On Chesil Beach
On Chesil BeachThis short (166 pages) but beautifully paced novel is easily read in two or three sittings but only the meanest of critics will feel short changed as a result of this brevity. It essentially tells the story of a wedding night which goes catastrophically and messily astray. Ian McEwan has a great talent for tight examination of seminal moments in his characters lives which alter irrevocably the entire course of their futures. Readers of his previous work such as Atonement or Enduring Love will know that already but here too is the undercurrent of unease which darkens other McEwan books such as Black Dogs or The Comfort of Strangers.

The majority of the tale is set in the years immediately preceding the sexual revolution of the mid-1960s. On a July evening in 1962 two newly-weds, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, stumble through an awkward dinner at a hotel on the Dorset coast overlooking Chesil Beach and the Fleet Lagoon, anticipating the first night of their married lives with mixed emotions. Both are virgins, and each has their reasons for anxiety. For Florence, the prospect of engaging in penetrative sex with her new husband terrifies her to the point of hysteria. The manuals she has read have struck a chord of revulsion within her with words such as "membrane" and "glans". By contrast, Edward's fear is that he lacks the necessary self control to prevent him ruining his wedding night by "arriving too soon".

Over the course of this psychologically insightful novella, McEwan elicits a deep compassion for both Edward and Florence in the reader and it is this compassion which makes witnessing their inability to overcome their conjugal differences all the more heartbreaking. Through numerous flashbacks into the two protagonists lives leading up to the point of the wedding night, the reader is able to build up an understanding of these characters that they are unable to grasp themselves. Beneath the surface of every unspoken word, awkward silence or tumble weed inducing attempted joke, the reader can see through to the real affection that exists between them and their ardent but ultimately conflicting desires to please the other and go on to lead happy fulfilling lives.

McEwan writes extraordinarily well with seldom a word misplaced and we drift subtly, without even noticing, between events within the marital chamber and those of years gone by. The book looks unflinchingly, but not without humour, at the conventionally English emotions and traits of repression, deception of others and of the self and at lifelong mournful regret. That might not sound immediately appealing, I grant you, but I have no hesitation in recommending one of the best works of fiction I've read in many many months.
Written by Kevin
Monday, 14 July 2008
 
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