McEwan, Ian Books

Atonement

Ian McEwan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 763 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ian McEwan's Booker Prize-nominated Atonement is his first novel since Amsterdam took home the prize in 1998. But while Amsterdam was a slim, sleek piece, Atonement is a more sturdy, more ambitious work, allowing McEwan more room to play, think, and experiment.

We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama "The Trials of Arabella" to welcome home her older, idolized brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins, the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren't up to the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting prospects of preoccupation come onto the scene. The charlady's son, Robbie Turner, appears to be forcing Briony's sister Cecilia to strip in the fountain and sends her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen for a war to promote his new "Army Ammo" chocolate bar; and upstairs, Briony's migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon, secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present....

The interwar, upper-middle-class setting of the book's long, masterfully sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green, but as we move forward--eventually to the turn of the 21st century--the novel's central concerns emerge, and McEwan's voice becomes clear, even personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains, and dangers of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling what readers make of your writing. McEwan shouldn't have any doubts about readers of Atonement: this is a thoughtful, provocative, and at times moving book that will have readers applauding. --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk

On Chesil Beach

Ian Mcewan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 217 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Such is Ian McEwan's genius that, despite rambling nature walks and the naming of birds, his subject matter remains hermetically sealed in the hearts of two people.

It is 1962 when Edward and Florence, 23 and 22 respectively, marry and repair to a hotel on the Dorset coast for their honeymoon. They are both virgins, both apprehensive about what's next and in Florence's case, utterly and blindly terrified and repelled by the little she knows. Through a tense dinner in their room, because Florence has decided that the weather is not fine enough to dine on the terrace, they are attended by two local boys acting as waiters. The cameo appearances of the boys and Edward and Florence's parents and siblings serve only to underline the emotional isolation of the two principals. Florence says of herself: "...she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires...."

They are on the cusp of a rather ordinary marital undertaking in differing states of readiness, willingness and ardor. McEwan says: "Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness." Edward, having denied himself even the release of self-pleasuring for a week, in order to be tip-top for Florence, is mentally pawing the ground. His sensitivity keeps him from being obvious, but he is getting anxious. Florence, on the other hand, knows that she is not capable of the kind of arousal that will make any of this easy. She has held Edward off for a year, and now the reckoning is upon her.

McEwan is the master of the defining moment, that place and time when, once it has taken place, nothing will ever be the same after it. It does not go well and Florence flees the room. "As she understood it, there were no words to name what had happened, there existed no shared language in which two sane adults could describe such events to each other." Edward eventually follows her and they have a poignant and painful conversation where accusations are made, ugly things are said and roads are taken from which, in the case of these two, the way back cannot be found. Late in Edward's life he realizes: "Love and patience--if only he had them both at once--would surely have seen them both through." This beautifully told sad story could have been conceived and written only by Ian McEwan. --Valerie Ryan

Saturday

Ian McEwan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 294 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Well worth the effort. 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Ian McEwan has a voluble, poetic style, with most of his writing elaborating his characters' fleeting, chaotic, but insightful thoughts. He has a way of turning a second's reflection into pages of meditation, or a day into 279 pages, so that his characters seem unusually lucid, but still the reader can see familiar branches of thought that make the characters real. At times it can be exhausting to read, but McEwan skillfully tightens his vast web of character introspection into a cohesive and powerful conclusion.

This book follows Henry Perowne, an English neurosurgeon approaching fifty, on his day off, an extraordinarily memorable Saturday. The setting is London in 2003 just before the start of the Iraq War, an issue central to the concerns of the novel, not for only for its politics but for its effect on the lives and minds of people, real and fictional. McEwan introduces us to his narrator and then brings the pivotal event into the story about eighty pages in, after the reader has begun to wonder when something is going to happen. He also has a way of weaving in many circumstances that seem vital, then inconsequential, and then vital again, or symbolic, so that reading this is like a mystery novel where the mystery is the plot and the clues are the myriad tiny details of life and thought interspersed with larger happenings. It all comes together into a brilliant picture. Having read Atonement, I was prepared for this slow and unexpected unfurling of the story, but I admit to getting impatient and restless for things to get moving and for Henry to shut up already. I was not to be disappointed. The last part of the book brings everything together beautifully, passionately, and completely, and it was all well worth the ride.

