TO DESCRIBE On Chesil Beach in musical terms is apt, because one of its
principal characters, Florence, is a musician: a violinist, trained at the
Royal College of Music and just beginning a professional career.
If one thinks of Ian McEwan’s recent novels — Enduring Love,
Atonement, Saturday — as symphonies, grand structures of many complex
themes, intricately developed and interwoven, then On Chesil Beach is
a chamber piece, more intimate and delicate, if no less complex and highly
wrought.
The year is 1962, the setting the honeymoon suite of an hotel on the Dorset
coast, just above Chesil Beach. The story begins as Florence and her husband
of a few hours, Edward, are sitting down to supper on their wedding night,
having been married that afternoon after a courtship of protracted chastity.
As they tackle the heavy hotel meal, the minds of husband and wife are
separately preoccupied with the moment when the waiters will depart and they
are left alone together. Throughout the unwanted supper, they are conscious
that “soon after dinner . . . their new maturity would be tested, when they
would lie down together on the four-poster bed and reveal themselves fully
to one another”. But their separate apprehensions are of opposite natures.
For Edward the stately pavane of their courtship has been a kind of delicious
agony of deferred fulfilment, made bearable only by the mesmerising prospect
that “on the evening of a given date in July the most sensitive portion of
himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity
inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman”. For Florence
the pavane cannot go on long enough. Having gained a general idea of what
awaits her in that virginal four-poster from a briskly-written handbook for
young brides, she regards the act she and Edward are about to perform with
“a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness”.
The waiters retire. The moment approaches . . . folded in an embrace, for one
passionate, for the other panic-stricken . . . we leave them poised on the
brink of discovery and turn to consider the question of “How did they meet,
and why were these lovers in a modern age so timid and innocent?”
On the answer hangs the power of McEwan’s novel. Philip Larkin noted that
sexual intercourse began in 1963 — a year too late for Edward and Florence.
But the erotic abandon of the war years during which his characters (in
their early twenties when they marry) were conceived is well documented and
it requires a certain contortion of the imagination to believe that two
adults in the mid-20th century might have walked up the aisle to be married
with no practical experience of what they would do together in bed that
night.
“You carry on,” says Edward, petulantly to his bride, “as if it’s eighteen
sixty-two,” and it is rather in terms of a Victorian heroine that
Florence is described: such an aura of otherworldiness surrounds her — the
product, perhaps, of her calling as a musician and a high-minded North
Oxford upbringing, as well as of her sexual inhibition — that it seems a
startling anachronism when she is described as wearing jeans.
Edward’s upbringing was less rarefied: the son of a schoolteacher father and a
mother brain-damaged in an accident, he has a certain inner toughness and,
despite a scholarly nature (he is a historian, with a particular interest in
millenarian cults), a taste for getting into fights, in which he discovers a
“spontaneous, decisive self that eluded him in the rest of his tranquil
existence”.
It is that “spontaneous, decisive” physical side of Edward’s nature that
yearns to express itself in the bedroom of the Dorset hotel, and from which
Florence shrinks in a revulsion that seems at moments cruelly like coquetry.
In a narrative that alternates between the drama of advance and retreat in
the honeymoon suite and the gradual converging of destinies that brought his
characters to this point, McEwan examines with a kind of relentless delicacy
the catastrophic wounds that innocence and inexperience can lead two
sensitive, intelligent people, deeply in love and profoundly suited by all
but the slightest mismatch of temperament, to inflict upon one another.
He, like most novelists, relishes the flourish of a coincidence, of a destiny
altered by a word, a gesture, a road taken or turned aside from, but here
his virtuoso deployment of incomprehension, misinterpretation, untimely
reticence and equally untimely abandon is positively Hardyesque: the
tragedy, as in Hardy, almost comic in its extremity. This is not Hardy,
however, so no one dies. Here, the consequences of folly are humiliation and
a certain chill to the heart — and those, you might argue, are the essential
elements of growing up.
But as his cadences move towards their resolution, McEwan introduces an
unexpected twist. Modern lore on sexual love is that it is achieved by
industry, by “working” at maintaining a relationship as though it were the
emotional equivalent of a home improvement project. McEwan, however,
throughout his writing career has shown a fascination with the power of fate
to change the course of a life. Here his novel explores the deeply romantic
(but fastidiously argued) premise that the course not merely of two lives,
but of a tiny strand of history can be changed by a tiff.
For the reader, the ending of On Chesil Beach comes too soon. Its
devastating concluding passage, in which we glimpse the future that flows
from the events of the honeymoon night, feels almost like the sketch of a
larger novel of which this is merely the first section. Still, the
experience of finishing a novel with regret is not so frequent that one
should complain of it.
Better to say with gratitude that McEwan’s latest fiction is full of richness:
of serious thought about the nature of love and human relationships,
informed by a poetic sensibility and expressed in prose whose lyricism never
errs on the side of self-indulgence.
Next week: Christina Hardyment reviews the audiobook of On Chesil Beach read
by Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape, £12.99; 176pp £11.69 (free p&p) 0870
1608080 or buy here
Extract
Between Edward and Florence, nothing happened quickly. Important advances,
permissions wordlessly granted to extend what he was allowed to see or
caress, were attained only gradually. The day in October he first saw her
naked breasts long preceded the day he could touch them — December 19. He
kissed them in February, though not her nipples, which he grazed with his
lips once, in May. She allowed herself to advance acros his own body with
even greater caution. Sudden moves or radical suggestions on his part could
undo months of good work. The evening in the cinema at a showing of A
Taste of Honey when he took her hand and plunged it between his legs set
the process back weeks. She became, not frosty, or even cool — that was
never her way — but imperceptibly remote, perhaps disappointed, or even
faintly betrayed. She retreated from him somehow without ever letting him
feel in doubt about her love. Then at last they were back on course: when
they were alone one Saturday afternoon in late March, with the rain falling
heavily outside the windows of the disorderly sitting room of his parents’
tiny house in the Chiltern Hills, she let her hand rest briefly on, or near,
his penis. For less than fifteen seconds, in rising hope and ecstasy, he
felt her through two layers of fabric. As soon as she pulled away he knew he
could bear it no more. He asked her to marry him.
