Worse, he never makes the reader understand what brought Florence and Edward together in the first place, save a mutual desire to escape their parents and start new lives of their own. McEwan attributes the lack of communication between the newlyweds to the era and its repressive mores: “They lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” But while his choice of a time frame for the novel might be some sort of allusion to Philip Larkin’s famous lines that “sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three” sometime “between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP,” he acts as though 1962 were the early Victorian era, not a time when the Rolling Stones were starting to rock ’n’ roll, and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was playing on Broadway. McEwan in unsavory, voyeuristic terms that are as cringemaking as they are graphic. In fact Florence is beyond nervous: She’s terrified, for she regards the prospect of sex with “a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness.” The couple’s attempt to consummate their marriage, predictably enough, ends in an embarrassing encounter that will snowball into a far more dire emotional exchange, all of which is depicted by Mr. Both are virgins, and both are nervous about their first time in bed together. The central event of this novel concerns the disastrous wedding night of Edward and Florence, naïve young things, who have come, one evening in July of 1962, to a hotel on the Dorset coast for their honeymoon. It also focuses closely on one couple’s romantic and sexual relationship without opening a window, as his earlier novels have done, onto larger social and moral issues, and without giving the reader any genuine psychological insights into its two main characters. McEwan’s perennial themes - the hazards of innocence, the sudden mutation of the ordinary into the awful, the inexorable grip of time past over time present - it does so in a mechanical and highly arbitrary fashion. After two big, ambitious novels - “Atonement” and “Saturday” - Ian McEwan has inexplicably produced a small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses none of those earlier books’ emotional wisdom, narrative scope or lovely specificity of detail.Īlthough “On Chesil Beach” grapples with some of Mr.
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