The thing is… while many (okay, most) people don't necessarily write novels, everybody makes up stories. Many of you probably don't even want to write novels. But many of you probably aren't planning to write novels. You can see why this would interest McEwan since he's a novelist and all. Ian McEwan's Atonement is a novel that does a lot of thinking about novels. What is Atonement About and Why Should I Care? You would as well-and you deserve to after the horrible way you treated poor old Beluga. That's right: Keira is sad and it's all Briony's fault. But on the other hand, Cecilia-the sister whose life Briony ruins by falsely accusing her boyfriend-does experience such intense romantic tragedy that she had to be played by Keira Knightley in the 2007 film adaptation. Okay, not zombie attacks-it's not really that kind of book. Instead of putting Briony in control of the world, though, her imagination ends up spreading chaos and misery and guilt and zombie attacks. And you know what? He has to listen to you on account of living inside your brain and all. You can make up a character, give him an awful name like Beluga Throckmorton, and then make the poor guy do all of your homework. When you write, after all, your characters do what they're told to and speak when spoken to. Briony wants to be a writer because-she figures-they get to control the whole world. The screwer up here is Briony Tallis, a dreamy, upper-class 13-year-old control freak who we first meet in England before World War II. This is the kind of screw up that you don't come back from.
The stakes are a whole lot higher-and by higher, we're talking falsely-accusing-your-sister's-boyfriend-of-a-horrible-crime-and-ruining-her-life higher.
It's by Ian McEwan-a serious and critically acclaimed big-deal novelist who won the Booker Prize, so when he writes about screwing up, you can be sure it's not your garden variety oops-I-washed-my-jeans-with-a-pen-in-the-pocket kind. Atonement, published in 2001, is a book about screwing up.
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