Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance."
I think the one thing that makes this book so wonderful is McEwan’s eerily accurate understanding of how a 13-year-old girl’s mind works - her understanding of the world and her emotional reaction to it. Briony is trapped between childhood and adulthood. She’s old enough to recognize the dark and startling behind-the-scenes facets of her proper British family’s life, but not old enough to properly analyze or judge them. She’s old enough to impose her will and her ideas on others, but not wise enough to know when to act or when to question herself. It’s a frustrating and fascination (and uncomfortable) time, and he has it down pat.
The last 2/3 of this novel are as good as contemporary fiction gets. The first 1/3 is like reading a Jane Austen plot trapped in amber.
My favorite quote from this book would be this :
"From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended."
The film motion pictures easily, and unobtrusively, until the end, where everything flips around. It is an attribute of the metafiction novel that is, on which the film is based, of a similar name.
The demise of the characters are enthusiastic, as the severe World War plays the format against which their predeterminations are demolished. The peculiar depiction of the genuine abhorrences of the war, what it did to the "300,000" officers who longed to their demise to get back, however never could; who passed on without having anything to drink, who were left in outside terrains, injured, and overlooked by the Empire.
The many, numerous who lost their lives only for the conflict of pride of Imperialism, the errors of others' that destroyed lives, and there was no returning.
What's done, will be done, and that is the truth.
Incredible cinematography, extraordinary plot, incredible acting.
Worth a watch. Give it a shot, you won't be frustrated