Word: mcewan
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...that won't stop itching, a remembrance of pain and disgrace. Even for those people whose nations were on the winning side, sadness and horror intrude into memories of glory. Novelists can capture the mixed emotions that go with war better than historians. It's no accident that Ian McEwan's Atonement--perhaps the most admired British novel of the past decade--has at its center the retreat of British forces to Dunkirk, a story that mixes courage, fear and incompetence in equal measures...
...living was not having to get up in the morning. In spite of that slacker attitude, Rhodes, 31, this month finds himself on Granta magazine's prestigious decennial list of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists, standing on the shoulders of giants like Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, and rubbing his own with publishing hotshots Zadie Smith and Toby Litt. Rhodes' presence there is all the more remarkable since his first novel, Timoleon Vieta Come Home (Canongate; 214 pages), is only now arriving in bookstores and is likely, he says, to be his last. The grind...
...first half of Ian McEwan's novel, Briony passionately misunderstands a series of events she witnesses on a summer day in 1935, then tells a lie that ruins the lives of her older sister Cecilia and Cecilia's lover Robbie. So much for the virtues of the imagination. But McEwan is crafty. Even as he shows us the damages of story-telling, he demonstrates its beguilements on every page. Atonement is full of timeworn literary contrivances--an English country house, lovers from different classes, an intercepted letter--rendered with the delicately crafted understanding of E.M. Forster...
This is familiar terrain for McEwan. Betrayal by loved ones and the serene corruption of children are subjects he knows well. The incestuous siblings of his first novel, The Cement Garden, keep Mother buried belowstairs while they sport with each other above. The family dynamic in Atonement is less ghoulish but every bit as treacherous...
...Briony, now a nurse trainee, is struggling to find some remedy for the damage she has done. Her solution is not plain until the surprising final pages, when you grasp that if storytelling can be an occasion for sin, it can also be an act of contrition. It's McEwan's subtle game to show fiction working its worst kind of curse, then leading us unawares to give it our blessing...