On Chesil Beach [Paperback]

Ian McEwan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 10, 2008

In 1962, Florence and Edward celebrate their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Yet as they dine, the expectation of their marital duties weighs over them. And unbeknownst to both, the decisions they make this night will resonate throughout their lives. With exquisite prose, Ian McEwan creates in On Chesil Beach a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Such is Ian McEwan's genius that, despite rambling nature walks and the naming of birds, his subject matter remains hermetically sealed in the hearts of two people.

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Not quite novel or novella, McEwan's masterful 13th work of fiction most resembles a five-part classical drama rendered in prose. It opens on the anxious Dorset Coast wedding suite dinner of Edward Mayhew and the former Florence Ponting, married in the summer of 1963 at 23 and 22 respectively; the looming dramatic crisis is the marriage's impending consummation, or lack of it. Edward is a rough-hewn but sweet student of history, son of an Oxfordshire primary school headmaster and a mother who was brain damaged in an accident when Edward was five. Florence, daughter of a businessman and (a rarity then) a female Oxford philosophy professor, is intense but warm and has founded a string quartet. Their fears about sex and their inability to discuss them form the story's center. At the book's midpoint, McEwan (Atonement, etc.) goes into forensic detail about their naïve and disastrous efforts on the marriage bed, and the final chapter presents the couple's explosive postcoital confrontation on Chesil Beach. Staying very close to this marital trauma and the circumstances surrounding it (particularly class), McEwan's flawless omniscient narration has a curious (and not unpleasantly condescending) fable-like quality, as if an older self were simultaneously disavowing and affirming a younger. The story itself isn't arresting, but the narrator's journey through it is. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (June 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307386171
• ISBN-13: 978-0307386175
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (320 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #30,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#93 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#94 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#93 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#94 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

256 of 267 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Almost June 15, 2007

By Roger Brunyate TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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. Read more ›

68 of 81 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply impeccable. Sad, but impeccable. August 21, 2007

By Cipriano

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›

37 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A writer's writer September 3, 2007

By David Scott

Format:Hardcover

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.

47 of 58 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A Talented Wordcrafter Describes an Improbable Honeymoon July 6, 2007

By Donald Mitchell HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›