On Chesil Beach
By Ian McEwan
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 203 pages, $22
Ian McEwan’s 11th novel is a shocker. Fans new to his work — and there are many, thanks to the thunderous critical praise heaped on his last few books — will be taken aback by this slim volume, an intimate account of a young British couple’s wedding night. But those who’ve followed his career from the beginning know McEwan has always been a shape-shifter.
From the Gothic tale to the historical epic to the psychological thriller, he has proven himself a writer capable of anything. His talent is mercurial, a liquid thing; and each form becomes a container for his formidable gifts: a radiant intelligence, keen psychological insight, as fine a prose style as any writer working in the English language. Now, after two books that engage the larger world — “Atonement,” a sweeping World War II epic, and “Saturday,” a tense allegory for the post-9/11 world — McEwan makes an audacious choice to go small.
At just about 200 pages of text, “On Chesil Beach” is more novella than novel. If “Atonement” is a sumptuous tableau by Jacques Louis David, “On Chesil Beach” is an exquisite miniature, a world engraved on a grain of rice.
The story takes place in a single evening. The newlyweds, Florence and Edward, find themselves cloistered in a seaside hotel suite and served a stodgy meal (“This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine”) while a neatly made bed looms large in the adjoining room. They are virgins, and anxious. It’s a titillating setup, but McEwan offers little hope of a torrid and joyous consummation. “[T]hey lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible,” he asserts in the first sentence.
The time is summer 1962, a staid moment, largely forgotten now, before the decade found its swing: “This was still the era — it would end later in that famous decade — when to be young was a social encumbrance . . . a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.” Florence and Edward seem at once much younger than their years, and much older. They call to mind high school graduation portraits of the time: the serious miens, the matronly hairstyles, the faces impossibly young.
Initially at least, the couple’s naivete strains credulity; but no matter: Innocence is innocence, after all, whether one experiences it at 14 or 40. These characters are so vividly drawn, so deeply imagined, that the reader can’t fail to be transported to his own early fumblings, at whatever age they occurred.
The wedding night unfolds slowly and painfully. After a year of chaste courtship, Edward is nearly sick with anticipation of “that awesome experience that seemed as remote from daily life as a vision of religious ecstasy, or even death itself.” At the same time, he feels hopelessly ill-prepared for the task. His inner turmoil is occasionally comical: “He remembered a time . . . when he sat at the controls of a combine harvester, having boasted to the farmer that he was competent, and then did not dare touch a single lever. He simply did not know enough.”
He doesn’t know, most critically, that his bride harbors a crippling horror of sexual contact, a fear and disgust so extreme that the slightest intimacy causes her physical distress: “[T]he idea of herself being touched ‘down there’ by someone else . . . was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on her eye.”
McEwan suggests, delicately, that her anguish stems from past trauma, an incestuous relationship with her father. Florence can’t bring herself to articulate this, to Edward or to herself. Yet the modern reader, so steeped in the culture of psychotherapy, can’t fail to understand what Florence does not.
I’m not giving anything away by saying that the evening unfolds disastrously. McEwan depicts the debacle moment by moment, in minute detail. The scene is graphic but not prurient — it is as precisely observed as the endless squash match in “Saturday,” and almost unbearably poignant. McEwan has written one of the most memorable sex scenes in English literature, excruciatingly honest and utterly revelatory. In this moment of crisis, Florence and Edward are most nakedly and completely themselves.
Despite its intimate scale, “On Chesil Beach” is in no way a small book. Its subject is destiny itself: the fragility of human happiness, the power of a single moment, words uttered impulsively or thoughtlessly, to change the course of a life.
In its plain way, this intimate story is the truest thing Ian McEwan has written. “On Chesil Beach” isn’t a grand novel, but it is a great one, a quietly devastating tale of love and loss.
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Jennifer Haigh is the author of the novels “Baker Towers” and “Mrs. Kimble.”
