Customer Reviews

On Chesil Beach

5 star:		(115)
4 star:		(68)
3 star:		(38)
2 star:		(28)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

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 stirring of new possibilities, but there are big differences between them, socially and culturally (Edward, for example, is into rock), and they each want different things. But the most heartbreaking things in this book are not their differences, but how often and how close they come to making new connections; just an inch more, a moment longer, and everything might be all right.... Almost.

But McEwan does not end the story in the bedroom or on the beach below. Much as in ATONEMENT, though in only a few pages, he adds an epilogue continuing the story forward several decades. At the time, I felt it was too brief to settle all the emotions stirred up by the preceding pages, but now as I write, several hours after closing the book, I begin to see its rightness and appreciate its consolation.

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 compact and quick, and believe me, it comes to a ragingly lopsided climax now.
Quickly. No words wasted.
It is not spoiling anything here for me to say that the bed scene is an absolute disaster. An emotional armageddon.

But the true tragedy is yet to appear.
On Chesil Beach.

Not to over-moralize here, but the book made me ask myself a question.
At what point do we attend to the physical matters of relationship?
Is the correct answer to be only after the wedding day, as many religions [and presumably, "God"] would tell us? As Edward and Florence did?
Far be it from me to attempt an answer to that question that would suit all people.
But, this book surely provides one look at the devastation that can result from an unrealistic commitment to delayed gratification and lack of open communication.
Whatever else we want to think about sex, one thing that rings true in this book is that it is profoundly important.
And to think otherwise, and enter into marriage in a state of mutual sexual ignorance, can be life-threatening.

And yet, On Chesil Beach is not even about sex.
It's about "love and patience" which, as Edward realizes on the last page, [and decades later] could have saved the day. Could have "seen them both through."
We are given hints that Florence has learned the same thing, too.
Sometimes, [in fact, perhaps all the time] to do nothing, is to have done too much.
The armageddon of the bedroom scene was fixable.

What an amazing, amazing book!
Days later, I re-read the last 50 pages or so, aloud, to a friend, and even knowing it all ahead of time, had to stop several times. Couldn't go on.
The last chapter, the fifth one, is among the most moving pieces of writing I have ever encountered.
On Chesil Beach is the eighth McEwan book I have read.
I've loved each one, but I think I like this one best.
So, in my opinion, Chesil Beach is five stars out of five!
It will become a beloved novel to everyone who will have, or is having, or has had a love relationship with another person. And you've gotta admit, that's a huge audience.
Such is the appeal, of On Chesil Beach.

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.

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.

If you are easily seduced by beautiful sentences, you'll feel On Chesil Beach is a five-star book. If you love exploring inner dialogue, you'll be even more pleased with this book.

If, however, you like your stories to be compelling because of their relevance and interest to your own life, you'll wonder why in the world Mr. McEwan chose to write about this particular problem of poor communications in the context of 1962. As you delve deeper into the book, you'll be even more puzzled by the book's pivotal event and the characters' reactions to it.

The short book (neither novella nor full novel) is organized in five parts that seem much like the acts in a Greek tragedy. The opening scene shows a couple dining in their room at an inn. "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." The second act describes how they met. The third act takes place in their bedroom in the inn. The fourth act describes their courtship. The fifth act takes place on the beach and in their lives afterward as they attempt and fail to communicate.

Mr. McEwan does a good job of capturing your attention through exploring the couple's growing tension as they move toward the consummation of their marriage. But past that point, the story seemed like a punctured balloon to me: My interest was gone. I suspect that reaction is because I didn't feel close to either character; they are more there to entertain me than to lead me into experiencing the story like the characters do.

Clearly, the story would have worked much better for me if focused around a more universal trial in marriage, such as handling both sets of parents during the birth of a first child. I also thought that Mr. McEwen played the role of the Greek chorus too often . . . telling us what was going on rather than letting us see and hear the action. The fourth part seems clearly out of place; it should have preceded the third part.

Unless you are drawn to beautiful sentences and images, I suggest you skip this book . . . it's a misdirected storytelling foray by a talented writer that is eminently avoidable.

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.

I've been meaning to read McEwan forever. So many books, so little time. On Chesil Beach was the perfect solution. It can be easily read in a sitting.

It is the story of Edward and Florence on their wedding night on the British coast in 1962. Almost all of the action takes place in that one evening, with flashbacks that tell the tale of these two young people's lives and the entire history of their relationship. They're both so young, and innocent and scared. Even though 1962 isn't that much before my time, reading this book it felt like a period drama from another century. It was a different world.

