Atonement+by+Ian+McEwan

 A novel by Ian McEwan  //"Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence." // The Independent
 * ATONEMENT: **

__  2001 Booker Prize For Fiction

//New York Times Book Review// Editor's Choice   __

__ BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by //Time, The Washington Post Book World, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic Monthly, and Seattle Times//

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award   ____ The //Los Angeles Times// Book Prize   __

__Ia____n McEwan:__ Ian McEwan was born on 21 June in 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England. He spent much of his childhood in the Far East, Germany and North Africa where his father, an officer in the army, was posted. He returned to England and read English at Sussex University. After graduating, he became the first student on the MA Creative Writing course established at the University of East Anglia by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded a CBE in 2000. (from http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth70) Because the majority of McEwan's childhood surrounded the complications of being involved within a typical Army family, it is safe to assume that many of the conflicts surrounding World War II in __Atonement__ are inspired by his father's experiences. <span style="display: block; color: rgb(0,0,0); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;">

<span style="display: block; color: rgb(0,0,0); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;"> <span style="font-size: 170%; color: rgb(128,0,0); font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif;">__ In Summary: __

//Atonement// follows 13-year-old aspiring writer, Briony Tallis, from her first play drama //The Trials of Arabella,// to its presentation on her 77th birthday. As the youngest of the Tallises' three children, raised as nearly an the only child in the family, Briony seems to suffer for a dramatic ened of attention and confirmation. Her older sister and middle child, Cecilia, has recently come home from attending Cambridge, while her brother Leon, a banker from London, has visited home with his friend Paul Marshall. Three of her cousins, 15-year-old Lola Quincey and identical twins Pierrot and Jackson, age 9, arrive at the Tallis estate at the same time due to a recent divorce.

Briony, while rehearsing for her play, accidentally sees a heated confrontation caused by a broken vase between Cecilia and 23-year-old Robbie Turner, the family landscaper and childhood friend. This accident sparks most of the controversy that Briony herself creates. Because of the incident, Cecilia and Robbie realize their love for eachother and follow through with their passion hours later before a dinner party in the library. By a twist of fate, Briony walks in on the two making love and interprets the scenario as Robbie being violent, and then only hours later interrupts a true assault on Lola in the woods. Confused and unaware, Briony decides that Robbie is the culprit of Lola's rape, and by giving her testimony sends Robbie to jail, later leading to his placement in the War.

The majority of the novel takes place between Cecilia and Robbie's struggles of keeping in contact through World War II, the trials that occur because of the distance, and the horrid guilt that follows Briony for the rest of her life. In hopes to fully carry out her //atonement//, Briony writes her last novel as a personal account of what she has done and how she has truly dismembered the lives of the two lovers. It is only as she is dying that this book is finished, and she realizes that it will only be able to be published posthumously.

<from http://litsum.com/atonement/>

<span style="display: block; color: rgb(0,0,0); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;">__<span style="font-size: 190%; color: rgb(128,0,0); font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif;">Major Characters: __

<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;"> **//<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">Briony Tallis: //** <span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;"> <span style="display: block; color: rgb(0,0,0); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;">An imaginative and creative thirteen year old girl in the beginning of the novel, Briony is an aspiring writer in the midst of presenting her very first play for her brother Leon's arrival home from the war. Constantly in the need to impress and accomplish, Briony's flighty demeanor and overly dramatic thoughts inevitably destroy Cecilia and Robbie's relationship in the hopes of creating her very own, real-life romance. Her transformation from pre-adolescence to womanhood is <span style="display: block; color: rgb(0,0,0); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;"> documented both by her narration and by her character roles in the novel, allowing the reader a look inside her mind as well as her relations to others in her life.

<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">   <span style="display: block; color: rgb(0,0,0); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;">//**<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">Cecilia Tallis **//: The middle child of the Tallis household, Cecilia is a strong willed, independent scholar constantly leaving her family in shock. Many of her actions are considered to be "unlady-like," however she finds no disgrace in this. By eventually falling in love with her childhood friend, Robbie Turner, Cecilia's life becomes a complicated mess of love and heartbreak. Cecilia is the most affected of her family by Briony's foolish, selfish ways.

<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">   <span style="display: block; color: rgb(0,0,0); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;">//**<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">Robbie Turner: **// The young servant to the Tallis household, Robbie is presented to the reader as an intellectual, hard working man striving to accomplish his dreams of becoming a medical student. After attending college at Cambridge with Cecilia, and in the midst of staying home for a break, he falls madly in love with Cecilia, a relationship that inevitably leads to being the downfall of his aspirations. //**<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">Leon Tallis: **// The eldest brother of the Tallis family, Leon is sent away to war during Briony's early years. His arrival back home with a friend, Paul Marshall, causes an unthinkable action to occur between his friend and cousin.

//**<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">Emily Tallis: **// The mother of Leon, Cecilia, and Briony, Mrs. Tallis is confined to her bedroom for a majority of her days due to severe migraine complications. Very keen in her observations of the household while she is in her bed, Emily still has little knowledge of the many conflicts in her household. She is referred to as Emily because of the lack of relationship with her children.

//**<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">Lola Quincey: **// Cousin to the Tallis', Lola becomes involved in a scandal with Paul Marshall that, mostly due to Briony's immaturity, breaks apart Cecilia and Robbie's love affair. She later marries Paul Marshall.

<span style="font-size: 120%; color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">//**Paul Marshall:**// The friend of Leon Tallis and an innovator in the chocolate business, Paul's visit to the Tallis abode becomes more than a simple vacation.

<span style="display: block; color: rgb(0,0,0); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;"> //<span style="display: block; color: rgb(128,128,0); font-family: Georgia,serif; text-align: center;">"Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man who once crossed the surrey park at dusk, in my best suit, swaggering on the promise of life. The man who, with the clarity of passion, made love to you in the library. The story can resume. I will return. Find you, love you, marry you and live without shame." <span style="color: rgb(128,128,0); font-family: Georgia,serif;">~ Robbie Turner //

Torn apart by World War II and the distance placed between them, Robbie and Cecilia make efforts to keep in contact through a series of love letters. This quote, one of the most revealing of Robbie's letters, represents the love and passion that the life-long friends hold for one another. In hopes of finally being with each other once again, clinging on to these love letters becomes one of the only positive aspects in their lives already filled with hatred, war, and separation.

<span style="font-size: 140%; color: rgb(128,0,0);"><span style="font-size: 150%; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"A Thousand Miles" <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">by Vanessa Carlton

//<span style="color: rgb(6,91,6); font-family: Georgia,serif;">If I could fall Into the sky Do you think time Would pass me by A thousand miles If I could Just see you** Tonight
 * 'Cause you know I'd walk

When I think of you** And I wonder If you ever Think of me
 * It's always times like these

'Cause everything's so wrong And I don't belong Living in your
 * Precious memories**

'Cause I need you And now I wonder.... //
 * And I miss you**

Discussing the trials of separation, "A Thousand Miles" is a highly appropriate lyric to express exactly what undying affection can do to a couple. Willing to walk a thousand miles, such as Robbie as a soldier in the War, and desperately wanting to see the significant other, no other song can fully express the desire of Cecilia and Robbie.

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