Atonement

I've just finished reading Atonement by Ian McEwan, and I'm not entirely sure how to feel about it at the moment. Perhaps I should be taking longer to do a little bit of reflecting, but I also feel like I just need to write it down, to sort out what I'm thinking. I'll do my best to avoid spoiling things.

The book was written in absolutely fabulous prose, full of sweeping descriptions as well as a kind of chracterization that his highly reminescent of Austen and Elliot. The younger Briony is melancholy in the best kind of sense; McEwan is able to put in to words the thoughts of a young child as they face the change from the innocence of childhood to the disillusionment and reality of adulthood. The scenes where Briony realizes that perhaps there is more to life than the black-and-white definitions she's so used to finding in her fairy tales are some of the saddest in the book. When she witnesses a moment between her older sister, Cecelia, and Robbie, the son of the woman that cleans their house, Briony is yet again forced to come to the realization that things might not be as simple as her childhood has led her to believe. The second half of the book, however, is where things begin to loose a little bit of steam, at least as far as I'm concerned. I can only read so many pages and pages of scenes of war. My biggest problem was that, after a while, the scenes of Robbie at war began to meld in to one another, forming pages and pages of endless description of war-torn villages, pain, death, destruction. There are certain touching moments - moments where Robbie talks about his love for Cecelia, when he talks about the life he wants them to build when the war is over. However, on the whole the middle of the book became, for me, the part to push through. The third part of the book puts the reader back with Briony as she becomes a nurse faced with realizing the horrors of war for herself. The book picked up a little bit more here, and the descriptions of the injuries Briony was made to deal with were disgustingly haunting, making me feel uncomfortable in possibly the best ways. The book wraps up the story line of Cecelia, Robbie, Briony, and the family memebers surrounding them, but there weren't quite as many moments of shock and surprise - something I was kind of hoping for.

All in all, I thing Atonement is a fabulous book, but not necessarily living up to the rave reviews that made me read it in the first place. I would reccommend it again, mostly because McEwan writes simply beautiful prose, prose that I could only wish to emulate. The love he portrays between Robbie and Cecelia is beautifully crafted, beautifully and hauntingly familiar. But the story itself, however, wouldn't stand as strong if someone else had written it.

Next on the list is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. This is a book reccommended to me by a good friend, and I've seen the movie, so I figured that this break would be as good as any to crack it open. The books is about a boy, born in France, who has a sense of smell so sharp that he is able to smell literally everything that makes up a person. He uses this sense of smell to apprentice and become a fantastic perfume maker. The best scent he has ever smelled, however, is that of a young woman, and the quest to repicate this scent is what makes the tale a tale of murder. Hopefully the book is as good as my friend as told me it is. I'm a little wary to follow a historically-based fiction novel with another historically-based fiction novel, but I'm going to cross my fingers and hope for the best. Thank God for break - uninterrupted reading time, at last!

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