On Chesil Beach [Hardcover]

As powerful as it is slender, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach--a gripping rumination on what the pact of marriage really means--is proof that even in this electronic age, few things are as captivating as a good story that's told well.

Laid across five slight chapters, On Chesil Beach begins in the honeymoon suite of Florence and Edward as they hover at the edge of the first-time intimacy that will corroborate, legally and spiritually, the vows they have already exchanged.

But simple sex is not so simple--unknown to Edward, who is delirious with lust, his bride harbors absolute revulsion for the act. Naturally, this is not news to Florence, who nevertheless pledged, before family and community, "With my body I thee worship! That's what you promised today," Edward reminds her at the book's paralyzing climax. "In front of everybody. Don't you realize how disgusting and ridiculous your idea is? And what an insult it is?"

Yet that idea--Florence's preconceived response to the inevitable mess she finds herself in on her wedding night--forms the tale's central question: when we wed, how much of ourselves are we obliged to reveal to our prospective mates?

If that sounds straightforward enough, you can bet a master novelist like McEwan spins it off in a million complex directions, tapping every available emotion. The plight of Florence and Edward resonates deeply long after readers have zoomed through the book's scant 166 pages.

Ironically, part of what makes the book so powerful is McEwan's delicate touch. As he tiptoes through Florence and Edward's respective back stories, we forget he's there, instead focusing on the almost palpable scenes he lays before us. This is storytelling at its most dynamic--vivid, persuasive and completely fluid. Though rendered in figurative watercolors, On Chesil Beach is a tiny, perfect masterpiece as lasting as a canvas infused with oils. --Kim Hughes

