On the Shelf
Originally published 11:04 a.m., September 22, 2007
Updated 11:04 a.m., September 22, 2007
The evening isn’t perfect, but the weather is balmy enough to allow the young couple to dine with the French windows partly open to the sounds of the English Channel and Chesil Beach, which stretched before them.
It is their first dinner as husband and wife and both are keenly aware of the four-poster bed in the adjoining room of the inn they have chosen for their honeymoon.
Edward and Florence are in their early 20s. Both are virgins.
In 2007, that is probably a surprising state of affairs. But Ian McEwan has set his novel “On Chesil Beach” in 1962, when virginity was, if not universal, at least presumed on the wedding day. The married state brought certain privileges and responsibilities, not least among them the requirement to assume a measure of maturity.
For two educated people, a couple in love, Edward and Florence are remarkably immature. They have discussed their parents, their childhoods, their political leanings, but they have never talked about sex.
Florence does not know that, for all his eagerness to move from the dinner table to the marital bed, Edward has little idea of what will be expected of him there. And Edward does not know that Florence’s reticence is not innocent shyness; it is disgust and terror.
McEwan’s narrator adopts an almost scientific manner in the telling of this brief tale that is, at once, heartbreaking and comedic. From a microscopic slice of these two lives, a few hours on a wedding night, the reader looks into the past and the future.
Edward grew up in a village, enjoying the freedom of the countryside, not understanding that his mother was different from other mothers. An unusually bright boy, he was fortunate to have doors opened to education, at which he excelled.
Florence was the daughter of a successful businessman and a university professor. Her gift was music, which wiped away her shyness and gave her a strength of personality that, sadly, did not manifest itself in other facets of her life. It’s possible that some traumatic experience has led to her fear of being touched, but readers can’t be sure.
For a reader unfamiliar with McEwan’s work, “On Chesil Beach,” may not be the best starting point. Some of his earlier novels — “Amsterdam,” “Atonement” and “Saturday” — are probably better for getting a sense of what he’s about.
He seems to be shrinking his field smaller and smaller, moving from one day to just a few hours, examining relationships for that particular point, which brings them to success or failure.
Nevertheless, “On Chesil Beach” is a beautiful dissection of two lives that come together, for better or for worse, on one night in a Georgian inn on a beach in Dorset.
Emporia Public Library staff and volunteers write “On the Shelf.”