On Chesil Beach

The characters could be any of us. This story shows how a common human flaw can have devastating results. I found the story to be very interesting and I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened for days.

This novel will richly reward anyone who appreciates serious literature and writing as craft. McEwan's control of his narrative is breathtaking: the first section ranks with the best-written passages I've read. The novel tells the sad story of a star-crossed couple back in 1962, young people stumbling over their own limitations and the stultifying sexual inhibition of their time. It's beautifully wrought. McEwan doesn't waste a word as his concise story works towards it's entirely appropriate conclusion. I recommend this highly to any serious reader.

This book was so good-packed with history and a message. I was captivated by it. He painted the political and social climate of the time in such a vivid manner. His insights were perfect and his historical detail was too good for words. He puts the reader back into 1962-even if the reader had not been born yet. It begins on the wedding night of two virgins, Edward and Florence. He's ready and willing to go, but she is filled with dread. She tries to have sex with Edward out of a sense of wifely duty. Their childhoood's are related. She is raised by emotionally distant parents, Violet and Geoffrey; and he is reared by a handicapped mother and a over-whelmed father. Both Edward and Florence try to escape their past lives with their marriage. The ending was sad, and, I was surprised. This book is worth reading-it is a historical treasure and tells an interesting and perplexing story.

Nowadays, in premarital relationships, sexual compatibility is something that most couples do not wait too long to find out about. Typically, we're getting to this part quicker and quicker it seems, and I would venture to say that this is an area fraught with less mutual confusion than say for instance, the depth of true "love" between the two people. Compatibility in other realms taking a [shall we say] front seat while the people themselves are [ahem] in the back one! In other words, [generally speaking now], courtship includes sexship! Yeah! Well! ? Meet Edward and Florence. We are told in the very first sentence [the author does not court his reader long]... They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. When was this time? 1962. Pre-sexual-revolution England. Thing is, Edward and Florence are in love. They've got that part of things in order. They're 22 years old. They've got the world by the tail. Florence, daughter of wealthy parents, has her musical interests. Edward loves history, and dreams of being a writer. McEwan paints a rather idyllic sort of atmosphere surrounding the couple, Edward becoming increasingly involved with the Ponting family, even moving into their villa just off the Banbury Road. He plays regular tennis with Geoffrey, the future father-in-law, and lands a job working in the family business. What could be wrong in this picture? Well, in the midst of all of this splendor and promise, there are things that both of these youngsters avoid confronting, on a communicative level. Edward, well aware of his own sexual inexperience, is startled to find that even his slightest advances toward Florence are met with seemingly undue resistance. Yea, even revulsion. Florence, we are told in one brief, almost hidden away sentence, thinks that Edward has been with many women, before her. This misinformation fuels her reticence and fear. McEwan seems to suggest [albeit so subtly that the reader must guess at it] that Florence has experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her father in the past. Point being that lack of communication, like termites, is eating away at what could be a perfectly good building. And so here we are at The Wedding Night. We are on Chesil Beach, at this resort.... well, not us, but these two are there. And McEwan writes so forcefully that we cannot help but become wicked voyeurs. Yea, we lean in closer, to be sure we hear every word... see every eyelash flicker. They are having a very lackluster, fear-fraught dinner. And then the moment arrives. The bed. False signals are flying every which way, like penalty flags at a soccer match. McEwan is all about moments. About antecedent causes, and how moments in time can change us forever. Well, for those of us who appreciate this aspect of his work, [and I am one of them] he is not about to disappoint us here. Everything about this novella is com

A marriage is about to start and then fails on square one because both antagonists don't really know what is what regarding the physical side of it, and though neither is an illiterate yokel, they don't manage to rationalize it enough to talk their way through it. Hard to believe this is set only about 45 years ago. It reads as if it was a lot older. Some reviewers have problems with that. They seem to think this is not real. This can not be the 60s of the 20th. But my own recollection confirms to me: this is how it was, then. The wordlessness, the embarrassment, the fear. The shame. What a breakthrough the much maligned 'sexual revolution' of a few years later was. It brought freedom for many, freedom from the paralysis of Chesil Beach. To me, this story of complete disaster in a relationship reads entirely true. (Just in case, I don't deny that the 'sexual revolution' brought us some other trouble in its wake, but that's besides the point now. And maybe it was not all that bad after all, right.) There is one caveat: how do we know that the woman's problems would not have been the same 10 years later? Sometimes a short term problem, i.e. the speechlessness, just paints over the long term problem. What if she couldn't have been different under any circumstances? That's a possible reading which IME does not even imply. Which does not reduce the high level of enjoyment and interest of the book.

A brilliant book, but such a sad one; it would be unfair not to say so up front. Ian McEwan is a master at dissecting emotions. Every page of this wonderfully-crafted novel gave me the uncanny feeling of living within the skins of the two main characters, Edward and Florence, just married as the book opens. When they fall in love, nurture ambitions, experience happiness, I feel these things too. But when happiness eludes them, the pain is unbearable, not least because the author never lets us forget by how small a margin their happiness was missed. In his last major novel, SATURDAY, McEwan pulled back from the multi-decade scope of ATONEMENT its predecessor, choosing to confine himself to the events of a single day. Here, the essential action occupies a mere three hours, described in a book which is itself unusually compact, a mere novella of only 200 delicate pages. In an opening that is surely a homage to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," the new husband and wife sit in a hotel room within sound of the sea on England's South coast. They eat a mediocre meal in one room; in the next, their bed stands waiting. They love each other, there is never any doubt about that, but they are inexperienced and secretly afraid. The book tells how they came to that moment, and what becomes of their love and fears as they move from one room into the other. I have not known McEwan to write before in such detail about sex, but his writing is never prurient. Every detail serves to illustrate the psychological intercourse between these two talented and caring young people. On this particular night, as in a high-stakes game, their honeymoon bed becomes the board upon which all the other pieces of their relationship must be played. By going back to the early 1960s, that dark hour just before the dawn of the sexual revolution, McEwan performs the remarkable feat of undoing the modern liberation of sex from marriage and returning to a mindset in which marriage was not only a contract for sex, but sex might also be a prime reason for marriage. But not the only reason. The focus on the bedroom also makes you consider all the other qualities that these two bring to their marriage, and before long you feel that you know them very well. [Exceptionally well in my case, since I was also born in Britain in the same year (1940), and share qualities with each of them; readers might take this into account when weighing the objectivity of my reactions.] Edward is a bright young man from the country who has recently achieved a first-class academic degree. Florence comes from a more socially sophisticated family, though she herself is naive in most things. The one exception is her calling as a violinist; here as in SATURDAY, McEwan is extraordinary in his use of music; the sections describing Florence's quartet playing are right up there with Vikram Seth's AN EQUAL MUSIC, my touchstone for sensitive writing about musicians. So both are bright, both are talented, both feel the stirr