On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, 2007 Anchor Books
Among my many reading repentances is to have known certain masterful writers by reputation only. Experiencing Ian McEwan’s prose for just the first time in 2024 is now foremost among them. I purchased his 2004 novel Saturday because I was intrigued by an entire novel dedicated to that day of the week that presents the highest combination of possibilities and variables in our lives but shadowed by the underlying anxieties to not waste it. The Children Act is a study on how the detachment of the Court tries to abate the waves of religious zeal and personal liberty, and if it can ever impart dispassionate judgement for either. As affecting as both these narratives are, On Chesil Beach is his most compelling work I have read so far.
McEwan keeps company with Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway in his ability to distill a cultural and historical zeitgeist into a character or singular plotline. On Chesil Beach’s historical and cultural context is a night in 1962 England, the liminal space between the lingering conservative patriotism of post-WWII and the social liberation of the late 1960s. The present tense of the story is the first night that his protagonists Florence and Edward are spending together as newlyweds.
As the evening progresses between the two, readers are privy to the reflections of both, interposed with flashbacks from their lives that led them to this moment. From these, we can see how incongruent they really are, in their passions, beliefs, and expectations for the future. Returning to the present, it’s revealed how much they have refused to share with each other, especially expectations on this the most pivotal night in both their lives. Even the two of them are uncertain if the reluctance is to protect their own or the other’s ego.
The flashpoint of the tension revolves around sex, and reading an honest reflection of the topic’s inherent anxieties is therapeutic. Thank you, Mr. McEwan, for sparing us the clichés, euphemisms, and artful suggestions. Even better, there is an absence of mystification and glamorization. Sex means vulnerability and uncertainty, and it’s Florence’s and Edward’s respective responses to it that turn them into each other’s unwitting adversary. Love has little to nothing to do with it; the question becomes if it ever really does.
Sex is also framed as the physical manifestation of ceaseless expectation. At the height of conflict, Florence realizes that “It was the brooding expectation of her giving more, and because she didn’t, she was a disappointment for slowing everything down. Whatever new frontier she crossed, there was always another waiting for her. Every concession she made increased the demand, and then the disappointment.” Even from an expansive view and after sixty years of progress has passed, have we truly been able to liberate ourselves fully from the demands of sex, either culturally or in our own relationships?
McEwan also reminds us that, as unwilling as we may be to accept it, sometimes our most intimate thoughts, desires, and fears are hidden deepest from the ones we hold the closest. How much pain and regret rises with them with they inevitably surface? McEwan’s protagonists/antagonists discover exactly that this night on Chesil Beach.
Regrets. I know my own regret for not reading McEwan until this moment in my reading life will give way to my enthusiasm in knowing there is still so much from him I have yet to read. I have no doubt I will enjoy the experience.