|
|
|
It is June 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come..."On Chesil Beach" is another masterwork from Ian McEwan - a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
| ISBN | 0224081187 | | Pages | 176 | | ISBN13 | 9780224081184
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 296 | | Publisher | Vintage | | Published in | London | | Imprint | Jonathan Cape Ltd | | Height (mm) | 206 | | Format | Hardback | | Width (mm) | 137 | | Publication date | 20 Jan 2007 | | Spine width (mm) | 22 | | DEWEY | 823.914 | | Academic level | General | | DEWEY edition | DC22 | |
|
| |
On Chesil Beach, is Ian McEwans astonishing fourth novella. In the short space of some 39 thousand words, he absorbs the world and returns it more alive, producing some of his best writing yet. The prose is as silken as the Isis in mellow late summer, yet it has tangled depths: the story treats the most closely held of personal secrets, sexual fear and sexual dysfunction which is as difficult to talk about today as it was in the more repressed early sixties when the book was set. There is no doubt that McEwan, as ever, intended to deploy and exploit the potential for shock of his theme and the compact form of the novella allows him to hit the problem head-on: in the first seven lines we meet the young couple, Edward and Florence, eating supper on their wedding night with their nuptial bed next door, whose smooth white cover is a reproach of something not only not achieved but not yet even started. The chemistry of sexual failure, we learn, is already part of their history together, those contortions, () agonies of restraint which delay the crumpling of the sheets and precipitate the disaster of the bedroom climax. From then, the pace of the novella pushes inexorably onward to its endpoint of silence on Chesil Beach, that rocky divide where the marriage of the young couple, only hours old, founders. As the novel fades in a blur of regret, that isnt the end. The text seems to run on after the final word, ever into the present, gathering with it the unresolved frustrations of loss. This is perhaps what McEwan meant by continuancy at its purest, yet there is also something else which hovers in the mind: that eternally unfinished moment when Edwards hand lifts to touch Florences shoulder, at the point of rescue for them both (and maybe all of us). - Kate Wilson Write a review
|
|
|
|
|
Enlarge
