Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach” is being marketed as a novel, but it might be more appropriately described as a collection of five linked short stories that explore the essence of a pair of lives.
Edward and Florence are 22, and the collection begins on their wedding night. McEwan takes the reader to England and a very different world in July 1962.
The couple’s innocence is hard to place in today’s world, where the facts about reproduction are first broached in elementary school, where Britney Spears was – at least for a time – marketed as an appropriate role model for preteens, where sexual images and revealing clothes are the norm. But Edward and Florence are innocents in love and come to their wedding night as virgins, facing the evening with more fear than excitement.
Aside from their sexual inexperience, the two seem to have little in common. McEwan spends a good deal of time exploring the individual back stories that brought the two to this juncture. They attended university in London, Edward studying history at University College and Florence, the violin at the Royal College of Music. But Florence is from a wealthy and educated family, and Edward grew up in a home where his mother floated around the edges, and his father, a headmaster, was the only underpinning of the chaotic household.
McEwan’s stories are introspective and, at times, told at a wondering distance. He describes a society in which youth has no standing. “This was an era – it would end later in that famous decade – when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.”
It’s no surprise, then, that neither of the pair spent any time wondering whether they should get married. It is the expectation, and they are dutiful children looking to the next step. They find each other and, as it turns out, love. But it’s not clear that love will be enough to carry them through even the fumbling first night of their marriage.
They enter the hotel room with very different expectations and anxieties. Florence loves Edward for his companionship and for his solid presence, but she fears the consummation of their union. During the courtship, she has held firm her boundaries and the wedding night looks akin to stepping into an abyss.
Edward, for his part, has honored Florence’s wishes, but a good part of the timing of his proposal had to do with unfulfilled desire. He knows he is expected to take the lead, but is clumsily unsure of what he should do. And he is completely unaware of the depth of Florence’s fears.
The feeling that the reader is going to witness a disaster grows stronger as more about each of the individuals is revealed. While it’s true that two very unlike people can enter into and maintain a marriage, in all cases a healthy supply of patience, communication and forgiveness is needed. As the reader follows McEwan down his meandering path, what becomes most clear is how much of those qualities the two will need if they are to keep the promises made to each other, and how unlikely it is, given their current levels of maturity and expectation, that such is forthcoming.
McEwan writes his man more convincingly than his woman, though in the interest of full disclosure, this reviewer is a woman who finds Edward more admirable and honest in his emotions than Florence, who is tightly wound when it comes to anything sexual. She is a woman who wants the romance of early dating without the yeoman’s work of commitment.
In some ways it is difficult to develop much sympathy for the characters. Neither is introspective; both are frighteningly immature as they enter what they profess to be a lifelong commitment.
But Edward has been raised in a home of adversity and, though he has little ambition, has some resilience. Florence has had to overcome few hurdles on the life path that advanced her to the altar. As a result, she is self-centered and spoiled, unequipped to work through a challenge.
The most moving section of the book is the final, fifth section in which the future is revealed in its entire could-have, should-have splendor.
It is a bittersweet ending and one that reveals far more about the nature of love than the sections that precede it.
It’s not a flaming emotion fueled by passion or unfulfilled desire but rather something quietly burnished by time, something that must be fed by more than chance and missed chances.
Robin Vidimos reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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FICTION
On Chesil Beach
Ian McEwan
$22
