On Chesil Beach

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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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Throw this one back, 2008-08-25
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.


0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Short story, 2008-08-21
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.


15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

The power of words. The power of misunderstanding., 2008-08-20
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.



1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

They Should Have Talked, 2008-08-17


It seems as though each time you check his website, Ian McEwan has collected another award, and with the success of Atonement he has to be considered one of the great living novelists in English. Although On Chesil Beach (Nan A. Talese, 2007) lacks the scope of Atonement, it is clearly a product of the same artistic sensibility.

The recent novel is set in 1962, on the eve (ironically) of the decade that brought fundamental changes in lifestyles, especially in regard to sexual mores. McEwan's young newly weds are both products of older times, virgins who have never spoken to one another about such things. Florence assumes that Edward has the required minimal sexual experience, and he assumes that she is eager for a sex life within the sacrament of marriage. Neither is correct. The central event of the novel is the wedding night in a hotel at Chesil Beach, where things come apart miserably as a result of his extreme performance anxiety and her irrepressible sexual loathing.

Throughout the novel, McEwan shifts from one point of view to the other, allowing the reader to experience first hand each character's flawed perceptions of the other. The technique is especially effective after the failed wedding night, when they fabricate defensive cases against one another. Atonement and On Chesil Beach are both about communication and how its failure can alter a life. In the first novel, the failed communication was the telling of an untrue tale by a child who dreamed of being a storyteller. In the later novel, the sexual failure was the result of things left unsaid. Both novels end with glimpses of the future lives that resulted from the communication failures.

On Chesile Beach is really a novella, stretched to book length with the use of small pages and a lot of white space. Personally, I think short is good, and this one is definitely vintage McEwan.


0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Not Good, 2008-08-17
I have to give this "book-ette" two stars because it is very well written, but the story is truly dreadful and, in the end, uninteresting. This is my first McEwan book, and despite stellar reviews of his other works, I will have a difficult time trying them.

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