Atonement by Ian McEwan : Book Review

How does one live with guilt in their hearts and spend rest of their lifetime knowing that nothing they do would change the past or reverse it, and the damage once done is irreparable?

As you seek ways to atone for the misdeed committed, would that turn out to be enough to ease the guilt? If not, how does one make peace with it?

Does time actually heal wounds, or does time merely make the memory of it less vivid?

Who do you turn to in such times of helplessness for a piece of solace? A wise friend of mine tells me — maybe, connections or art. Maybe.

As I closed this book, I was left haunted with these thoughts.

I began reading Atonement with a sense of foreboding. The heaviness in my heart grew with each page. Despite feeling ominous, I anticipated for that last glimmer of hope for the protagonist, but only to be let down so terribly in the end.

Atonement , as is aptly named , is the journey of Briony Tallis — as she attempts in making reparations for the grave misjudgement she made in her childhood , owing to her fanciful thoughts and literary impulses. The serious implications it creates would go on to ruin the lives of her sister and her sister’s beloved. And how she resorts to fiction, her very literariness that led her to commit the crime unintentionally, but later in seeking atonement forms the crux of the novel.

McEwan’s writing leaves nothing unsaid. Even the most fleeting of emotions and thoughts are worded in exact. This experience won’t leave you soon and you will remember this, despite many books later.

Ending this note with a brilliant but heart wrenching line from the book -

“How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.”