SOURCE: Wood, James. “The Trick of Truth.” New Republic 226, no. 11 (25 March 2002): 28.

In the following review, Wood commends Atonement as one of McEwan's finest novels, lauding the large scope of the plot and a feeling of “spaciousness” that is in contrast to McEwan's other works which, Wood asserts, have at times seemed “artificial” and contrived.

Ian McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive—where storytelling means kinesis, momentum, prowl, suspense, charge. His paragraphs are mined with menace. He is a master of the undetonated bomb and the slow-acting detail: the fizzing fact that slowly dissolves throughout a novel and perturbs everything in its wake, the apparently buried secret that will not stay dead and must have its vampiric midnight. These talents, which are enabled by a penetrating intelligence and a prose style far richer and more flexible than most contemporary writers dream of, have made McEwan...