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Title: The end does not justify the means...
Review: An earlier review gave Atonement a five-star recommendation even after acknowledging that it was "horribly boring for the first 330 pages." The alleged saving grace was the book's "shocking" ending. Sorry, but if a novel is only entertaining in hindsight, it's not really entertaining at all. The art of telling a story with a twist ending is to ensure that the story itself is compelling -- separate and apart from its ending. McEwan utterly fails in that regard. The characters are dull. The prose is long-winded and tedious. There's not one whit of wit anywhere in the story. And the only satisfying aspect of the aforementioned ending is that it finally puts an end to the tedium that precedes it. Ian McEwan will have to do much better next time to atone for Atonement.
