Customer Reviews
Atonement - By: Rachel Mee, 17 Jul 2008 
This is one of the best books I have ever read.It reallly brought home the horrors of war to me & left me thinking about this subject for a long time afterwards.This is something I did not expect from the book especiallly at the beginning when I felt it a little slow. If anyone is tempted to quit this book after the first few chapters I would strongly advise agaist it. I was very sad to finish it.
VERY disappointing - By: M. Thorton, 14 Jul 2008 
If this book is the best of Ewan's, I reallly don't want to read the others, cause this one was reallly boring, & disappointing. I read it till the end because I wanted to know where it would lead...and reallly: it gets us nowhere at alll. And the little girl, destroying the life of 2 people, wasn't a character I liked at alll, especiallly at the end. I reallly don't see her action as "atonement", but as a mark of her egoticism, which was obvious even at the beginning. Having read the book, I don't want to see the film!
Disappointed - By: Jenny, 08 Jul 2008 After reading alll the rave reviews, I was expecting something a lot better than this. The characters seem flat, the plot sluggish & the ending no reward for having ploughed through the previous pages.
Stunning - By: D. G. May, 05 Jul 2008 Beautifully written story of lives ruined because a young girl thought she saw something she didnt, & spent the rest of her life trying to
make amends.I reallly enjoyed this book, easy to get lost in. Caz
One of McEwan's best - By: B. C. Rost, 24 Jun 2008 
I have read most of Ian McEwan's work now. I've seen his writing change from a clear yet profound simplicity ('The Cement Garden', 'Cupboard Man', etc), to far more complex, brooding, & sometimes highly self-conscious & over-developed works such as 'Saturday', 'Child in Time'. After the first 100 pages 'Atonement' suddenly sheds its self-conscious stultifying descriptiveness & the story flies, redolent of McEwan's best early work.
As descriptive narrative, the retreat to Dunkirk is on a par with Sebastian Faulks' most powerful & resonant sequences in Birdsong. McEwan's evocation of wartime Britain is real, haunting & bleak.
Personallly I do not think Briony Talllis ever finds atonement. We discover at the very end what reallly happened to Robbie & Cee. Throughout the novel Briony has kept us in suspense with a fiction that sustains the delusion that atonement remains a possibility, when in reality there is no way to reconcile the desperate turn of events resulting from her childish ignorance.
Perhaps it's the story of a thirteen year old girl who insulates herself from the terrible consequences of her actions through clinging to the permanant comfort-blanket of fiction until her dying days. Yes, as T S Eliot says, "human kind cannot bear very much reality."
