Product Description

A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence’s response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite.

Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan—a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25055 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-05
• Released on: 2007-06-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Amazon.com
Such is Ian McEwan's genius that, despite rambling nature walks and the naming of birds, his subject matter remains hermetically sealed in the hearts of two people.

It is 1962 when Edward and Florence, 23 and 22 respectively, marry and repair to a hotel on the Dorset coast for their honeymoon. They are both virgins, both apprehensive about what's next and in Florence's case, utterly and blindly terrified and repelled by the little she knows. Through a tense dinner in their room, because Florence has decided that the weather is not fine enough to dine on the terrace, they are attended by two local boys acting as waiters. The cameo appearances of the boys and Edward and Florence's parents and siblings serve only to underline the emotional isolation of the two principals. Florence says of herself: "...she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires...."

They are on the cusp of a rather ordinary marital undertaking in differing states of readiness, willingness and ardor. McEwan says: "Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness." Edward, having denied himself even the release of self-pleasuring for a week, in order to be tip-top for Florence, is mentally pawing the ground. His sensitivity keeps him from being obvious, but he is getting anxious. Florence, on the other hand, knows that she is not capable of the kind of arousal that will make any of this easy. She has held Edward off for a year, and now the reckoning is upon her.

McEwan is the master of the defining moment, that place and time when, once it has taken place, nothing will ever be the same after it. It does not go well and Florence flees the room. "As she understood it, there were no words to name what had happened, there existed no shared language in which two sane adults could describe such events to each other." Edward eventually follows her and they have a poignant and painful conversation where accusations are made, ugly things are said and roads are taken from which, in the case of these two, the way back cannot be found. Late in Edward's life he realizes: "Love and patience--if only he had them both at once--would surely have seen them both through." This beautifully told sad story could have been conceived and written only by Ian McEwan. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Not quite novel or novella, McEwan's masterful 13th work of fiction most resembles a five-part classical drama rendered in prose. It opens on the anxious Dorset Coast wedding suite dinner of Edward Mayhew and the former Florence Ponting, married in the summer of 1963 at 23 and 22 respectively; the looming dramatic crisis is the marriage's impending consummation, or lack of it. Edward is a rough-hewn but sweet student of history, son of an Oxfordshire primary school headmaster and a mother who was brain damaged in an accident when Edward was five. Florence, daughter of a businessman and (a rarity then) a female Oxford philosophy professor, is intense but warm and has founded a string quartet. Their fears about sex and their inability to discuss them form the story's center. At the book's midpoint, McEwan (Atonement, etc.) goes into forensic detail about their naïve and disastrous efforts on the marriage bed, and the final chapter presents the couple's explosive postcoital confrontation on Chesil Beach. Staying very close to this marital trauma and the circumstances surrounding it (particularly class), McEwan's flawless omniscient narration has a curious (and not unpleasantly condescending) fable-like quality, as if an older self were simultaneously disavowing and affirming a younger. The story itself isn't arresting, but the narrator's journey through it is. (June)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

In the summer of 1962, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting are married in the English university city of Oxford. The wedding "had gone well; the service was decorous, the reception jolly, the send-off from school and college friends raucous and uplifting." Now they are alone, dining "in a tiny sitting room on the first floor of a Georgian inn" at Chesil Beach, on the English Channel. They are happy, yet almost indescribably nervous: "They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible."

This breathtaking novel, Ian McEwan's 11th, tells the story of that night. Like a number of his previous books -- among them The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, Black Dogs and Amsterdam -- On Chesil Beach is more a novella than a novel, weighing in at around 40,000 words, but like those other books it is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest -- innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected -- and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment.

"It pained him tremendously," McEwan writes of Edward, "that their wedding night was not simple, when their love was so obvious." Then: "And what stood in their way? 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. Nothing much at all." They are in truth an odd couple. Both are 22 years old, smart and well educated, but different in important ways that probably are reconcilable, but only if they are able to talk honestly to each other.

In no respect is this more important than in their attitudes toward and expectations of sex. Edward has no experience to speak of, but he fairly bursts with desire and quite specifically desire for Florence, "this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman" with whom he is positively besotted. They have had their adventures in petting, he a considerably more enthusiastic participant than she, but these have left them not much less ignorant than before. As he contemplates his first time in the marital bed, Edward's "specific worry, based on one unfortunate experience, was of overexcitement, of what he had heard someone describe as 'arriving too soon.' " Florence is something else altogether:

"Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness. For much of the time, through all the months of merry wedding preparation, she managed to ignore this stain on her happiness, but whenever her thoughts turned toward a close embrace -- she preferred no other term -- her stomach tightened dryly, she was nauseous at the back of her throat. . . . Florence suspected that there was something profoundly wrong with her, that she had always been different, and that at last she was about to be exposed. Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated. She simply did not want to be 'entered' or 'penetrated.' Sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy, but was the price she must pay for it."

