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Title: Highly Acclaimed Mediocrity
Review: ATONEMENT demonstrates again that, when she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the river, Virginia Woolf took the English novel with her.ATONEMENT is a mediocre book, unqualifiedly in love with its own prose, which is workmanlike. Both the narrator and the characters signal their punches throughout, so when we discover, at the end, that one of the characters, a highly acclaimed writer, IS the author of the book, that the book is her atonement, then we feel that those she punished have been punished doubly so.ATONEMENT presumes its readers are rather dense, won't see right away that Paul is the one who raped Briony's cousin nor that she will marry him. Are English readers dense? are they terribly distracted? they cannot be as dense as McEwen presumes.Anyway, if you seek a contemporary British novel, highly acclaimed but actually run-of-the-mill, then try ATONEMENT.
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