Atonement
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This is one of the best books I have ever read.It really 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 especially 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.
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VERY disappointing
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If this book is the best of Ewan's, I really don't want to read the others, cause this one was really boring, and disappointing. I read it till the end because I wanted to know where it would lead...and really: it gets us nowhere at all. And the little girl, destroying the life of 2 people, wasn't a character I liked at all, especially at the end. I really 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!
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Disappointed
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After reading all the rave reviews, I was expecting something a lot better than this. The characters seem flat, the plot sluggish and the ending no reward for having ploughed through the previous pages.
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Stunning
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Beautifully written story of lives ruined because a young girl thought she saw something she didnt, and spent the rest of her life trying to
make amends.I really enjoyed this book, easy to get lost in. Caz
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One of McEwan's best
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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, and sometimes highly self-conscious and over-developed works such as 'Saturday', 'Child in Time'. After the first 100 pages 'Atonement' suddenly sheds its self-conscious stultifying descriptiveness and 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 and resonant sequences in Birdsong. McEwan's evocation of wartime Britain is real, haunting and bleak.
Personally I do not think Briony Tallis ever finds atonement. We discover at the very end what really happened to Robbie and 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."
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