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Books Atonement

Author: Ian McEwan
Year: 2001
Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Also by McEwan

…the first section, set in a country house in 1935, is a brilliant feat of storytelling, whereby McEwan manages both to sound like McEwan and not quite like himself.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at London Review of Books James Wood London Review of Books 2009
The novel’s bloody illustrations of the horrors of war compel assent and pity, and yet, such is the novel reader’s romantic nature, it is the lovers that keep us turning the page; theirs is the consummation we devoutly wish. Our wish is granted, but with a duplicitous art.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New Yorker John Updike New Yorker 2002

A novelist’s responsibility to her characters is not at all the same thing as her responsibility to other, real, people. Atonement is an ethical rather than an aesthetic idea; it doesn’t make sense to talk about atoning to a fictional being. Briony seems not to notice this—which is in character, since her sense of other people’s existence was always weaker than her wish to have the world “just so.”

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books John Lanchester New York Review of Books 2002
It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at London Review of Books Frank Kermode London Review of Books 2001

Our Thoughts

The technical mastery of the book’s first act and its A Farewell to Arms-rivaling retreat sequence is the work of a deft craftsman, but the lingering disquiet of its final section is the work of an artist.

— Brian Flanagan

Issyvoo

Books Atonement

Also by McEwan

Our Thoughts

“Storytellers' Stories”

“Precocious Children”