On Chesil Beach

In his most recent novel (really a short novella), On Chesil Beach , Ian McEwan returns to some of the concerns of his recent work: Arnold’s Dover Beach , the way “the entire course of a life can be changed” in an instant, coitus interruptus . McEwan’s writing is always impressive, and he fills out the mismatched lovers with tidy precision (e.g., he a country boy with a taste for early rock ‘n roll, she a classical violinist from Oxford).

Yet, none of McEwan’s themes works as well as in other novels. Start with the last: The brief, comparatively discrete, and abortive sex scene early in Atonement haunted the entire novel. McEwan had done his work early to make us care about these lovers, and to hope through the remainder of the novel that they would find each other again. On Chesil Beach reverses the plot of Atonement , with distasteful results. We know from the first sentences that Edward and Florence are going to have troubles on their wedding night, and McEwan delays the crucial scene by filling in their histories, apart and together. He never makes them or their love for one another very believable, however, and when we get to the sex scene we have known was coming McEwan falls into Updikean explicitness. If it was supposed to be comedy, McEwan failed.

Nor does the story doesn’t make the narrator’s concluding comment that “This is how the entire course of a life can be changed – by doing nothing” plausible. As always, McEwan peppers his novel with the moments-that-might-never- have-been; the most piteous is the brain damage Edward’s mother suffers in a freakish train accident. But the main characters’ inaction is inexplicable. The newlyweds react to their sexual failure with understandable embarrassment, anger, humiliation, guilt. They say things they regret. But is it really believable that two young people as deeply in love as McEwan assures us they are would just drop each other after a botched wedding night? Their lives are changed on that night, for sure, but there were dozens of other, more plausible, outcomes. McEwan doesn’t take their love seriously enough to keep them from walking away from their marriage without ever talking to one another again. Why should I take their love seriously?

Edward and Florence are married in 1962, just before, the narrator repeatedly tells us, the outbreak of sexual freedom that was the Sixties. This is supposed to explain Florence’s inhibitions about discussing her abhorrence of sex – as if, perhaps, things might have been different had they married three years later. The final breach between the newlyweds occurs on the beach when Florence suggests the possibility of an open marriage; we could live together and share life, but Edward would have freedom to satisfy himself sexually elsewhere. Edward is dismayed, insulted, angry, but the narrator tells us that later in the decade Edward concludes that it wasn’t such a nutty idea after all – as if, again, they could have maintained a happy marriage by a regular dose of infidelity. No doubt we enjoy the benefits of the unraveling of post-Victorian prudery, but were people really as incapable of “love and patience” prior to the 60s as McEwan indicates? McEwan goes far beyond Larkin: The 60s not only invented sex, but love and patience as well.

McEwan’s title and the imagery of the sea and beach is intended, I think, to evoke Arnold’s Dover Beach , which figures prominently in Saturday (2005). Tides are going in and out in this novel – the lovers rolling into adulthood, and doing it badly; and British culture is also, McEwan wants to say, going through the sea change from the innocence of the 50s to the experience of the 60s. Arnold’s poem is a lament for the retreat of the sea of faith, and a commitment to love in a world that no longer has fixed certainties. McEwan doesn’t lament, but he does propose the same response to the loss of faith.