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.On Chesil Beach is a thin book (166 pages in my edition) but it's not a lightweight. It's basically three scenes (intercut with flashbacks to fill in the details of the characters' courtship and childhoods): Florence and Edward eating dinner in their bridal suite; Florence and Edward in the bedroom afterwards; Florence and Edward on the beach after that. All three scenes are tense and awkward -- with the reader being privy to the inner thoughts of both of them, which only ratchets up the discomfort -- and the flashbacks vividly illuminate just who these two really are.
Author Ian McEwan wisely set this story in the waning days of British sexual repression; a time when Edward had heard of girls who would have uncommitted sex but doesn't think he'd ever actually seen one; a time when "the Pill was a rumour in the newspapers, a ridiculous promise, another of those tall tales about America". On their wedding night, Edward expected their long-awaited consummation to be transcendentally blissful for them both and Florence was completely disgusted by the whole prospect. The fact that they couldn't bring themselves to talk to each other about these things -- and that the reader understands how little it would take for them to find common ground -- makes for charged ironic frisson.
His anger stirred her own and she suddenly thought she understood their problem: they were too polite, too constrained, too timorous, they went around each other on tiptoes, murmuring, whispering, deferring, agreeing. They barely knew each other and never could because of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences and blinded them as much as it bound them.Even with this self-awareness, Florence finds herself "conscious of play-acting, of being tactical in a way she had always despised in her more demonstrative girlfriends". I may not have been an adult in early 60s Britain, and I may not totally understand the class distinctions and cultural mores that these two were weighted under, but McEwan really captured the way that I felt as a young adult: the frustration of not knowing how to fully express myself; an unwillingness to give too much away; not wanting to be the first to give in.
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.I remember not being overly impressed by Atonement and I avoided Ian McEwan after that (but I think for some reason I got him mixed up with the Amises, who I also avoid). After On Chesil Beach and a snoop around reviews for his other books, I'll be happy to give him another shot.
