He yearns to find a "coherent world, everything fitting at last."Īs the day progresses, Henry fixates on the plane accident and wonders about possible terrorism and the imminent war with Iraq. He has come to believe, however, that "there has to be more to life than merely saving lives." Though he has willingly accepted the discipline and responsibility of a medical career, "he's still young enough to yearn for the unpredictable and unrestrained, and old enough to know the chances are narrowing." Daisy has found through her poetry, and Theo has found in the blues, "not melancholy, but a strange and worldly joy," a spontaneity of feeling different from anything Henry has ever known. All in all, the Perownes are a happy family whose members support each other, the children seeking creative outlets, while Henry is firmly grounded in reality and science. They have two children, Theo, an 18-year-old blues musician, and Daisy, an aspiring poet whose first book is about to be published, with whom they share a relationship of mutual respect.
Henry is happily married to Rosalind, a lawyer for a newspaper, whose life he saved through emergency surgery when she was nineteen. From his awakening in the early morning hours through the end of this long and trying Saturday, Henry's life is laid bare-every action, thought, and question about life, fate, and destiny is articulated as Henry struggles to make sense of his good life and, more importantly, to see it in a philosophical context. In intensely realized descriptions, Henry's reaction to this event, along with the more mundane events of his daily life, come vividly alive, drawing in the reader who shares the most intimate aspects of Henry's existence. Looking out the window, he sees what he thinks, at first, is the Hale-Bopp meteor, but the object brightens, moves faster, and comes streaking through the skies at low altitude-not a meteor, but a plane on fire, apparently crashing on its approach to Heathrow. In the middle of the night, Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon awakens for no apparent reason. "It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fates, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance that cause one young woman in Paris to be packing her weekend bag with the bound proof of her first volume of poems before catching the train to a welcoming home in London, and another young woman of the same age to be led away by a wheedling boy to a moment's chemical bliss that will bind her as tightly to her misery as an opiate to its mu receptors." ( Jump down to read a review of Atonement)
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