A portrait of the artist as a young terror   Ian McEwan won the
Booker Prize in 1998 for a deadly little masterpiece called
"Amsterdam." What seemed like a triumph of literary acumen then
was, in fact, just a prelude to a far broader, more ambitious
novel that captures the brutality of love and war and guilt. The
extraordinary range of "Atonement" suggests that there's nothing
McEwan can't do.  The story opens on a sweltering day at the
ugly Gothic estate of Emily Tallis and her much-absent husband.
McEwan rotates through the perspectives of several residents and
guests during a ludicrous and ultimately disastrous weekend,
turning subtly through a kind of mock tribute to Jane Austen,
Henry James, and Virginia Woolf.  Thirteen-year-old Briony has
composed a romantic play, in verse, for her older brother "to
celebrate his return, provoke his admiration and guide him away
from his careless succession of girlfriends, towards the right
form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the
countryside, the