On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"[...] her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh."

On Chesil Beach (2007), my third novel by Ian McEwan after Amsterdam and The Child in Time , is the best of the three. Delightfully short, it offers psychological observations with acute realism and dead-on accuracy. An absolute opposite of a feel-good book, it cuts through the superficial pretense, through the thick layers of fictions people create about themselves, and uncovers the underlying bare bones of one's personality. Quite painful to read in several places and impressive in the scope of truth about human nature that it reveals.

The novel has an interesting non-linear structure of its five chapters. The odd-numbered ones describe events happening during the pivotal day of two people's lives, while the even-numbered ones go back in time to give an account of how they reached that fateful day. They eventually merge with the "current" time of Chapter One. The ending of Chapter Five is written from an over-40-years-later perspective and relates the further life trajectories of the characters.

It is summer of 1962: Florence and Edward, freshly wedded at St. Mary's in Oxford, are beginning their honeymoon day and night at a hotel on Chesil Beach on the Dorset Coast of England. Florence is a gifted violinist, the leader of a string quartet; Edward is a graduate student of history. There is not an iota of doubt that they are in love with each other. They are both anxiously anticipating the joys of their future lives together but while Edward is focused on his sexual performance on their initiation night - they have been basically chaste until the wedding - Florence is terrified of the sexual act itself, repulsed by its sheer physicality.

Chapter One, Three, and Five are bravura pieces of writing. The detailed psychological passages about the sexual act - Florence and Edward's deep kiss and the long scene beginning with his touching her inner thigh - are little masterpieces of prose, so painful to read and so true to life. They far, far, far transcend the frivolity of erotica and stupidity of romance. They show how different the boundaries of privacy are for different people and how difficult it is to merge the two "I"'s into a "we," without sacrificing substantial portions of one's identity. And yet there is a ray of hope, as evidenced by the phenomenal passage that begins with

"[...] a mere shadow of a sensation, an almost abstract beginning, as infinitely small as a geometric point that grew to a minuscule smooth-edged speck, and continued to swell."

All that about a lone hair in its follicle. Stunning!

The events happen on the backdrop of the early 1960s, the times of quite rigid social norms, times just before the cultural earthquake of a few years later. An elderly reader such as this reviewer (although he still is about 10 years younger than Florence and Edward) will be able to palpably feel the cultural restrictiveness of these times. This reader also greatly appreciates the references to the music by John Mayall and Alexis Korner as well as to Beethoven's early and late string quartets.

I would have certainly rated the novel with five stars if not for the atrocious last page. Maybe I am too obtuse but to me the last eight sentences of the novel constitute the author's attempt to explain the story and to give the reader suggestions about what it is supposed to mean. I passionately believe that the readers should work it out themselves. That's what great literature is about.

Four and a half stars.




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