3.5/5

The last few pages shattered me. I'd like to read them again, but don't think I can, or should.

McEwan's economy of language is remarkable, and it's highlighted especially in this novel/novella. He deftly examines the inner lives (and turmoil) of two young virgins in the early 1960's—this was before the freedom of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll had gripped England and allowed for a more equitable and open conversation around physical intimacy. On top of that, Florence is asexual (though never explicitly named) and struggles with her loyalty to Edward, her new husband and true love, and her own desires, or lack thereof.

The story takes place on their wedding night but smoothly moves back and forth in time to give you glimpses of their individual lives as well as how they met, how they came to be married, and ultimately the result of a rather uncomfortable and potentially disastrous wedding night. McEwan creates such vivid characters in such a short amount of time—and if you've got 4.5 hours to spare I'd highly recommend listening to the audiobook narrated by the author himself. He's a very sympathetic author and reader, who makes an endearing read out of a topic that is traditionally taboo and awkward.

A dud if ever there was one....

I suppose I should start off by saying I read this yesterday in quite some pain, so maybe that has made me even more intolerant that usual. Not for the first time I wonder at the professional world of book reviewing, this receiving the highest of accolades from the English press. It’s all a crock if you ask me.

This is a fifties/sixties story of the debacle of the wedding night of a young English couple. I wonder if it was a short story that got padded into 165 pages in order to sell on its own, a mish-mash as it is of story line and facts about English society at the time. He wants to have sex, she doesn’t in a way that would be laughably stereotypical but for the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that takes itself so seriously, is so entirely bereft of humour. She is so revolted by anything to do with the idea of sex that when he accidentally ejaculates before he has managed to enter her, in shock and horror she gets dressed and runs to the beach and then miles away from the hotel. Dead set. Then when he, recovering from his shame, goes to find her, she accuses him of failure. Generously strewn expletives from me at this point, take them as given. I’ve never read anything so unconvincing in my life.

So, they are in bed, she touches his penis as it is near her vagina and:

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres...

This deceptively light novella describes the events of Florence and Edward’s disastrous honeymoon night in 1962, interspersed with details of their childhoods and courtship to suggest how those influenced what happened.

(Update re film at the bottom...)

It is clinical and understated from the start: “The wedding... had gone well” and the “weather... not perfect but entirely adequate” and continues in the bedroom with detailed descriptions of physical sensations of skin, muscle, and even individual hairs: “stroking... for more than one and a half minutes” (too precise).

Florence is “incapable of rudeness”, Edward “polite to a fault” and both are virgins and unable to discuss intimate things (“There were no words to name what had happened, there existed no shared language.”), leading to misunderstandings, lost opportunities and unexpected consequences.

Edward is guided by duty.

Florence is guided by guilt (though not being religious, she can’t get absolution) and has a “visceral dread” of sex, realising that “sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy, but was the price she must pay for it”.


Photo: On Chesil Beach, April 2016: sea in front (barely visible), lagoon behind.

Destiny

A major theme is destiny, which is perhaps the converse of missed opportunities. “They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny”, yet it was a belief in destiny that prompted Florence to form her quartet, and Florence and Edward inferred the hand of destiny in the extreme improbability of their meeting, plus Edward wants to study and write about how powerful individuals can change destiny.

Contrasts

They are very different: Florence is a classical musician from a privileged academic city background, lacking in confidence - except where music is concerned.

Edward is quiet but (in the past) occasionally explosive, a history graduate from a rural “squalid family home” with a brain damaged mother.

Both are used to leaving things unsaid: Florence is “adept at concealing her feelings from her family” and “lived in isolation within herself”, while Edward grew up in a family that colluded in his mother’s fantasy of a well-run household by not talking about it. He secretly chose a London university instead of nearby Oxford as part of “his sense of a concealed life”.

Music is often important in McEwan's works. Florence and Edward's musical tastes are fundamentally incompatible (though they try), yet for Florence music is her “path to pleasure”, rather than physical intimacy.