Early in this engaging short novel, Ian McEwan’s omniscient narrator writes that “comedy was an erotic poison.” And comedy may be, though I’m not convinced it has to be. A little intentional comedy between the main characters of this novel, Edward and Florence, would more likely have prevented the poisoning of their love. Ironically, there is much comedy in the telling of the first part of this novel: the two principal characters think, talk, and act at cross-purposes to humorous effect; there is excruciating humour of discomfort; there is even some slapstick (something of a cream pie at what is, as it were, the climax). On Chesil Beach also shows that a hyperintense seriousness respecting sex can lead to erotic, romantic, and connubial catastrophe. Somewhat oddly then, this short novel begins in comedy, flirts with farce, and ends in a pathos that could be called tragic. And because it is such a short novel (a novella really), the tonal and emotional shifts contribute to the frustration, disappointment, and failure of love.
Ian McEwan takes risks here with cliché and sentimentality, and the pay-off for readers is considerable. Perhaps sometimes the pathos slips too far into sentimentality, as when ex-wife Florence at her first major concert performance searches the seats in vain for ex-husband Edward because he once promised he’d be there for the big day (also a cliché). The most troubling cliché is the use of paternal sexual abuse to account for Florence’s sexual ‘frigidity’ (in apostrophes because she may be asexual or only sexually suspended; and of course that may be all that ‘frigid’ signifies anyway, if it’s not an anatomical problem). That implied explanation is something of a contemporary psychosexual version of the deus ex machina; and if it’s brought on stage to explain Florence’s sexual dysfunction or anxiety, then this reviewer wants to know what explains the father’s perversion. Are we to accept that Father is just a bad man? It is a very short novel, so McEwan had world and time enough for fuller characterisation. I would have remained content with Florence’s rationalised, if neurotic, reluctance to be invaded or violated physically as a condition of the married love she desires. I didn’t require what has become the pat explanation, which, granted, is only teasingly suggested a few times (yet this repeated gesturing toward, rather than direct dealing with, abuse could also be seen as a narrative weakness). But perhaps such misgiving says more about the peccadilloes of the compulsive reviewer than the novel under review.
On Chesil Beach tells a deeply engaging story indeed. Set in 1962 on the wedding night of two virgins in their early twenties, its action and characters are determined by the sexual and interpersonal mores of that time. Readers know that a cultural revolution is about to occur in the West, and that Youth, coveted by all from Coca-Cola to Pope John XXIII, will soon enjoy something of an apotheosis. But in 1962 the Beatles are rocking mainly Hamburg and Liverpool, and so the action of On Chesil Beach transpires at the threshold of the 1960s’ triumph of libertarianism, after which many things that dared not speak their names seemed to go on permanent conference call. For Edward and Florence, children of the 1950s, not youth but being married adults means freedom-again, this is just before that time when no one over thirty was to be trusted. Consequently, this fated love story is read against the background radiation of big-bang irony.
The sexual revolution has not yet exploded on the scene, so it is believable that Edward and Florence don’t talk about the thing most on their minds this wedding day and evening. What is less believable is that they hardly talk at all. Until a pointedly cross-purposed argument, in which each cruelly accuses the other of incompetence, they simply never elaborate on their thoughts and feelings. One typically longish passage of cogitation ends this way: “Thrown by this thought, she could not come to her point.” Exactly. And this leads to much frustration for the engaged reader (a sort of scenario interruptus). Florence and Edward are deeply in love, of that there is no question. They are simply ignorant lovers where sex is concerned (Edward’s decision to endure a preparatory week-long masturbation fast is the most fated instance of this ignorance, as well as being a fictional version of that proverbial gun in the first scene of a play). But despite McEwan’s fidelity to setting and his masterful marshalling of character traits and personal histories, I thought it a stretch to accept that these two well-educated modern individuals (Edward a historian with thoughts of teaching, Florence already an accomplished musician) would tolerate such failure to communicate. Similarly, it’s a stretch to accept that one event, however momentous, would keep two such lovers from contacting each other ever again. So much for “enduring love” (another McEwan title).
Florence is a classical musician in the nascent age of rock-n-roll culture (Edward plays some early-it must be very early-Beatles and Stones for her and she doesn’t like the redundant drumming). She is professional and masterful in her life as a musician, and passionate. Along with her inarguable love of Edward, and being stirred sexually on the wedding bed by the patient excitation of one pubic hair, her passion for music supports the view that she is not frigid but merely suspended, which accentuates the romantic tragedy. Music, mainly classical music, has come to mean more and more in McEwan’s fiction. It was central in the Booker-winning Amsterdam, where I had trouble believing that a few notes from a bird could inspire so much composition, but had no trouble believing that a good composer could be a bad man. In On Chesil Beach, though, I think he overdoes the musicology. For fair instance, when he writes of “four rising notes, which appeared to be posing a tentative question,” I have no idea what he’s on about (though I have no trouble with Ringo’s drumming). And since I’ve mentioned it, I might say that I think this novel is better than Amsterdam and Saturday, if not at the level of McEwan’s best (The Child in Time, Enduring Love, Atonement). But of course McEwan, even in his lesser novels, is always well worth reading. He has such a proficient style, and such a strange eye.
McEwan’s British contemporaries often seem to be struggling with the whole genre of the novel. Perhaps the best example of the consequences of this genre confusion is the mistaken reception given to Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog-which is a version of what Northrop Frye called Menippean satire-as opposed to the acclaim awarded Amis’s most recent and more generically conventional The Meeting House. These questions of form seem never to trouble McEwan. His novels are conventionally told stories-On Chesil Beach consists of a comic situation, a predictable flashback, a tragic resolution, a pathetic denouement-and though he has even tried popular genres (The Innocent), his fiction has not changed much from the social-psychological realism of his first short stories (the pleasure of whose discovery in the mid-1970s I clearly remember). If his writing has changed, the development has been in the direction of the more conventional. This apparent conventionality-because his stories are anything but conventional-may partially account for McEwan’s pre-eminent popularity in that group that includes the likes of Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Margaret Drabble, Amis, and others. In that, he is like Alice Munro: utilising a conventional, highly readable style to tell a moving, often deeply disturbing story. And as with anything by Munro, I would, as remarked earlier, recommend anything by Ian McEwan. But On Chesil Beach has much more than the author’s track record to recommend it, as I trust this review has indicated.
Gerald Lynch (Books in Canada)