Atonement is a joint favourite to win the Booker

Briony, half-seeing, half-knowing has created a drama around the pair with disastrous results.

The plot thickens, a crime occurs and before you know you are in part two of the book and its years later.

There are a few paragraphs of readerly anxiety as you want to know what happened before becoming engrossed in the trials of a wounded Robbie attempting to reach Dunkirk in 1940.

Desperate

It is as realistic a portrayal of the horror of war as I have read, by erratic turns both heroic and ignominious.

The sheer quirkiness of the descriptions and incidents bears the hallmark of truth and intense research.

At one point an increasingly desperate Robbie is passed by a motorcycle driven by two soldiers, one with useless arms the other with dreadfully wounded legs.

Apparently McEwan's father witnessed just such an incident during the war.

When we leave the innocent Robbie to his enforced atonement, it is to take up Briony's story as she trains to be a nurse in London.

Her penance is to be willingly bullied and regimented into the necessary shape to cope with the onslaught of the wounded from the battlefields.

Finally we learn that the whole story is written by Briony and that she considers it her atonement for what happened that sultry 1935 day.

It was this part that I liked least about the book.

It's quite nice and comforting sometimes to have an unseeing omniscient figure in the book - but that is generally the author.

This time that figure is Briony herself and inevitably she grants herself atonement.

Nice old lady though she turns out to be, finding that the entire story was given from her own perspective only made me suspect her motives.

But then these 20 odd pages probably would not bother most in what is undoubtedly a great read.

And perhaps leaving the reader with suspicions of the protagonist is exactly what McEwan - famed for his forays into the darker side of human nature - set out to do.