ON CHESIL BEACH
Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, US$22
On Chesil Beach was looking like a sure bet for this year’s Man Booker Prize, for which it was short listed, but despite losing out, it is a work well worth reading by a master wordsmith.
Born on June 21, 1948 in Aldershot, England, a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia under the tutelage of novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson launched the career of one of England’s finest living writers.
Ian McEwan’s works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim including the Booker for Amsterdam in 1998, the WH Smith Literary Award in 2002 for Atonement and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday last year. And in On Chesil Beach he has again served up a real treat.
The year is 1962. Florence, the daughter of a successful businessman and an aloof Oxford academic, is a talented violinist. She dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, the earnest young history student she met by chance and who unexpectedly wooed her and won her heart.
Edward grew up in the country on the outskirts of Oxford, where his father, the headmaster of the local school, struggled to keep the household together and his mother, brain-damaged from an accident, drifted in a world of her own. Edward’s native intelligence, coupled with a longing to experience the excitement and intellectual fervour of the city, had taken him to University College in London. Falling in love with the accomplished, shy and sensitive Florence – and having his affections returned with equal intensity – changed his life.
Their marriage, they believe, will bring them happiness, the confidence and the freedom to fulfil their true dreams and desires.
The glowing promise of the future, however, cannot mask their worries about the wedding night.
Edward, who has had little experience with women, frets about his sexual prowess. Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by conflicting emotions and a fear of the moment she will surrender herself. On Chesil Beach is a novel that movingly shows us how the entire course of a life can be changed – by a gesture not made or a word not spoken. It is short at under 200 pages, more of a novella, but its poetic prose and the skilful, light detailing of the couple’s hidden emotions makes it a true pleasure to read.
David Johnson
