![]() He turned the drum and typed an 'x.' 'Cecilia, I don't think I can blame the heat.' Now the humor was removed, and an element of self-pity had crept in. He forgave this punctuation only in his mother's letters where a row of five indicated a jolly good joke. The rhetorical questions had a clammy air the exclamation mark was the first resort of those who shout to make themselves clearer. 'Cee, I don't think I can blame the heat!' Now jokiness had made way for melodrama, or plaintiveness. What was I doing, walking barefoot into your house? And have I ever snapped off the rim of an antique vase before?' He rested his hands on the keys while he confronted the urge to type her name again. He flicked the return lever twice and re-wrote: 'It's hardly an excuse, I know, but lately I seem to be awfully light-headed around you. He was like a man with advanced TB pretending to have a cold. "How thin it looked, this self-protective levity. Robbie Turner is writing a letter to Cecilia Tallis, only minutes after an incident in the garden of the Tallis family's country estate outside London, a place of "timeless, unchanging calm" spoiled only by "the ugliness of the Tallis home - barely forty years old, bright orange brick, squat, lead-paneled baronial Gothic." It is an incident that will - in a matter of hours - forever transform both of them: By way of illustration consider the following paragraph, chosen entirely at random. As surely as if he had tied a chain around your waist and wound it through a powerful winch, McEwan pulls you toward the novel's climax and denouement, but there can be no rushing to get there. Every sentence is pellucid, yet every sentence is fraught with weight. It tells us - if his previous three or four books did not already do so - that an extraordinary literary career is in progress, and leaves us to await with high expectations books as yet unwritten.Ītonement is at once incredibly lucid and forbiddingly dense. It confirms me in the belief that there is no one now writing fiction in the English language who surpasses McEwan, and perhaps no one who equals him. Certainly it is the finest book yet by a writer of prodigious skills and, at this point in his career, equally prodigious accomplishment. Where to begin? Whether it is indeed a masterpiece - as upon first reading I am inclined to think it is - can be determined only as time permits it to take its place in the vast body of English literature. All along he has known how to make the reader think and imagine now he knows how to break your heart. From his first novel, The Cement Garden - impressive and deservedly praised, but a chilly tour de force - his work has grown ever more passionate, ever richer in emotion and plain human sympathy. Talk about global warming! McEwan is under the influence of what can only be called a heat wave. The progress of his work certainly can be measured by sensitive literary calipers, but in truth a good old-fashioned thermometer would work just fine. In just under a quarter-century, Ian McEwan has published nine novels and two short-story collections. By Reviewed Jonathan Yardley March 17, 2002
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