Although Edward’s family home was chaotic and somewhat repressed, it was loving. He enjoys the “exotic opulence” of Florence’s home, and although not a social climber, “his desire for Florence was inseparable from the setting”.

Florence was raised by nannies, and her mother is uninterested in her, tone deaf and “had barely ever touched her daughter”. Her relationship with her father is more subtle, but perhaps more troubling. Sometimes she found him “physically repellent” and sometimes she’d hug and kiss him, and loather herself for it. She even jokes about marrying him. Although “he never touched her... in Edward’s sight”, they were “intensely aware of each other” (he did hug her sister), and took overnight trips alone together, even sharing a room on the boat.

At times, Florence feels more like the parent or child of Edward, rather than his girlfriend or wife.

Ebb and Flow

There is plenty of see-sawing in the book: the ebb and flow of the sea on the stones of Chesil Beach; of desire; of who to blame for what goes wrong (both in the minds of the characters and the readers); and Florence’s feelings about her father, and whether or not she thinks there is something wrong with Edward or herself.

Nowadays

The story, and especially the ending, would be implausible nowadays, but fits the characters and the period.

My parents married at almost exactly the same ages, in almost the same year, and I can see many similarities in aspects of my mother's upbringing and attitudes and Florence's. I'm unsure whether she'd see that (or want to).

The fact that Edward “fell away from history to live snugly in the present” seems entirely appropriate.

It is a raw and painful book in places, all the more ironic given that it is set in the allegedly “swinging 60s”. There is additional irony in the fact that Florence takes Edward’s cherry – but only at dinner (an image oddly missing from the film).

Complimentary Novels

Two were written in the 60s, about the 60s, and feature a woman struggling with sexual intimacy, against the zeitgeist of the swinging 60s:

Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (see my review HERE).

Lynne Reid Banks' The L Shaped Room (see my review HERE).

One of my two favourite books was written in the 60s, describing the life (and awful marriage) of a man born at the turn of the century, John Williams' exquisite Stoner (see my review HERE).

Also, Julian Barnes' 1986 novel, Staring at the Sun (see my review HERE), has similarly poignant anxiety about sex, though it takes a more humorous angle.


UPDATE re Film of 2018

The film was brilliant, beautiful, and mostly true to the spirit of my memory of the book (eight years earlier) - with one HUGE caveat.

The significant difference is that there was more afterstory than I remember. That didn't feel necessary, and in particular, the fact that in the film, Florence went on to have three children, starting very soon after the annulment of her marriage to Edward, totally changes the causes and consequences of what went wrong on their wedding night.

Florence's relationship with her father was still subtle (so much so, my husband, who hasn't read the book, was oblivious to its likely significance).

It stars the luminously vulnerable and always watchable Saoirse Ronan, who first rose to prominence in another McEwan adaptation, Atonement. The rest of the cast are good, too. See On Chesil Beach on imdb.

The dramatic views of Chesil Beach are perfect, avoiding the cliché of extreme weather, but having a vaguely brooding heaviness. You hear the crunch of the pebbles, underfoot, and as waves wash up and percolate down. The lagoon behind is still and silent. Florence and Edward are the only people in sight.

McEwan wrote the screenplay, so it's not surprising it's faithful. It certainly brought home the message that their wedding night conversations should have happened long before they married.

Go see it - but don't stay for the end!

As a first foray into Ian McEwan, I found this heavy handed a touch pretentious and self indulgent, the characters did nothing for me and left me cold, sorry McEwan not a good first impression

n  «Como se tinham conhecido e porque eram aqueles amantes de uma época moderna tão tímidos e inocentes?»n

Na Inglaterra de 1962, Florence e Edward, jovens, licenciados, ambos virgens na sua noite de núpcias, são simplesmente incapazes de ter uma conversa séria sobre as suas dificuldades sexuais. O casamento não é consumado e termina nessa mesma noite não sem antes Florence sugerir uma união sem sexo.
Nessa noite, na praia de Chesil, eles diziam um ao outro que se amavam.
A narrativa centrada nesse triste e frustrante acontecimento recorre a analepses para enquadrar o namoro/ noivado destes jovens e respectivos meios familiares.

