Atonement

⚖The case for it

A vase chips at a fountain on a hot day in 1935 and the pieces go into the water, and readers name that scene as the moment the book starts moving. Then a thirteen-year-old walks into a library, sees something she is not equipped to read, and is certain she has understood it. McEwan replays the same hours from different heads until a dress left on a floor means four different things, which readers call “lush, beautiful, and almost sinister.” The Dunkirk retreat section gets singled out for “the vividness and body of imagined things,” and the late reckoning is “one gratifying, blistering scene of confrontation.” Finishers go straight back to page one: “not a hair out of place.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The first third is a single hot day at a country house, and the chapter spent inside a migraine in a darkened bedroom is where readers report quitting, since “the chapter gave me a headache.” McEwan renders “each one in WAY too much detail,” one reader notes, counting a full chapter’s attention on a single bath in a book “written like someone trying desperately to hit a page count.” Briony at thirteen reads to many as a miniature adult novelist rather than a girl, and Cecilia stands aside smoking through the interrogation that decides everything. The formal swerve late on splits even admirers, dismissed by some as a “cheap parlor trick, a manipulative tear-jerking device.”

— the honest librarian

8h

honest hours

11

sittings