The book is firmly grounded in the moment, not only in the almost stream-of-consciousness narration, but in the subject matter and themes, reflecting the confusion and preoccupation of many in the post-9/11 western world. By setting the events of the novel against the political background of the protests against war in Iraq, McEwan constantly addresses his characters' concerns and views, but translates them into more immediate events. This is a truly great novel that seamlessly merges setting and story into something greater, a narrative that captures time and feeling. It is not a succinct book, but it is moving, lyrical, and rewarding. If you enjoy contemporary fiction, character analysis, or the pleasure of beautiful writing, this is an excellent choice.

Editorial Review:

In his triumphant new novel, Ian McEwan, the bestselling author of Atonement, follows an ordinary man through a Saturday whose high promise gradually turns nightmarish. Henry Perowne–a neurosurgeon, urbane, privileged, deeply in love with his wife and grown-up children–plans to play a game of squash, visit his elderly mother, and cook dinner for his family. But after a minor traffic accident leads to an unsettling confrontation, Perowne must set aside his plans and summon a strength greater than he knew he had in order to preserve the life that is dear to him.

The Comfort of Strangers

Ian Mcewan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 54 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Great sense of atmosphere 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The skill of Ian McEwan is that he creates not only lush prose and complex characters, but that he completely immerses the reader in a sense of place and time. In this story, the travelling couple in a foreign land, is so vivid that you feel you can feel the frustration of the heat, the sounds, the scents, the sensations they experience. As danger approaches in the most subtle way, it is unsettling. However, my only complaint would be that the ending left me somewhat dissatisfied. Otherwise, a worthy read.

The Comfort of Strangers 5 out of 5 stars.
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Well written, perfectly crafted, scary as hell. Good movie version too with Julie Christi and Donald Sutherland. I'm a big Ian McEwan fan.

No comfort at all 3 out of 5 stars.
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I can find little to recommend in this book. Normally, if a McEwan plot is not utterly engaging, one can at least enjoy the style. This is an early McEwan, with neither plot nor style to redeem it. The style is not bad; it is just not what one expects after reading many of his later works.
The plot, I found to be ghastly, ghoulish, and with nothing to offset the violence. McEwan has one of his protagonists (Mary) say towards the closure of the work: "the imagination, men's sexual imagination, men's ancient dreams of hunting and women's of being hurt, embodied and declared a powerful single organising principle, which distorted all relations, all truth" (100). Let us ignore the style that is a long shot off smooth. If McEwan is having his character expound his thesis at this point in an unsubtle conclusion then this is a theme that has little to offer, even if it were true. He has presented us with a bazaar situation from which few generalities about the human condition can be drawn. One is left with no enlightening insight into anything universal or pertinent. We see merely ugly violence that pertains to a warped couple of people; a murder that will hopefully not be repeated.
I did not enjoy Thomas Mann's depiction of decadence in Death in Venice and this somewhat more modern death perhaps manages to outdo Mann in its depressing resonance. One could see the ultimate violence on the horizon at a very early stage in the novel and for me as a reader it was inconceivable that the couple remained in the city in the first place and then willingly walked into the trap in the second. Their accompanying Robert to his bar after his early display of force was a mystery, let alone their agreeing to go to his house. Their not leaving earlier than they did was astonishing. Their final return is incomprehensible.
One factor of interest is the interplay between a `rational' reaction and the McEwan presumed reaction -that our rationality is overthrown by our violent sexual urges. The logic of the book claims that we will be lured by the violence inherent in sex, presumably in the way that all four characters in the story were. I, however, was repelled by it, and continually wanted to relocate his characters for him. The characters' passivity annoyed me greatly; I was abhorred by their inability to extricate themselves from what was manifestly a dangerous yet avoidable situation. My rational self was never overcome by the putative attraction of the sexual violence. I see from reviews that others felt as I did.
For me, McEwan's comments do not relate generally to humans; they have relevance to a tiny subset of sadomasochistic individuals. I see the book as being little more than McEwan's personal indulgence in his own immature and violently sexual fantasies. His attempt to claim some universal application for these is not persuasive.

Editorial Review:

As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though someone is waiting for them who cares deeply about how they appear. When they meet a man with a disturbing story to tell, they become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.

