I just finished reading perhaps the most awesome book I have read in years: Atonement, by Ian McEwan. He won the Booker prize for his previous book, Amsterdam, but this author is phenomenal...and that is not an embellishment.
To nutshell the book, it is about a young girl; she is an author; she has a wild imagination. She has an older sister and a brother, and her brother's school chum is the maid's son who has had a smouldering love affair brewing for years with the older sister. She has two cousins who come to the house for an extended visit. She is 13. It is 1935 in England. You read the back of the book and it says essentially, that this 13 year old will commit a crime that will reverberate through the lives of the characters and all the way through the war. The book, however, opens up in this lovely pastoral scene: birds chirping, lovely English manor, witty repartee between the characters. You, as the reader, cannot fathom how the author is going to get from this lovely point a, to the awfulness which is promised in the summary. And yet he does. And I'm not going to spoil it for you. It just simply must be read.
As an author, what McEwan truly excels at is understanding the vulnerability and the arrogance of humans. He understands how a nice tableau of life can just unravel and how once things have inertia, they are unstoppable. He understands that actions are set in motion not with one big decision, but are rather a culmination of seemingly meaningless, thoughtless, mundane events in life.
He writes his characters with sympathy, and yet holds them accountable for their actions. You love them, and feel compassion for them, and yet cannot forgive them for what they have done. And that makes them real.
I realize that I haven't given much of a plot summary at all, but the beauty of this book is that you are continually suprised. After finishing it, I read a number of reviews on the internet and was a bit miffed at those which gave away plot details. It is best to go in blind.
The other thing I love about this author is that he writes prose...true descriptive beautiful prose. More like a 19th century author than anything modern, and yet he is contemporary. Critics have compared him, and I agree, to Virginia Woolf. Yet, I would add that his writing is, in my opinion, far more accessible than Woolf's. Perhaps it is the modernity of his language that give me this impression.
If I had to choose one novel to recommend...perhaps even of the last 5 years, it would be this one. It is nothing short of phenomenal.
5 comments:
I've never read any of his books, but I may have to after reading this review. :)
hmmm. i've often hmmmed over the cover of his books. this kind of review makes the difference! ta lindz!
ok then. bought it today, 2nd hand. it better not suck, or else i'll have to use it as a present (actually, it is a present for my mum, after i read it, of course)
Hmmm, I don't know...there's something about uttering threats that just tarnishes the whole idea of literature. So shame on you for that, Thomas. But then again, you bought it 2nd hand. And 2nd hand book stores are some of my favorite places in the world. I just love how they smell. So kudos for that. So maybe you even out then.
literature SHOULD threaten! it should gut the fish in front of you, lash the peasant, placate the child, skewer the hay, topple the tower, hold the other to the promise and promise to hold the other.
i read a bit. it's good. as it turns out i'd read some of it already, on a storm-ridden day last winter. besides, you'd better write i never threaten people. or else...
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