Review: On Chesil Beach

McEwan has a remarkably distinctive voice. His narratives move feverishly forward, cutting between the past and present. His writing is spare and lyrical, confident though subtle. But what is most affecting about his work, further illuminated by his recent novella, is what he is able to do with this big moment. When it is presented to his characters, the judgments they render give a clear picture of a specific era, and ultimately, of the whole civilization to which they belong.

On Chesil Beach is about one night in England in July 1962, "a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible." It echoes the first lines of Philip Larkin's oft-mentioned Annus Mirabilis: "Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me) – /Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles' first LP." Two young virgins, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, are finally alone on their wedding night. They sit straight-backed in their chairs at an oppressively formal dinner, move food around on their plate, listen helplessly to the news. They are individually preoccupied with visions of the ensuing sexual act, though they dare not voice anything. "Edward and Florence- free at last!" McEwan proclaims in the opening pages. But clearly, they are not.

They meet the summer after graduating university- he studied history and she studied violin- and for Edward, it is love at first sight. Their ritualized courtship advances slowly; thankfully, McEwan tells you this outright in a few sentences. Their half-realized love grows, but McEwan only illustrates this in a few short scenes. It takes until the end of the book to be convinced they are genuinely in love, and if there is a flaw, it is that the period detail doesn't leave enough room for the emotions of his characters. Of course, this is precisely his point.

The differences between the two abound. Edward is from an unconventional, middle class family; Florence is from a frigid, aristocratic family. Edward likes rock and roll; Florence enjoys classical music. Edward is desperate to have sex; Florence is disgusted with it. And herein lies their big problem. Whenever Edward tries to kiss Florence, she recoils. When he unzips his zipper, she considers it impolite. The marriage proposal comes after Florence removes her hand from a suggestive position, and Edward, in a state of ecstasy and excited expectation, can bear it no longer. Throughout, their rift perpetually grows larger: his lust, her revulsion, his sexual frustration, her claustrophobia.

"Why were these lovers in a modern age so timid and so innocent," McEwan asks at the beginning of the second part. He asks again, later, "what stood in their way?" And this time he answers it directly, "their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself."

On Chesil Beach is primarily a period piece of a young couple living on the cusp of the 60s rebellion. The question was never if their relationship could have worked. "Social change never proceeds at an even pace," McEwan writes. We are all products of our time and our culture; Edward and Florence are no exception. They are born when it is still uncertain whether they will speak German or English and though the anti-bomb rallies in Trafalgar Square have begun, they are a few years too early to be a part of the social upheaval. Their love is tainted by the constraints of their era, an era that obscures, casts shadows, and limits possibility.

What they can never speak of is that he masturbates frequently and has a secret thrill for bar fights. Or that she suffered a vaguely incestuous relationship with her father and abhors sexual touch. Or that he has a brain-damaged mother who has been kept isolated from the rest of town, and that he never knew what was wrong with her until he was fourteen because he never asks. Necessary conversations, particularly between two people with such troubled histories, cannot exist within the boundaries allowed by their society. The intrinsic chaos of human relationships is kept in line by formal dinners, slow walks on the beach, headbands, and tennis matches. They are condemned to the conventions of English propriety. McEwan makes it obvious to everyone but the couple themselves, that their problems "were already present in those first few seconds, in their first exchange of looks." This decade was not for them.

The finale takes place on Chesil Beach after the worst has come true in the bedroom. The chords strike large and this is McEwan at his best, writing sentences that could practically be sung. Edward's big moment is in the form of a conversation, and he doesn't know what to do with it. Though both Edward and Florence begin to break down barriers of English propriety, they are the wrong ones. They fight, but unaccustomed to such openness, it is almost as if each is acting only for themselves and in the name of their new freedom of expression, reckless to say anything to exercise it, unaware of the consequences. They walk away broken and spend their lives apart. McEwan has much sympathy for them because love could never conquer their times. There is also empathy to be felt, because to empathize with them is to feel a universal agony of restraint, restraint of which Edward and Florence, tragically, are old pros. The epithet? "This is how an entire course of a life can be changed- by doing nothing."