Amsterdam: A Novel

Ian McEwan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 296 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When good-time, fortysomething Molly Lane dies of an unspecified degenerative illness, her many friends and numerous lovers are led to think about their own mortality. Vernon Halliday, editor of the upmarket newspaper the Judge, persuades his old friend Clive Linley, a self-indulgent composer of some reputation, to enter into a euthanasia pact with him. Should either of them be stricken with such an illness, the other will bring about his death. From this point onward we are in little doubt as to Amsterdam's outcome--it's only a matter of who will kill whom. In the meantime, compromising photographs of Molly's most distinguished lover, foreign secretary Julian Garmony, have found their way into the hands of the press, and as rumors circulate he teeters on the edge of disgrace. However, this is McEwan, so it is no surprise to find that the rather unsavory Garmony comes out on top. Ian McEwan is master of the writer's craft, and while this is the sort of novel that wins prizes, his characters remain curiously soulless amidst the twists and turns of plot. --Lisa Jardine

Enduring Love: A Novel

Ian Mcewan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 171 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Joe Rose has planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States. To complete the picture, there's even a "helium balloon drifting dreamily across the wooded valley." But as Joe and Clarissa watch the balloon touch down, their idyll comes to an abrupt end. The pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope, while the only passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump down. As the wind whips into action, Joe and four other men rush to secure the basket. Mother Nature, however, isn't feeling very maternal. "A mighty fist socked the balloon in two rapid blows, one-two, the second more vicious than the first," and at once the rescuers are airborne. Joe manages to drop to the ground, as do most of his companions, but one man is lifted sky-high, only to fall to his death.

In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. (In one of the novel's many ironies, the balloon eventually lands safely, the boy unscathed.) But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.

Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye.

The Innocent: A Novel

Ian McEwan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The thrill lies not where you expect 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

McEwan creates well the atmosphere of a post-war, pre-wall Berlin, amplifying our imaginings. The interaction between Brits and Americans is full of subtle humor, and as it later turns out, great regard and humane understanding. The narrative is smooth and concerns an everyman, virgin, British geek assigned to an American intelligence project consisting of building a tunnel crossing the border into the Russian zone to tap underground phone cables through which presumably important matters are discussed (remember, we are in 1948, almost a decade before Sputnik). Love interest and sexual education is provided by an experienced German girl to our Brit, the virgin geek. The writing is so smooth that one doesn't realize one is turning pages and reading on at a rate as if one were reading a chock-full-of-events thriller when in fact not much is really happening; the tunnel is just chugging along. But McEwan is a "smooth operator" and he is moving you along, hinting at tension, to the point you are expectant of actions or revelations in the intelligence component of the novel to pop-up any minute and throw everything topsy-turvy.

Rest assured McEwan is too smart to do that. Nothing happens as such that you are aware of for three quarters of the book until our everyman, the somewhat endearing British geek is plunged into a grand guignol not of his making and totally alien to the place where you would have expected the excitement you were owed to come from.(After all, you bought the book and it was sold to you as a thriller, and after all, it takes place in thriller-city and all major protagonists except two are freeks and geeks and goons and guards mostly in uniform and with varying levels of security clearance in the intelligence services of the powers which split this city. At times it looks as if each agent has his little black book which lists the interests they are called uypon to protect, investigate, eliminate, whatever, and thus move quickly about, talk with other similar blokes and keep moving about. The Tunnel provides a country-club of sorts for those connected with the project. There are body parts indeed, but they do not come from there.

So, much activity occurs in our atmospheric tunnel, yes. But nothing happens there really. The unwelcomed death occurs elsewhere, has nothing to do with Military Intelligence. The neatly wrapped body parts do not bring the Tunnel down, it's the disguise they wear. But the story does not end there.

Many years later a mature, no longer virginal Brit geek comes back to Berlin, post wall, to revisit sites, and carries with him a letter explaining what precipitated events at the tunnel and freed him of any trace of guilt, if any such he held.

The explication at the end of the book is clear, surprising, and truly closes the nattarive in an intelligent, satisfying way.

Endearing Love, after such an unforgettable opening and the obsessive development remains my favourite McEwan novel so far. Saturday is contrived, feels Thatcherite and stacked against the lower orders. Nonetheless I appreciated the medical tracts. (It's up for a Booker). In short, I liked "The Innocent" Better.

Editorial Review:

Leonard Marnham is assigned to a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin. His intelligence work—tunneling under a Russian communications center to tap the phone lines to Moscow—offers him a welcome opportunity to begin shedding his own unwanted innocence, even if he is only a bit player in a grim international comedy of errors. Leonard's relationship with Maria Eckdorf, an enigmatic and beautiful West Berliner, likewise promises to loosen the bonds of his ordinary life. But the promise turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening—a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.

