dappled shade

Atonement

Friday night, I stood outside a shop window and finished Atonement by the store lights. I'd read all but the last 20 pages on the train and couldn't face the 10 minute walk home until I'd found out how the book ended.

Over the years I've developed a talent for not getting emotionally involved in books. My detachment is not absolute — I can't read a book in which I don't like any of the characters — but I seldom truly feel for the characters. I've been reading Atonement by Ian McEwan for at least the last 4 months. I got about half way through and then just couldn't get myself to read anymore because I was so emotionally involved in the book. McEwan has a remarkable ability to make his characters seem real, and for the events that occur to them to seem plausible. I picked up the book again just recently and finished it in a few days.

The book is set in England and France about 5 years before and also during WWII. Most of the narrative follows the experiences of the protagonist Briony — as a girl and as a nurse — and examines a crime and how atonement can be made for that crime.

McEwan delves into being human and what motivates people. While his books tend to be a little grim, he does seem to ultimately have faith in people. His characters are often good people who make mistakes or who have impossible situations foisted onto them.

This is the best book I've read so far by McEwan. Atonement is wonderfully written and beautifully constructed. Oddly enough, the ending has echoes of Villette. Compared to most modern books, Atonement is subtle and complicated, the language is sophisticated, but it would not appeal to all readers.

The Eyre Affair

Jasper Fforde has written a whole series of books about his heroine Thursday Next (whose name goes right up there with Neal Stephenson's character Hiro Protagonist in Snow Crash). The Eyre Affair is the first of this series.

The Eyre Affair takes place in a world a lot like ours, but in which history and society took a slightly different course. The aforementioned Thursday Next is part of the LiterTecs (a group charged with the investigation of literary crimes). Characters in books are very real, and can even be kidnapped out of their books. Jane Eyre is kidnapped and Thursday Next has to get her back to her proper place, and, in the process, re-writes the ending of Jane Eyre.

The Eyre Affair is unabashedly a book for bibliophiles. For instance, a major running argument in the book is who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays. Fforde settles it, but perhaps not to everyone's taste.

(The argument — and this is real — goes that Shakespeare was not well educated enough to write the plays attributed to him; the counter argument is that people who say this are unspeakably snobbish. I'm probably oversimplifying the two camps, but it hits me as the type of argument people come up with to pass those long winter evenings.)

There are some ideas that don't sit comfortably with me in this book, but it's hard to take them too seriously. For instance, in Fforde's book, Bronte wrote Jane Eyre differently. Jane went to India with St John and never returned to Rochester. Thursday Next's changes re-wrote the ending and reunited Jane and Rochester. Being so casual about how the book ends changes Jane Eyre from a carefully constructed work of art to merely a story.

The Eyre Affair is not a book to be taken seriously or carefully analyzed, though. It's a fun book that has endless references to other books. The Eyre Affair is highly entertaining and a wonderful choice for a gloomy winter afternoon.