Condofire

Tessa: Ian McEwan is a writer who makes you realize you love reading books. You pick up one of his books and you don’t put it down until you’re done six hours later. I have read Enduring Love, Saturday and recently finished Atonement.  McEwan is a master of  creating layer upon layer of exquisite detail that lays the groundwork for psychologically compelling characters and an undertone of menace in a narrative that turns dramatically on a single act or word that forever irrevocably changes the course of people’s lives. This is precisely what he does in Enduring Love and Saturday and so brilliantly in Atonement.    Set in the country side outside of London in 1935, this is the story of one young girl’s act of vengeance that wreaks havoc on the lives of those around her.  As the much younger sibling of Leo and Cecelia, and with a mother who is absent through illness and a workaholic father, Briony is left mostly to her own devices. She escapes her loneliness through fiction where she can create the perfect world she longs for.  But as her final act of vengeance takes place she learns that real life outcomes can’t be controlled and thus she loses her innocence as she leaves childhood for adolescence. Briony intercepts a letter from the char woman’s son, a boy who has been taken under the family’s wing since he was young. The letter is to Cecelia with whom he is in love.But like any great fictional imbroglio he gives Briony a raw, sexually explosive version of the letter which had been intended for his eyes only. After seeing her sister and Robbie locked in an embrace she convinces herself that she must save her sister from such a monster. The lie she goes on to tell bears enormous consequences not only for Cecelia,and  Robbie and but for their families as well. Briony ultimately faces the consequences of her actions but not without realizing that life is much messier than the fiction that she creates. She finally seeks atonement both personally and through her work but still in the end tries to neatly tie up the pieces of Robbie and Cecelia’s life by allowing the reader to believe that a happy ending finally brought to the star crossed lovers together. McEwan traverses the themes of fiction and life, childhood and loss of innocence, love and war beautifully, creating an elegiac, tale of love and loss.