It became immediately obvious what everyone says is true. McEwan writes beautifully, just beautifully, but the novel is not especially difficult or challenging. What impressed me the most was how concisely but fully he told his story. Highly recommended.

Ian McEwan is a master of atmospheric writing, taking a seemingly isolated incident and building a story around it in a way that the reader completely lives in the moment described by his novel. He selects strange topics and then makes them feel so familiar by comparison to each of our lives that exploring the dense background he paints pulls us in like a strong magnet. Reading McEwan is one of the rare pleasures literature lovers find. Few writers of today can match his quiet, subtle, but bravura technique.

ON CHESIL BEACH is essentially a study of a wedding night, a night when the two characters involved approach the virginal consummation of their marriage with disastrous results. Florence is bright, a gifted violinist, beautiful and fragile in affairs of the heart and senses: she is frigid. Edward, her new husband, is of lower class than she, but has reached a degree of education and overcome some thorny family obstacles to become a young bridegroom longing for his marriage night, a night he blunders with premature ejaculation. McEwan leads into this evening and its subsequent resolution on Chesil Beach with delicate prose, brings us to the topic of climax, and then offers flashes of background of each of his characters that allows us to understand the subsequent course of events 'doing nothing' brings.

In beautiful prose, stunningly elegant writing, and rich observations of life in the early 1960s with all that the decade of 'enlightenment' and changes in England and the world produced, Ian McEwan has created another masterpiece. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, August 07

Three stars may be a bit unfair but just this week the Booker Prize 2007 longlist was announced and Chesil Beach is the odds on favorite to win it. I find this somewhat annoying. No doubt Chesil is an impeccably written story, but I somehow feel that impeccable writing is the least we'd expect from such a renowned novelist, especially writing in short story format (yes book is 200 pages long, but with normal pages this would drop at least a third).

While the overall theme is engrossing and the characterizations wonderful, Florence's wedding night behavior seem somewhat farfetched and forced in an otherwise very realistic setting. I also found the ending of the novel disappointing: after so much care and attention to creating a tension-filled few hours, some 40 years in a life pass by in a handful of pages.

All in all, if one is looking to savor McEwan I would suggest "Atonement". "On Chesil Beach" left me feeling a bit shortchanged for having been sold a novel for what is really an extended short story.

"On Chesil Beach" by Booker Prize winning author Ian McEwan is a masterpiece--one of those rare books that keeps getting better the more the reader thinks about it and studies how it was crafted to achieve its overall stunning effect. The book is set in a few brief hours--actually one late afternoon and evening--in or near a hotel room on Chesil Beach in the south of England. It is a honeymoon and both the husband and the wife are virgins. Through seamless transitions to flashbacks, McEwan artfully weaves in just enough background information so that we feel we know and understand these vulnerable and fragile young 22-year-olds. They are truly in love, but they are on a collision course to disaster.

I disagree with many of the other reviewers here on Amazon who believe that this couple's wedding night disaster is partially or wholly caused by the period in which the novel is set--a time just before the sexual revolution of the mid-1960s. The message of this work is clearly not one of criticism for the sexual mores of any particular historical period. What happens to this young couple could happen at any time, in any culture--even today when sex is matter-of-fact, and in-your-face, everywhere, all the time.

The message of this novel is a lovingly crafted lament. It is about the appalling lack of communication that can exist all too easily between people who truly love each other, and how this silence about essential matters of the heart can rise up like an erupting volcano and suffocate even the most promising relationship. Miscommunication is at the heart of nearly all breakups, be they between lovers, spouses, friends, or family members. McEwen takes one all-important miscommunication on a wedding night and shows how it can ruin lives. He puts a spotlight on the road not taken, and challenges us to rethink how it might have been otherwise.

I am awed by this book. McEwan is a master, a compelling and powerful storyteller, with an all-important message to convey. Read this novel; hear this lament; sing it silently in your mind's ear whenever you are tempted to strike back in anger at some wrong you think was unmistakably meant directly to harm you. Think again. Grow up. It's not about you! Loved ones generally act first and foremost out of their own self-interest, not out of any kind of desire to hurt the beloved. Realize that there is probably a significant miscommunication at the root of the problem and find out what it is before you act too hastily and with anger. Let the heartfelt lament of this book fuse itself to your being. Maybe this book will help you save an important relationship from failure, help you avoid your next--and perhaps most regrettable--road not taken.