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I must open with a disclaimer; this is not usually the kind of book that I would choose to read. I did not choose to read this book. I am in a book club and it was and this book when described sounded interesting. That being said, I did not like this book at all! Don’t worry there will be no spoilers in this review because there is nothing of interest to spoil! I found Mr. McEwan’s writing “style” to be verbose and pretentious. He starts the book with a lot of doctor jargon for the sake of sounding smart and you don’t really buy that McEwan knows anything about what he’s writing and your not really sure why you should care. His constant description of the most minute details is exhausting and painful to read. Often the item or idea, which he is explaining to the nth degree, is not pertinent to anything that’s happening in the “story” and is a waste of your time to read and his to write. In essence there is a lot of wasted time describing nothing. The chapters of this book are long and since they are devoid of anything interesting it is hard to find a moments respite. There are 278 pages of this book and it only starts to get remotely interesting on page 220, but that’s only for about ten pages. This book could easily have been fifty pages and would have been much better or at least it would have tortured me infinitely less. McEwan talks about this uselessness of fiction in here and I’m not sure, but ironically he could have been commenting on his own book. He attempts to weave the beginnings of the Iraq war into the book but doesn’t succeed in making this at all relevant to what’s going on in the “story”. This part of the “story” is weak and seems a bit forced and is not insightful at all. He’s not saying anything new and in fact most of his insight is due to hindsight. I’m by no means for the war in Iraq and I’m not very nationalist at all but Mr. McEwan places a lot of the blame on America and doesn’t really see the UK’s culpability in the mess that is Iraq. He makes constant comments about America and Americans that is clearly the worst kind stereotyping. For instance there is a character who is an American ex-pat who is hawkish, but some how is pro socialized medicine (something not really in line with the thinking of conservatives), likes country music over classical and is divorced After the fifteen page squash match the American drinks a coke and McEwan says, “ you have to be an American to want, as an adult, something so sweet”. This comment is pompous and shows that he is operating purely on stereotypes He goes on to send the main characters English son to New York to play the blues and he makes the assertion that the Americans probably won’t like it... I wonder if he knows that the blues are an American art form? Another really bad part of the book is the grandfather’s name, he is a famous poet and his last name is Grammaticus! Yeah, I know, lame. Anyway, I digress… Wow, this review is starting to be as long winded as Mr. McEwan, he must be rubbing off on me. Lastly, the end of the story is really unbelievable and quite trite and like the Iraq war content, a bit forced. As you can tell I would not recommend this book to anyone, EVER!