Atonement

Ian McEwan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Brilliant descriptive writing by a master novelist 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This novel is an astonishing achievement from one of Britain's leading modern day novelists. It contains three very individual pieces of descriptive writing. The first is about family tensions in an upper-middle class English family in 1935 - in particular the tensions between two sisters and with a handsome young man who is suitor to the elder. There is an undercurrent if not of menace certainly of unease and when the climax comes it is no surprise. Here passions, mendacity, jealousy, snobbery and ultimately violence bubble inexorably to the surface. The second piece describes what happens when the grievously hard done by young man from the first part gets caught up in the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940. Again the description is brilliant - harrowingly complete and at times horrifically graphic in its gory detail. The third part is a description of how the now adult younger sister copes not just with the aftermath of the tragedy of 1935 but also with her determined effort to atone, partly by training as a nurse in a military hospital. The strengths of "Atonement" are the gripping plot, brilliant writing and the fine portrayal of both the principal and the supporting characters.

Editorial Review:

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

The Child in Time

Ian Mcewan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A wonderful mix of passion, introspection, and contemporary commentary 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

McEwan manages to take the theme of a kidnapped child and turn it into a story of courage, love, and hope, without dredging it in sentimentality and triteness. Not as immersed in irony as is ON CHESIL BEACH, it nevertheless manages to leave a lasting impression both as a story and a well-written novel.

Introspective 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is the eighth book of McEwan's that I have read, and it was not among my favorites. This was probably McEwan's most introspective novel so far, but I found myself getting bored with Stephen's thoughts. I enjoyed the plotline involving the disappearance of his daughter and how that tragedy affected his relationship with his wife. I liked his reflection on how he became a children's writer, but I thought the whole relationship with his publisher Charles and his wife a bit strange. Charles' wife's ramblings about Time were uninteresting, as was Stephen's work with the committee. I typically fly through McEwan, but certain parts of this one just had me stuck.

While the title has many levels aside from Stephen's missing daughter, there were layers that I thought seemed irrelevant. If you prefer the more introspective McEwan novels, like Saturday, then you'd enjoy The Child in Time. This did not have the shock value of The Cement Garden or The Comfort of Strangers, or the epic novelty that made Atonement a huge success, but it's still McEwan through and through.

Editorial Review:

The Child in Time opens with a harrowing event. Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children's books, takes his 3-year-old daughter on a routine Saturday morning trip to the supermarket. While waiting in line, his attention is distracted and his daughter is kidnapped. Just like that. From there, Lewis spirals into bereavement that has effects on his relationship with his wife, his psyche and time itself: "It was a wonder there could be so much movement, so much purpose, all the time. He himself had none." This beautifully haunting book won a 1987 Whitbread Prize.

Black Dogs: A Novel

Ian McEwan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 33 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Black Dogs: A Novel 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

An extremely sophisticated look at two married people whose mental paths diverged at the very onset of their marriage many years in the past. The story is told by their son-in-law who clearly loves both people and seems to bring out the best of each. Historical vignettes are used to illustrate personality traits and thought processes of both the mother and the father-in-law; the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of these. It was like being there.
It was an extremely cleverly constructed book which did not seem unreadably "clever" as I turned the pages. I only marveled at how wonderfully it was put together and how everything "worked" in the days and weeks after I read it.
McEwan's descriptions, which have occasionally felt overdone to me(in his other books), worked extremely well here and I was not irritated by verbosity as I sometimes am. In fact the grammar, the construction, the tenses and the choice of words were so perfect that they disappeared completely from my observation while I was reading and only became apparent later when I stopped to think carefully about this book. A real gem. It's on my Xmas list for just about everyone I know!

Editorial Review:

Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs is the intimate story of the crumbling of a marriage, as witnessed by an outsider. Jeremy is the son-in-law of Bernard and June Tremaine, whose union and estrangement began almost simultaneously. Seeking to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences Bernard and June cannot reconcile, Jeremy undertakes writing June's memoirs, only to be led back again and again to one terrifying encouner forty years earlier--a moment that, for June, was as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy's own time. In a finely crafted, compelling examination of evil and grace, Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civiliation's darkest moods--its black dogs--with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.