"She whispered his name with the deliberation of a child trying out the distinct sounds. When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word- the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different. Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief but it was impossible not to think of an invisible witness or presence in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract."
Ian McEwan, Atonement
How powerful are the words in a book. Once you take a stroll with them, they draw you slowly and cunningly into a tangled web; there is no escape from a good book until it has finished with you. You are in the clutches of every emotion that the protagonist feels- elated, bewildered, angry or shameful. The confines which separate humans are blurred, and you are at once more than one person, delving into each mind seamlessly as you follow the words which paint these pictures, these people, none of whom may have never existed, the circumstances surrounding them and their reactions nothing but a flight of imagination. But for you, the reader- they are real, they are suffering and surviving and as you plunder page after page, a satisfactory ending for them is your hope.
Atonement has been a thoroughly satisfying read, so very well cut into episodes, and with a staggeringly beautiful epilogue that quenches your thirst and curiosity completely. There are questions of course, the last boulders you encounter before the finish line, but in a rhetorical sense, because the answers are standing right next to them, and you know you are the one who put them in your head, you are free to believe as you choose to, its all your glass half-full/half-empty perception.
Briony Tallis is a 13 year old author whose innocent and capricious cosmos collides with the depravities of the adult world and her lie, albeit without malice, out of good intentions, a sense of justice and protectiveness, changes lives forever.
"Weak, stupid, cowardly, evasive- she had hated herself for everything she had been, but she had never thought of herself as a liar."
How wonderful the world would be, if one could walk backwards along the fourth dimension and undo the wrongs one did. No, you wouldn't want to go back to do the right thing because its the right thing, you would go because guilt, is the most destructive of emotions, one that threatens to kill the parent the seed germinated from. You would go because a life with that knowledge of a sin committed is but a life, it's a slow death. Of course, one forgets, but a mere remembrance is a scalpel gnawing at your skin, and pain, shame, self-pity become inseparable soul mates. The only emancipator to sustain you at that moment is, a resolution to make amends, to secure the future from being scarred by the blow you dealt long ago. And Briony, now 'grown up', begins to get the full grasp of what she did, wishes to make amends, to tell the truth, but is it too late, too worthless?
"...how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form, that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her..."
So there it is, 'a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama'- as the review suggests.
I couldn't have agreed more.
