Synopsis courtesy of Amazon.com:
A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.
It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence’s response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite.
Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan—a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
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. But it is never easy.
Thus begins On Chesil Beach, and in that brisk but loaded passage is revealed the central catalyst of this slim novel’s events. As the novel opens, Edward and Florence, our virgin newlyweds, are eating dinner at an inn with a view of Chesil Beach. Both are racked with anxiety but far too civilized to broach the necessary conversation. The rest of the novel deals with the ensuing consequences of the conversation that never took place.
Edward, having abstained from *ahem* self-love for the week preceding the wedding, is full of nervous energy. Throughout dinner, he rehearses in his mind how the night’s big event will play out while simultaneously dismissing lingering fears of failure. Florence, on the other hand, is filled with dread. The thought of sex fills her with revulsion, but her desire to please her husband far outweighs any of her misgivings; she feigns desire for as long as she can take it, but that turns out not to be very long at all.
On Chesil Beach deals with themes that Mr. McEwan has explored before. In Enduring Love, Mr. McEwan probes the fleeting quality of love and happiness, and how one unfortunate but seemingly trivial moment can lead to the unraveling of everything we hold dear. The unfortunate moment in On Chesil Beach occurs when Florence, surprising even herself with her forthrightness, initiates contact with Edward; Edward, having been kept at arm’s length throughout their entire courtship, “arrives early.” Florence’s disgust again rears its ugly head, and this time she cannot will herself to remain calm or affect lust:
She had taken pride. . . in mastering her feelings and appearing calm. But now she was incapable of repressing her primal disgust, her visceral horror at being doused in fluid, in slime from another body. . . . Nothing in her nature could have held back her instant cry of revulsion.
Reading this novel made me very glad that I will not be a virgin on my wedding night. Beyond that, there’s surprisingly little in it that is illuminating. Unlike in his previous works, Mr. McEwan’s meticulous attention to detail does not lead to grander revelations. Although the novel details the events of that one fateful night, there is little in the novel to reveal why Edward and Florence ended up together. There are an awful lot of vignettes about the two characters’ families and some telling passages about the class difference between Florence and Edward but both instances only serve to illustrate the improbability of these two ciphers getting together. Throughout the novel, the two characters don’t even seem to like each other very much, let alone love each other enough to get married.
That’s not to say On Chesil Beach wasn’t well-written, because it was. The problem is that the novel read more like a working outline than an actual finished product. It was a lot of hemming and hawing over nothing – the plot is slim, the characters even less developed. Like Edward, the reader, too, is kept at arm’s length, to ponder the impact of what could have been.
1 Comment
Apr 13, 2008 | Sunday at 6:26 pm
[...] books that she thinks I might enjoy. Our tastes don’t always mesh (she loaned me her copy of On Chesil Beach, but I was underwhelmed; I loaned her my copy of An Invisible Sign of My Own, and she asked me if [...]