«Tudo o que ela precisava era da certeza do seu amor e de que ele lhe garantisse que não havia pressa, quando tinham a vida inteira pela frente.», como conclui Edward, 40 anos mais tarde.

Era tarde demais. As conversas não devem ser adiadas.

What a quietly stunning little book. I didn't know what to expect from On Chesil Beach, having only read and been somewhat underwhelmed by Atonement about a decade ago, but I have now officially been converted to the church of Ian McEwan. I could not believe the emotional torment he managed to put me through in the space of 200 bite-sized pages.

On Chesil Beach is an almost-love story about Florence and Edward, two young lovers on their honeymoon on the coast of England in 1962. What should be a romantic weekend quickly devolves into something much sadder as an ocean of miscommunications piles up between the two characters. Florence is asexual, though the term asexual is never used because of the time period, and the lack of access to this concept and vocabulary has led Florence to believe that she's fundamentally broken. As she's unable to communicate this feeling to Edward, he imbues her actions with false meanings, drawing from his understanding of social conventions to fill in the blanks - she's shaking because she's terrified and repulsed and ashamed, but Edward assumes she's shaking because she's nervous and excited, because don't all young women act demure to mask a secret sensuality? There is no precedent for Florence falling outside this expected norm.

McEwan also ties in Florence and Edward's story to the shifting social attitudes of the time - they're living in a Britain which hasn't quite normalized sexuality and celebrated youthful freedom. The two are inexperienced and unable to communicate their thoughts and feelings and desires and expectations to one another, because how do you even start a conversation about sex when it just feels like this abstract concept both to be revered and ashamed of?

I wasn't prepared for how expansive this book was going to be - McEwan dexterously explores themes of class differences, propriety, love and sex and sexuality, all in economical prose that says so much in a book whose conflict ironically hinges on a lack of articulation on the part of both characters. And above all else this book is just bitterly sad. The final pages are like an emotional gut-punch. If McEwan managed all this in 200 pages, I can't wait to see what he's done in his other novels.

Short, not much more than a novella, but almost perfect. In 1962 Edward and Florence are between their wedding day and first night together. They are deeply in love but know next to nothing about each other. In that sense, the book could be about any age; what sets it firmly in 1962** (or really in any age up till then – it feels particularly Edwardian too) is that they are still virgins, and the sexual accident and misunderstanding that happens that evening would now have occurred much earlier in their lives.

So Edward is mortified and desperate to find fault; Florence is appalled and disgusted, her suppressed fears have come true, and she can’t stay in the room with him any longer. For a while at least, she needs to be alone.

But what happens afterwards is timeless, really. It doesn’t matter what the trigger was, these two are polite to a fault, but strangers to each other. You want to scream “oh, just say you’re sorry! That it will all get better!” But of course neither of them can; they’re trapped in their own fear, anger, hurt pride, and embarrassment; and they part.

The last few pages follow Edward’s later life where there is more than a hint of regret. And the point of the novel is, as Edward discovers (now, some forty years later), when he at last can admit that Florence was the one he had loved most in his life, that
“this is how the entire course of a life can be changed—by doing nothing.”

But this of course is only Edward’s voice, and I wonder if that is actually the message: after all Edward didn’t do “nothing” ... he hurled the ultimate insults of the ‘60s – frigid and bitch; after which there could perhaps be no reconciliation. About Florence’s later life, we learn little except that her string quartet did become successful and famous; perhaps she had no regrets at all. I think the real message is that being deeply in love is not enough; it can take a lifetime to know someone.

Memorable quotes:

"This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time, except visitors from abroad."

"On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk"

"“You’re a bitch talking like that.”
The word was a starburst in the night sky. Now she could say what she liked."

