ISBN 978-1-0įunny you and I should disagree on this, when we’ve agreed about most of the other books that we’ve chatted about.Ĭhesil hinged on a premise that I found totally unbelievable – left me screaming at them to get on with it, and, when they couldn’t get on with it, to drink the rest of that horrible wine, have a chat about it, and try again once they’d got to know each other better. On Chesil Beach Ian McEwan, Knopf 2007 166 pp.
There’s nothing like a slim hardcover to tuck into your pocket on a train journey, and you could do far worse than to pack this one along next time. If one of the aims of literature is to create such lingering impressions, then the book’s modest length is in no way an obstacle to its impact. I finished reading On Chesil Beach in a day (travelling from Brussels to Ghent, to be precise), but I continued to think about it for weeks. What happens over the course of a single evening will affect both characters in ways they would never have predicted. As Edward grows increasingly numbed by a terror of performance failure, Florence harbours a deeper dread of the sexual act itself. But one thing stands between them and their longed-for future of wedded bliss: the wedding night. Having overcome the social gap that divides their families (her father is a wealthy businessman and Oxford academic his father struggles to make ends meet while caring for his brain-damaged mother), the couple embark on their honeymoon at a seaside hotel. It is 1962, and talented violinist Florence has finally married earnest history student Edward.
On Chesil Beach is an excellent example of the former.Īs in Atonement, the novella hinges on the power of a single word or action to change – or destroy – an entire life. He is a modern master of the slim volume ( The Cement Garden remains, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of a then-debut author) and longer, virtuosic novels that merge complexity and style ( Atonement). Incredibly, McEwan has proved that he can do both. There is as much skill, if not more, to writing an excellent novella as there is to writing an opus pushing 900 pages. McEwan’s latest offering may not have been good enough to win the Booker – by all accounts, there were at least two other books which were better – but it certainly provided a welcome antidote to all those bloated novels out there. The Prince, A Room of One’s Own and The Great Gatsby are all relatively short works, but no one would argue that their significance is diminished by their page count. The most outrageous claim so far has been that On Chesil Beach “wasn’t long enough” to deserve the Booker.
I’ve heard a few people moan about Ian McEwan lately, and I’ve been struggling to fathom why.
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