From my review in The American Conservative:
Many successful date movies, such as “Casablanca” and “Gone with the Wind,” combine a love story for the ladies and a war for the gentlemen. With his 2001 bestseller Moreover, McEwan constructed his novel not only for both sexes, but also for the middle and upper brows. For the book-buying masses, One dark night in 1935, Briony, a writing-obsessed 13-year-old girl, briefly glimpses a tuxedoed man ravishing her sultry 15-year-old cousin Lola. A budding novelist eager to connect the dots, Briony leaps to the conclusion that the statutory rapist is the housekeeper’s son, Robbie, the ardent new lover of her older sister Cecilia. (Robbie is played by James McAvoy, the callow doctor in “The Last King of Scotland,”...