But Atonement opened on a sweltering midsummer’s afternoon in an English country house as a girl on the cusp of adolescence tried, in vain, to stage a play for her brother’s long-awaited return. When McEwan started publishing fiction in the Seventies, he’d earned a Private Eye nickname of Ian Macabre: his novels were littered with unflinching and detailed accounts of grisly dismemberments, kidnappings and euthanasia pacts. Playing McEwan’s unforgettable protagonist Bryony Tallis confirmed 12-year-old Saoirse Ronan’s talent as prodigious.Īnd yet, for all those glittering accolades, Atonement’s legacy runs deeper than just turning its author into a household name. When adapted to film in 2007, it earned six Oscar nominations and galvanised the careers of Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. It carries quite a mantelpiece of gongs – The Whitbread, the Critics Circle and the Boeke Prize among them. It has sold 1.5 million copies in the UK alone and been published in 42 languages. While he was hardly an unknown – his previous novel, Amsterdam, won the Booker Prize – McEwan’s eighth novel is arguably his most famous (and, he’s admitted at times, his favourite).
Ian McEwan was 50 when he embarked upon the notebook “doodles” that would become Atonement, an age that he reckons “is around about the peak, for a novelist”.
0 kommentar(er)
