Sunday Reading: Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach

I've never read a novel about premature ejaculation, at least until now. In Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach a climax serves as, well, the climax and anti-climax at the same time, the high point of the slender novel but the low point of a doomed and unconsummated marriage that never survives the honeymoon on the English Channel. Without giving away too much of the plot, that's essentially a summary of the sensitive and intricately crafted novel by one of England's masters.

The novel tells the story of Edward and Florence, a young couple in 1962. Typically for McEwan, the historical moment of the novel is significant. In this case, the novel takes place at the tipping point between the buttoned up Victorianism of traditional England and the heady 1960's decade of sexual liberation. McEwan is a novelist who specializes in the precise description of the inner life, but the historical moment informs it. This is one way in which he is different from a writer like Austen, whose novels take place almost outside of history and seem universal because of it. But McEwan fastens the characters to a particular time and place almost like an insect pinned to a mounting board. In Saturday, for example, the particular Saturday in question is the day of the massive anti-war protests in London, and the questions of violence and war are the weighty questions the novel addresses. In the current novel, the historical moment is less exact, but still carefully articulated in the narrative.

Florence is the daughter of a successful entrepreneur and an Oxford don, Edward the son of a working class family. His father is a school teacher and his mother a harmless woman detached from reality. Their past and courtship make up one thread of the novel, while the events of their wedding night make up the other.

McEwan's familiar plot elements are present here, such as personal tragedy, regret, and personal violence. Edward has a habit of getting into fistfights, again a reminder of Saturday, with its brutal physicality. But the novel is much more reminiscent of Atonement. McEwan's fiction has a tendency towards the sentimental, and his 1998 masterpiece is a tearjerker, building as it does towards towards the narrator's revelation of her complicity in the tragedies that have unfolded for her sister and her lover. His novels build towards powerful and unexpected emotion, which some readers might find heavy or manipulative. Same here with On Chesil Beach. The final pages of the novel build like the crescendo of a great symphony, with beautiful prose and rising emotion that may seem a little over the top, a little heavily painted. But it's a satisfying read, with gorgeous prose and emotion which, while perhaps melodramatic, is emotion that the reader can share in, feeling that characters McEwan has created deserve our caring about them.

On Chesil Beach has not been released yet in the U. S. I hate to say too much about it before anyone has had a chance to read it. While the novel isn't as good as Saturday or Atonement, it's a satisfying and lyrical novel, well worth the 28 pounds I spent to send it here from the UK.

By the way, how much is a pound?!

I'll have more to say when this novel is released in the U. S.

Link to my earlier review of Saturday

McEwan on being in the public eye following accusations of plagiarism.

Here is an excerpt. In the following passage, you can see the difficulties the couple is having with their physical relationship. Edward is awkward and pushy, Florence is cold and unapproachable, treating the physical nature of love as a duty rather than a pleasure. The passage below prefigures in many ways (as McEwan more or less announces figuratively in the final sentence) the novel's, and the relationship's, end. McEwan's clinical prose mirrors the clinical approach Florence takes to kissing and touching her husband.

When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her. Her own tongue folded and recoiled in automatic distaste, making even more space for Edward. He knew well enough she did not like this kind of kissing, and he had never before been so assertive. With his lips clamped firmly onto hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved round inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anaesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private, imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. It was the hard tapering tip of this alien muscle, quiveringly alive, that repelled her. His left hand was pressed flat above her shoulder blades, just below her neck, levering her head against hi. Her claustrophobia and breathlessness grew even as she became more determined that she could not bear to offend him. He was under tongue, pushing it up against the roof of her mouth, then on top, pushing down, then sliding smoothly along the sides and round, as though he thought he could tie a simple up and over knot. He wanted to engage her tongue in some activity of its own, coax it into a hideous mute duet, but she could only shrink and concentrate on not struggling, not gagging, not panicking. If she was sick into his mough, was one wild thought, their marriage would be instantly over, and she would have to go home and explain herself to her parents. she understood perfectly that this business with tongues, this penetration, was a small scale enactment, a ritual tableau vivant, of what was still to come, like a prologue before an old play that tells you everything that must happen.