On Chesil Beach: Review

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.