrific book, beautiful. Why did he made it so horrible? - I was asking myself. But, the thing is, that how it was, the casualties of war, when no-one was important on a singular individual basis.

And how one word, one deed, can change the life of a person forever. How cruel people can be. And how in love can people be, no matter what.

I tried to console myself, went to have a bath, and I was crying all the way to the bathroom, I was crying while taking my make up off, I was crying while undressing (my t-shirt was soaked with tears), I was crying, while sitting in the bath, I was crying when I was putting my pyjamas on, I was crying when I was drying my hear (and even the heat from the hair-drying couldn't dry them). I was crying when I was falling asleep, I was crying when I woke up in the morning - seriously. At night, I had vague dreams about the book. And on the train, I tried to completely blank my mind from any thoughts, because all the thoughts I had were about the book. And I couldn't do it, and I felt how my eyes were swelling, and I was biting my lip just to stop myself from crying, I was thinking about the hair on the black arm of the Indian guy, holding a handle on the train, I was thinking about blue sky and warm November morning, I was thinking about negligence in tort, but those thoughts were so weak and unimportant... So I just prayed not to cry in public. This emotion is really private.

It's been more than 10 years since I cried over the book.

Hmm, a book to change one's life? I don't think so. Or, at least, I haven't read that kind of book yet. And I read a lot. And I am quite an emotional human-being, but no, no book has ever changed my life. Altered my view a little bit - definitely. Or opened my eyes to something I never understood before. And I think to open one's eyes or to alter one's view is quite a deed for a book! "Atonement" was definitely one of those rare books for me.

10 people found this helpful

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David Beeson

A book of dreams, three of them nightmares

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 March 2019

Verified Purchase

Three nightmares dominate 'Atonement'.

The first, set in a country house during the oppressively hot summer of 1935, is the build up to the commission of a terrible crime. The offence is the false accusation made by one of the three main characters, Briony, against another. She knows the accusation is at best doubtful, and probably false, but she persists in it, even under oath, to the point of wrecking the life chances of a man who isn’t just innocent but also did her nothing but good.

This is the crime for which atonement must be made.

Five years later, we find ourselves plunged, again in sweltering heat, into the middle of the British Army’s catastrophic retreat in front of German armoured troops through Northern France to Dunkirk. This is the most powerful account I have read of the torment felt by individual men, especially a wounded man, struggling to keep up with what was practically a rout – undisciplined, chaotic and painful. It’s a tribute to the research McEwan carried out at the Imperial War Museum in London that he was able to capture the atmosphere of that harrowing time, and further proof of his outstanding qualities as a writer that he could convey them so vividly.

And the third nightmare is the one experienced again by Briony, in a first step towards atonement, as she trains to be a nurse at a hospital recognisable as St Thomas’s in London. That culminates in an extraordinary day of frightening and intense work, as she nurses wounded men from the Dunkirk evacuation. McEwan gives us a detailed account of the many hours she works, with men lightly injured, with men suffering terrible but treatable wounds, with men who cannot be saved.

Finally, there is a kind of coda in which McEwan deepens the dreamlike feeling of the novel still further. Because he leaves us wondering whether what he has given us is a novel of his own creation, or one written by Briony herself, a character he created. We see her going from a first attempt at writing the story, rejected by a publisher who nonetheless gives her excellent advice on how to improve it, to the final work, the one we’ve just read. And she asks us whether she hasn’t told the story as it deserves to be told. She tells us that she could have changed its details is significant ways but chose not to, and calls on us, the readers, to agree that she was right.

This reader is sure she is. My view is that Briony turned an indifferent first draft into an excellent novel. And Ian McEwan did well to make her work, and his own, available to us.

20 people found this helpful

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