Kevin, I’m glad I got to this one sooner than later, but one good thing about your goal is that it will give you time to forget this review and approach the book on its own terms! I hate feeling responsible for lifting expectations and then seeing them dashed.

Kerry, I have read only this one, but I think you’ll be glad when you stop pushing Maxwell down a spot! I’m anxious to get to They Came Like Swallows too, and look forward to t what you have to say about it!

They Came Like Swallows will be first pursuant to Kevin’s recommendation, but now I just have to read So Long, See You Tomorrow because I too thought Atonement was a masterpiece when I first read it. You make it sound like So Long, See You Tomorrow is not only Atonement‘s predecessor, but its superior. If so, it is a must read. (Plus, I loved Capote’s In Cold Blood. One of my favorites, though (because?) it is so incredibly, disturbingly dark.

Your exchange with Max is interesting and took me back to his first two novels (particularly Bright Center of Heaven) which also have a fair bit of “telling” at the start. My explanation would be that a Maxwell novel is like a literary version of a complicated chess puzzle — he does need to do some “telling” to set up the board but then turns himself and the reader loose to great effect. If you can accept this kind of approach (I quite like it — I feel as though the author is enrolling me as a partner) it does have a significant reward — a short novel can tell a very significant story. And then when you are done and start thinking that Maxwell spent 40 years of his life editing some of the best short story writers of the century, his use of that structure and approach becomes even more intriguing. I think he learned from the writers he worked with how to tell “big” stories without writing “big” books.

As for McEwan, I like it when he’s creepy and sinister i.e The Cement Garden, Amsterdam and Enduring Love. To be honest i have a love/hate relationship with Atonement. The first part more or less echoes L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, However I found it breathtaking. The war bit screamed BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE PLEASE!!!!! (and Evelyn Waugh has written about the same thing except in a much better way) I found the ending to be clever and ironically I found it to be a form of atonement for that horrendous mid section.

Great stuff Trevor, I’ll look out for it.

It also felt this way with the structure. Sometimes at the beginning the narrator would move from one subject to another fairly quickly. Again, though, it felt natural in the circumstances and made the elderly man looking back into the past a very believable construct.

And, indeed, this was a very rewarding book. It is short, too, making the accomplishment that much more impressive to me.