Almost from the novel's first sentence, the reader's heart aches for these two young people. They are so earnest, so clumsy, so naive, so desperately in love. But they seem incapable of reaching across the great divide that proper society placed between unmarried men and women four and a half decades ago, incapable of talking through their desires and fears. Instead, they cuddle innocently (though Edward certainly wishes it were otherwise) and talk about things that don't really matter, sedulously avoiding what is on their minds because they simply don't know how to put it into words that -- so at least they think -- will not humiliate them.

Thus it is hardly surprising that their wedding night proceeds slowly and awkwardly. They make small talk at the dinner table and silently worry that the waiters, who in fact are discreet and polite, are secretly laughing at them. They blanch at the inedible food that is set before them ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time, except visitors from abroad"), and they never follow through on Florence's suggestion of a moonlit walk on the beach. At last they stumble toward the bed, where they lie tensely, still clothed, and make tentative efforts to please each other. Edward caresses Florence shyly yet insistently, and to her surprise she responds:

"For the first time, her love for Edward was associated with a definable physical sensation, as irrefutable as vertigo. Before, she had known only a comforting broth of warm emotions, a thick winter blanket of kindness and trust. That had always seemed enough, an achievement in itself. Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else. . . . It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality. . . . For all the novelty, she was not in a state of wild abandonment, nor did she want to be hurried toward one. She wanted to linger in this spacious moment, in these fully clothed conditions, with the soft brown-eyed gaze and the tender caress and the spreading thrill. But she knew that this was impossible, and that, as everyone said, one thing would have to lead to another."

What occurs thereafter must be left for the reader to discover. Tension and surprise are constants in McEwan's fiction, and never more so than in On Chesil Beach. Suffice it to say that the turns taken are at once surprising and totally true to human nature. Love is rarely easy, notwithstanding all the exhilaration it arouses, and it is perhaps never more difficult than in its physical expression. In that act the vulnerabilities of each partner are on display to the other in ways so intimate and revealing as almost literally to bare the soul. In their different ways both Edward and Florence fear just that, and the ultimate confrontation is devastating.

What makes On Chesil Beach so heartbreaking -- no other word will do -- is that it does not have to end as it does. None of this is foreordained. People almost always have choices when they come to decisive moments in their lives. These choices aren't always clear and certainly aren't always easy to make, but there's no getting around it: They have to be made. Suffice it to say that in the decisive moment, both Edward and Florence take the wrong direction. What each person does is no better or worse than what the other does, for this is a story unencumbered by heroes or villains, bad guys or good guys. Edward and Florence simply are ordinary human beings trying to do what they think is right and/or necessary, and they are too innocent and ignorant -- and in their own ways too proud -- to follow wise courses. What a terrible pity.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

not what I thought
After watching atonement, I wanted to read more material by Ian McEwan.. so this was my choice. Wonderful pose and writing style, but I couldnt say I enjoyed the story. I kept wanting to like it and hoped it would get more interesting. In a nut shell it was about a newly married virgin couple that goes into their mind process of dealing with sex and flashback to how they met and their interaction with the rest of the world; which seemed a little off for the period of the book. I will try another of Ian's book, but this short novel lacked subtance.

So much feeling in so few pages
Some reviewers are complaining that this is really just a short story. Uhhhhh, ok, maybe, but the author has packed it full of emotion and feelings that make it a page turner. Who hasn't said the wrong thing at the wrong time and regretted it later, sometimes much later? Or who hasn't stood by and done nothing to save a relationship out of pride or fear of rejection? And who hasn't wondered decades later about the paths not taken? Most of us can relate to at least some of the feelings that Ian McEwan so masterfully depicts.
If it's a "short story," it's definitely the best short story I've read in many years.

Throw this one back
I may have missed it, but did Ian McEwan recently move to that Greek monastery where the don't allow any females of any species? You would think he'd never met a woman in his life from reading "On Chesil Beach," a minor character study that's not really worth even the short time it takes to get through. McEwan's attempts to inhabit the mind of a woman in post-war England are laughably inept--although he works hard to get the period details right the character rings false all the way through. The author also seems to suffer from that modern misconception that everyone born before 1960 had no idea how babies are made--how does he think he got here? And the, er, climactic scene is more worthy of a soap opera scribe than a major novelist. The only time this novel works is when he's describing the male character's class resentment: that's where McEwan's talent lies and he'd be better off applying his much over-praised abilities to culture-clash stories like Atonement and Saturday.
In all, a bad day at the beach.