"Edward took the next steps with fatal ease: she had known all this—how could she not?—and she had deceived him. She wanted a husband for the sake of respectability, or to please her parents, or because it was what everyone did. Or she thought it was a marvelous game. She did not love him, she could not love in the way that men and women loved, and she knew this and kept it from him. She was dishonest."

"It is not easy to pursue such hard truths in bare feet and underpants."

** this is not exactly relevant, but it reminds me of Philip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis: Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP

Most people have already heard of Ian McEwan's presumable masterpiece Atonement, but many of his other novels have remained underrated ever since. On Chesil Beach is a simple love story about two opposing souls - but it is no love story in a typical way. In this short book, Ian McEwan reverses the love story and tells it backwards from their wedding night, allowing those events described to find a climax which might take them into a future with each other or separate them forever.

In the beginning, Edward and Florence prepare each other for their wedding night. It is the year 1962; a time when talking about sexuality was not as easy and natural as it would be fifty years later. Both Edward and Florence are virgins; however, Florence believes Edward to be experienced with other women, and Edward doesn't know about Florence's anxiety to even think of sexual relationships, of the disgusting feeling which builds in her stomach whenever her thoughts wander off to this night she fears so much. It is a simple premise, a fact which keeps this book from becoming as interesting and masterful as the complex Atonement, yet a premise intriguing enough for me to become interested in the characters. And interesting and complex they were indeed.

Ian McEwan's prose is beautiful as ever in this novella. He belongs to those writers you only have to read a few sentences from and immediately know they have been written by him. There is something powerful behind the words he chooses, something that makes you care for the characters even if it is sometimes difficult to understand their motivations. This simple story is able to say so much about human nature: how it is mandatory to talk to each other honestly about one's fears and feelings, because remaining silent could almost never lead into a happy future.

Over the course of 200 pages, Ian McEwan spends one fateful evening with his two main characters and their wedding night, yet the only time this book feels boring is when pages and pages of background information are inserted, something which would not have been necessary, considering the precision the characters have already been developed with. But who if not Ian McEwan could have been able to talk about a wedding night for 200 pages and never make it appear senseless or as if he went rambling?

Overall, my third McEwan novel proved to be a surprisingly interesting and insightful read, though while a lot better than The Innocent, not as complex and stunning as Atonement. Recommended for everyone interested in a convincing, yet not perfect love story written by a male author, although it may not be the best novel to start with if you want to get into McEwan's writing.

Uncomfortable truths looming against the backdrop of Dorset and the beautiful Jurassic coast.
A story about intimacy and human condition approaching its final curtain. Time to face the reality…before the inevitable fallout.
Although I’ve enjoyed some narratives portraying the beauty of the English coastline, I couldn’t relate to any of the characters (minimal development), or the boring and unassuming premise and storyline, or the ending that fell flat like a lukewarm finale of a melodramatic soap opera.
I was surprised by it’s Booker nomination.
Disappointed…2.5/5

When words fail. When words don’t fail.

This is a distressingly sad story of promised happiness marred by the lack of words.

They barely knew each other, and never could because of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences and blinded them as much as it bound them.

McEwan offsets the hopeless inability of the characters to communicate with each other with the splendid flow of his writing. For if the words that ought to have been said in the story falter, and those that should have been buried in silence explode, the reader is left with McEwan’s language. This novel is set with crafted, contrasting, balanced, nuanced, full-bodied, sweet and sharp words that evoke the completeness of chamber music. For music is always in McEwan’s writing.

There was however a dissonance. It seemed to me almost until the end that McEwan had been leaving a trail of word crumbs that would take us to a revealing monstrosity that would however explain the tragedy. But these were lost or dispersed by the waves or the wind in Chesil beach.


****

On the Film:

The script is by McEwan, and that ought to make the spectator tone down his/her anxieties. The visuals are beautiful, the recreation of the times, the early 1960s, and the setting Oxford, Oxfordshire and London, impeccable. The ending is however more of a pastiche than the somewhat anticlimactic ending in the book. Very well worth watching, though.