Atonement by Ian McEwan is an exceptionally enthralling novel, not due to any particular excitement that has happened thus far but because of the interesting conundrum of what Briony, the quiet thirteen year-old author/playwright, is going to do next. I already know she's going to "commit a crime" because McEwan says so in chapter thirteen, but I'm still confused as to what that particular crime will be. Maybe I should just start from the beginning.
Atonement is set in England during the summer of 1935. It follows the Tallis family: Cecilia, Briony, and their mother, Emily Tallis. Some chapters are also from the view of Robbie Turner, the laundress's son. Basically what its about is Briony has been writing a play because her cousins are coming to stay with them and she wants them to perform it. Well, Lola and the twins, Pierrot and Jackson, manage to screw that up (Lola, seemingly, on purpose) so the play never really gets off the ground. But its not about The Trials of Arabella, its about the, pardon me, sexual tension Briony witnesses between Cecilia and Robbie. Being only thirteen, she really doesn't understand whats going on and seems to think Robbie's a maniac who has some weird hold over Cecilia. Needless to say, she doesn't get it. Robbie has mad passionate love for Cecilia and writes some weird stuff on his typewriter about her. Deciding sending her that "weird stuff" would be, well, inappropriate, he drafts a handwritten letter. But, as these things do happen, the letters got switched (shocking, isn't it?) so now Cecilia gets the really kinda gross letter from Robbie. The worst part is that he asks Briony to deliver it and being the annoying little twit that she is, she reads it. Briony misunderstands the letter and starts to repeatedly call Robbie a "maniac." Of course, she also witnesses some naughty things in the library so its not really all in her head, she just has a wild imagination and no "grasp of adult motives" as McEwan puts it. Amid all this chaos, Cecilia and Robbie admitting their love to each other and Briony freaking out about protecting Cecilia, something weird is happening between cousin Lola and older brother Leon Tallis's friend Paul Marshall. There's a scene where he gives her some chocolate and is nice to her, but the next you hear of them Lola has a scratch and bruises on her arm and Paul has a scratch on his unfortunately smushed-looking face. And as if the book couldn't get any more mysterious/weird, the twins run away and are nowhere to be found. I will stop here because that's the farthest I've gotten.
I really am enjoying this book. It's got some great lines, especially a paragraph where McEwan describes what a story really is: "A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader - no intermediaries with their private ambitions of incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same things; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. you saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith's forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade..." I find I really connect with this paragraph because it exactly describes what I think of when I think of reading a novel or a book. How losing yourself in a good story can seemingly transport you to that time and place, make the story your story, the things happening things that actually happened to you. Reading is an escape and it makes anything possible.
I definitely recommend this book to you, but if your mother would perhaps not appreciate her son/daughter reading some rather crude material I suggest you put it down and walk away.
P.S. Is it weird to have a slight obsession with moustaches?
P.P.S. What's your favorite joke/silly saying?
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