On Chesil Beach After All
Okay. Last time I said I didn’t intend to finish On Chesil Beach. I said that I’m 67 and don’t want to read about bad sex. All I want to do is remember good sex, and the older I get the better it was. But I read it anyway. Here’s my take:
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.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:02 am
“…irrepressible sexual loathing.”
That is just so much fun to say. Because it made me chuckle out loud, I’m thinking it should be worked into conversations, on a daily basis.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
I think once a month would be adequate. You don’t ant people to look at you funny.
July 17th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I’m very pissed off that someone else said what I was going to say. Now, I don’t have anything adorable to add, other than that I read this and thought was intrigued.
Skipster needs to sleep later, and stop hogging all the pithy re-quotes.
July 17th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
I meant “I read this and was intrigued.”
As I said, I’m very pissed off. Apparently, that scrambles my thoughts.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Same here, Kitty. I meant to tell Skipster that she doesn’t want people looking at her funny. Skipster always scrambles my thoughts, like before when she offered to spank me. That really took me somewhere else.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Oooh, ooh, I just tried it at a Starbuck’s…I ordered a Grande (trilling the R) and said “I need to stimulate my irrepressible sexual loathing and a Venti would be way too fulfilling.”
Bite me, no one believed me.
July 20th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I ordered a Grande and just thought, “I need to stimulate my irrepressible sexual loathing…”, and people looked at me funny.
Not ‘ha ha’ funny, but that slightly disdainful, loathingly funny.
No poker face at all.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I love you, Kitty…you’ve given me another real gem from this blog: “Loathingly funny.”
You’re the best!