Atonement (Ian McEwan)**

I feel really bad about writing this because I’ve just met a really nice girl online and she loves Atonement. But I just can’t think of anything nice to say about it.

But I’ll try. Ian McEwan’s writing is very flowery, almost poetic, and he handles some challenging subjects. The middle section, about Robbie’s life as a soldier, is very interesting and shocking. His characters are all real individuals and I’ve never read another book like it.

But I hate this book. I really do. McEwan almost seems to be sneering at his characters from a distance. I can’t blame him for that, as I got quite sneery about them too, but there’s not much point in writing about characters if you don’t have the slightest bit of affection for them. It’s probably worse than writers that insist on telling you their characters are wonderful. I suppose it is possible to write about villains you dislike, but the best books are those where you even like the villains in a way. Hating a character isn’t that much fun really, but loving to hate a character is great. I don’t love to hate the characters in Atonement. I’d rather not think about them at all.

Some of the incidents in the book just didn’t ring true. Like there’s a bit where Robbie writes a horny letter to weird Cecelia, then writes a more decent one. He asks freaky Briony to deliver the letter, even though he’s going to see Cecelia himself, but mixes the letters up. I have read a different story with an incident like this, and it worked brilliantly, but that story had a strong element of comedy, and I really wanted the two characters to get it together. Atonement seems deathly serious, and I couldn’t stand Robbie or Cecelia. Robbie’s okay, I suppose, but Cecelia’s scary.

As for that stripping off by the fountain incident – as if! I accept that Cecelia doesn’t want to bother the kitchen staff by using the kitchen taps, but are there really no other taps in the house? I’m sure the house has bathrooms. Even if they don’t have running water, is there no garden tap Cecelia could use? And even if the fountain really is the only source of water, you don’t take all your clothes off and jump in. You’d have to be seriously deranged to do that. Any normal person would just lean over the fountain and hold the vase she wants to fill underneath the water. Actually, forget normal people, even I wouldn’t throw myself in. Not even if I wanted to impress some guy. If I want to impress someone, I don’t usually try to pretend to be even madder than I am. Even if I was in the mood for doing something silly, I’d go in with my clothes on. Much more fun that way.

Briony is the little bitch who causes all the trouble, and one positive thing I can say is that McEwan almost manages to make her crime reasonable. It’s still incredibly stupid, but the little brat obviously suffers from severe immaturity, and anyone a bit stupid with a mental age of 5 might make the mistake she did. She’s actually 13, so she really should have known not to be so evil. Or maybe the character could have been written in a more sympathetic manner. Briony is supposed to be very upset and hurt when she commits her crime, and a lot of readers will have been in a similar position, so it should be possible to understand her feelings. But she’s such a horrible little brat, and McEwan’s habit of distancing himself from his characters doesn’t help.

It’s not all Briony’s fault though. Anyone with parents like Leon and Emily probably didn’t have much chance of becoming reasonable human beings. Neither of them is very sane or very likeable. Some of the characters who feature in the Robbie section are interesting, but they’re hardly in it really,

Another really annoying thing about this book (which is apparently also true of at least one of his others) is that the story isn’t original. He stole it from an autobiography from the time where the book is set (he has denied this, but it looks a bit suspicious to me). Moral issues aside, I just find this a bit of a cheat. It’s okay to find outside inspiration. All writers do it. But you need to bring something to the book to make it your own, and writing a bizarre story that is half-copied, half-nonsensical, isn’t really enough for me.

But Atonement does seem to have made a lot of people really happy. And that is good.