Expiacion (Atonement) Book

In World War II England, 13-year-old Briony Tallis misinterprets her older sister's love affair with their family's gardener to be something much worse than what it is. Her innocence and partial understanding of the world begins a chain of events that tears the family apart and alters the course of the rest of the girl's life.

Sounds a little dry, right? Wrong! I guess I forgot to mention that the book was written by Ian McEwan, the king of uncomfortable moments, weird sex stuff, the rotating third-person close perspective, and - I'll say it! - writing about the human psyche. While I've found some of his earlier books to be a little too uncomfortable (or, rather, too uncomfortable without good reason) or a little too sexually deviant (again, in the way that it seemed for shock value than with a reason), this was a freaking great book.

I think the one thing that makes this book so wonderful is McEwan's eerily accurate understanding of how a 13-year-old girl's mind works - her understanding of the world and her emotional reaction to it. Briony is trapped between childhood and adulthood. She's old enough to recognize the dark and startling behind-the-scenes facets of her proper British family's life, but not old enough to properly analyze or judge them. She's old enough to impose her will and her ideas on others, but not wise enough to know when to act or when to question herself. It's a frustrating and fascination (and uncomfortable) time, and he has it down pat.

McEwan also experiments with structure in ways that are truly innovative and new without being gimmicky. Briony is an aspiring writer who grows and develops her style throughout the 60 years that the novel covers, and McEwan's novel mirrors her literary growth. Part One of the story is extremely traditional (broken into chapters, with a clear rotation of perspectives and a uniform chronology). Parts Two and Three are much more modern - the story, which switches gears to follow the gardener into WWII France and Briony to her experiences as a nurse in London, loses structure and fluidity and uses more modern storytelling techniques. Finally, the last section is utterly contemporary - the story becomes even more abstract, with unreliable narrators and more conceptual writing favored over simple narrative.

And yet these games with structure and story and perspective in no way take your focus from the story and the characters. Instead, they add to the experience of watching the main character grow and develop.

If the book suffers from anything, it might be a little slow in some places and move too fast in others. Since McEwan tends to be very thorough when it comes to interior thought, the story often slows down a bit more than it should so that he can explain how every single person felt about a certain moment in time (although the story spans 60 years, the first 200 pages span a single afternoon and evening). The slow story a necessary evil, though, if we want to keep the detailed character studies in place. And we do. And the action-filled second half of the book, which covers the British retreat from the Germans in 1940 and the over-capacity army hospitals of London, makes up for the sometimes austere and rigorous first half. It just takes a while to get the story rolling.