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On Chesil Beach: A Novelby Ian McEwan |
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A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.
It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence?s response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence?s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite.
Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan?a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
From Amazon.com:
Such is Ian McEwan's genius that, despite rambling nature walks and the naming of birds, his subject matter remains hermetically sealed in the hearts of two people.
It is 1962 when Edward and Florence, 23 and 22 respectively, marry and repair to a hotel on the Dorset coast for their honeymoon. They are both virgins, both apprehensive about what's next and in Florence's case, utterly and blindly terrified and repelled by the little she knows. Through a tense dinner in their room, because Florence has decided that the weather is not fine enough to dine on the terrace, they are attended by two local boys acting as waiters. The cameo appearances of the boys and Edward and Florence's parents and siblings serve only to underline the emotional isolation of the two principals. Florence says of herself: "...she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires...."
They are on the cusp of a rather ordinary marital undertaking in differing states of readiness, willingness and ardor. McEwan says: "Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness." Edward, having denied himself even the release of self-pleasuring for a week, in order to be tip-top for Florence, is mentally pawing the ground. His sensitivity keeps him from being obvious, but he is getting anxious. Florence, on the other hand, knows that she is not capable of the kind of arousal that will make any of this easy. She has held Edward off for a year, and now the reckoning is upon her.
McEwan is the master of the defining moment, that place and time when, once it has taken place, nothing will ever be the same after it. It does not go well and Florence flees the room. "As she understood it, there were no words to name what had happened, there existed no shared language in which two sane adults could describe such events to each other." Edward eventually follows her and they have a poignant and painful conversation where accusations are made, ugly things are said and roads are taken from which, in the case of these two, the way back cannot be found. Late in Edward's life he realizes: "Love and patience--if only he had them both at once--would surely have seen them both through." This beautifully told sad story could have been conceived and written only by Ian McEwan. --Valerie Ryan
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not what I thought -  |
On Chesil Beach: A Novel Review |
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After watching atonement, I wanted to read more material by Ian McEwan.. so this was my choice. Wonderful pose and writing style, but I couldnt say I enjoyed the story. I kept wanting to like it and hoped it would get more interesting. In a nut shell it was about a newly married virgin couple that goes into their mind process of dealing with sex and flashback to how they met and their interaction with the rest of the world; which seemed a little off for the period of the book. I will try another of Ian's book, but this short novel lacked subtance. |
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So much feeling in so few pages - |
On Chesil Beach: A Novel Review |
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Some reviewers are complaining that this is really just a short story. Uhhhhh, ok, maybe, but the author has packed it full of emotion and feelings that make it a page turner. Who hasn't said the wrong thing at the wrong time and regretted it later, sometimes much later? Or who hasn't stood by and done nothing to save a relationship out of pride or fear of rejection? And who hasn't wondered decades later about the paths not taken? Most of us can relate to at least some of the feelings that Ian McEwan so masterfully depicts.
If it's a "short story," it's definitely the best short story I've read in many years. |
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Throw this one back - |
On Chesil Beach: A Novel Review |
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I may have missed it, but did Ian McEwan recently move to that Greek monastery where the don't allow any females of any species? You would think he'd never met a woman in his life from reading "On Chesil Beach," a minor character study that's not really worth even the short time it takes to get through. McEwan's attempts to inhabit the mind of a woman in post-war England are laughably inept--although he works hard to get the period details right the character rings false all the way through. The author also seems to suffer from that modern misconception that everyone born before 1960 had no idea how babies are made--how does he think he got here? And the, er, climactic scene is more worthy of a soap opera scribe than a major novelist. The only time this novel works is when he's describing the male character's class resentment: that's where McEwan's talent lies and he'd be better off applying his much over-praised abilities to culture-clash stories like Atonement and Saturday.
In all, a bad day at the beach. |
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Short story - |
On Chesil Beach: A Novel Review |
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Am I the only person who read this McEwan piece as a short story in the New Yorker in September, 2006?
I thought it was a brilliant short story. However, when it was published as a new hardback, I forgot I had seen that title before. The book was what it was, a short story force-fed into becoming a publishable, hard-back book. The additional pages written by the author added nothing, except royalties. The short story contained every thing necessary to convey what I thought was an interesting, tense and surprising story. Authors and publishers should reveal somewhere on the cover of the "book" it has been previously published in another form. I was disappointed in this little charade. |
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The power of words. The power of misunderstanding. -  |
On Chesil Beach: A Novel Review |
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In "On Chesil Beach" Ian McEwan, as usually, delivers what expected of him. Exeptionally good literature, exceptionally good character study and background.
Florence, a violinist, and Edward, a historian, young college graduates and, what is more important, newlyweds, are about to spend their first night together. The honeymoon started well, they are in a hotel suite overlooking the beach, but none of them is happy - they fear what happens when they attempt intercourse., And, although they fear for totally different reasons (or maybe partly because of this?) it leads them to the tragic misunderstanding and puts the end to their marriage. McEwan, like in his previous novel, "Saturday", connects the central conflict between the pair of protagonists with the place and time of their life, and their social status. Again, he comes back to his point that we are trapped in our era and culture and most of us cannot find the way out. This new novel is very precisely set in 1962, a year before the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP. The young people still live according to old rules, but long for something new, something undefined and tempting, and at the same time are afraid of it. The tale told here belongs to the epoch, but at the same time is as universal and timeless as we can only imagine. It is a simple story about two people, very much in love and seemingly at the beginning of a very happy, successful married life, who shatter everything because of their assumptions, inability to communicate and to open to each other's feelings, and lack of understanding. The spoken and unspoken words change their lives without a chance for a change. The tragedy is not only their view of each other, but - and this is essential - their ignorance of their own feelings and characters, which they do not know themselves (example: Florence's own belief in her frigidity) - and when they learn who they really are, it is too late. McEwans language is, as usual, crystal clear and precise. The narrative is disciplined and transparent. There are just enough words for this short (but not too short) novel to be perfect. The dialogues flow and there is nothing superfluous, nothing redundant, every word is accounted for. The story is perfectly constructed, flawless - but not without some winks towards the reader, like a temptation after the climax to read on to the end... hoping for a change, although knowing what the end will be. Superb. |
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