A Rumored City
All Quiet on Chesil Beach
How can you take a slender idea and make something out of it? Well that's a question that the novelist Ian McEwan has been answering most of his career. His latest novel, well novella really at a slender 200 pages, On Chesil Beach, is beautifully crafted prose but bereft of important elements that makes a compelling read: plot and good characterization.
The book is laid out in a present-past-present-future format the periods corresponding to sections in the book that are ponderously titled ONE, TWO, etc.
Things start off interestingly enough: Florence and Edwards are sitting down to a wedding night dinner in a typical English seaside hotel. The meal--this is 1962--predates novel cuisine and starts off with a slice of melon garnished with a single glazed cherry. The cherry is an apt metaphor for the virginal (in deed and in manner) newly-weds. Florence is asexual and in 1962 that condition would be described as frigid. Edward is callow, unsophisticated and worries about premature ejaculation. The prose, as in all McEwan books, thrusts the reader on relentlessly. We are treated to the description of the four-poster bed with its tightly stretched sheets, and the gravy congealing on the roast just as dread tightens its hold on the married couple. There's no questioning the narrative flow but the motives are dubious at best. Why does a twenty-two year woman with no interest in sex, indeed is fearful and loathes the very thought of it, enter into marriage? After all this isn't some primitive, patrician society where women are forced into marriage. This explanation then becomes the nub of the novel.
McEwan goes to great lengths to convince us as to why we should believe that such a marriage would be possible. Along the way, in the best McEwan tradition, come a host of cliched characters: Edward's mother, brain damaged because of an unbelievable incident, wonders around the house doing imaginary housework, cutting up pictures for scrap books, and practicing the piano badly. Not to be outdone Florence's mother is a strict, unloving academic philosopher. Her father is an unrepentant Tory who has no time for labor unions. From this union we are to believe could emerge a daughter such as Florence. She's musically gifted, plays the violin and fronts a string quartet; believes in nuclear disarmament; and has an ambiguous relationship with her father. McEwan also indulges in another one of his pet foibles, something which readers of his Saturday will remember well: the usage of as much jargon about a newly (newly for McEwan) discovered subject as he can. In Saturday, the protagonist being a brain surgeon, it's neurosurgery. Here Florence is a musician so we're given a lesson on music with the various miscellanea that McEwan imagines is associated with a musician: arpeggios, scales, notes, tone-deafness, etc. This would all be acceptable if McEwan wasn't so hamfisted in its usage. He even has her (Florence) standing one evening next to Benjamin Britten.
The inevitable, which has been telegraphed from page one, occurs. The consummation of the marriage goes horribly wrong, at least in Florence's mind if not in the mind of Edward or the readers. Florence rushes out to the beach, which mercifully is quiet and peaceful, soon to be followed by a horribly wronged and angry Edward. The evening and the situation could have had several denouements but McEwan, to his credit, chooses the best one.
The last section, potentially the best in the book, deals with the consequences of decisions made, words not said upon the lives of the two young people. Strangely though McEwan is only interested in what happens to Edward after that fateful night. We are taken headlong, at breakneck speed, through the middle and late twentieth century. We see how Edward's life progresses but not a word about Florence till the very end. An ending that I'm sure McEwan finds satisfactory even if his readers don't.
This is a novel that should have been a short story. The two present day sections that deal with the evening and events at the hotel and Chesil beach could have been combined and tightened into a plausible short story but as it is we are left with a light read of what's basically a flawed novel.
On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan Anchor Books PB $13.95
Posted at 09:51PM Apr 20, 2009 by Horatio in Books | Comments[0]