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Ian McEwan: gets under the skin of life |
Heavy tread into virgin territory
Ian McEwan’s latest novella is remarkable in terms of attention to detail, but loses its focus and credibility quicker than its characters manage to lose their virginity, writes Gerald Isaaman
On Chesil Beach. By Ian McEwan. Jonathan Cape £12.99. order this book
THIS is half a book, and a remarkable novella as such – one that examines in detail all the elements of love and lust on a honeymoon night in the 1960s.
In some respects you might describe it as the longest-held erection in literary history as Edward is kept dangling on the cusp by his beautiful bride Florence, who is totally unprepared and unwilling to lose her virginity.
The whole concept repels her but she simply cannot voice her fears and frustrations, while healthy Edward is more concerned about the basics – whether he can make tender love without “arriving too soon” at the moment of consummation.
By modern standards it wouldn’t work. Many young people today do not hold sex in any high or mature regard, believing it to be the lettuce of life that sustains a relationship with its green fingers. Indeed, they throw in booze and drugs as part of the party, no matter what walls come tumbling down when three or more romp the night away.
But here the Primrose Hill writer Ian McEwan confronts a different time, when people from different backgrounds joining in matrimony were hesitant, on the edge, still frowned upon if they broke out of their fragile class barriers. With delight and elegant skill he builds up the background of the young lovers, providing us with illicit details about their ever-present parents, their upbringing, how they met and sifting through the delicate sands, rather than the stones, of their existence.
This culminates with their much- planned first night together in a bedroom scene in which McEwan displays his considerable talent to get under the skin of life and make us, at once, both understanding and exasperated by events – or perhaps by the reasons for the lack of action.
The evening ends in disaster, Florence fleeing the nuptial bed, still clothed and unabused, as she sees it, and Edward simply goes to pieces, his life smashed by this one non-climactic event, while, like someone out of a Jane Austen novel, Florence takes to a sexless and successful musical career.
Indeed, that is the sharp note, where the book goes wrong and spins out of control, the more so as Edward, who ends up in Camden Town running a chain of record shops, pops the pills and dances with more willing dames.
Unfortunately he disappears as a credible character, more cardboard and cut-out than a man unhinged by a frigid bride. What we needed, really, was a second half of this short novel examining sexual desire and its destruction at the other end of the spectrum. That would be the time when the characters were coming up to 70 and wondering how to sustain some kind of relationship when attributes, other than those physical, become so essential and important.
McEwan is in fact the writer to explore that serious and sensual side of life when diminishing demands for passion in the bedroom are overtaken by the needs of comfort and companionship, kindness, smiles and true love.
That would have provided him with an opportunity to examine our so-called culture at the start of a new century, when we have plonked our children in front of the telly at six months and allowed them to become brainwashed, have taken all that time to discover that smoking kills you, unless you’re lucky, and that drugs and drink can’t wipe out the horror of the weapons and casualties of war caused by blood lust as much as religion and greed.
How would Florence and Edward have coped with all that after one pathetic naughty night in a beach hotel that, more than anything, exposes their immaturity and lack of understanding? The reality of a couple of kids would have bashed all that out of them if they had stuck together in the concrete of Camden Town.
Life’s a beach, as they say, where the stones can fly in all directions.
You just have to learn to duck and dodge at the right moment. And get on with it.
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