Even so, the pallid qualifiers and disposable adverbs (a "gently rocking" sheet of water, the "coyly drooping" head of a nettle) come as a surprise. Unlike Martin Amis, say, or Salman Rushdie, McEwan is an invisible rather than a flamboyant stylist. One longs for a cinematic clarity and concentration of dialogue and action, but such interludes dissolve before our - and the participants' - eyes. Instead of the expected sharpness of focus, the first 70 or so pages are a lengthy summary of shifting impressions. The opening is almost perversely ungripping. McEwan is, in other words, a thoroughly traditional original.Ītonement does not feel, at first, like a book by McEwan. This is why the themes of the novels (with the exception of the enjoyably forgettable Amsterdam ) linger and resonate beyond the impeccable neatness of their arrangement. Moral ambiguity and doubt are thereby enhanced - rather than resolved - by clarity of presentation. Needless to say, the more disturbing or skewed that reality (in the early stories and novels, most obviously), the more finely McEwan attunes his readers to it. The novels' psychological acuity derives, always, from their fidelity to a precisely delineated reality.
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