This very brief review of Ian McEwan's new novel On Chesil Beach will appear next week in Time Out London (link updated):
In the story Ian McEwan tells of his own career, the ambition to write 'at the edge of human experience' gives way gradually to a preoccupation with 'character'. It's fair to say, however, that sometimes McEwan's attention to the 'fine print of consciousness' has been smothered by the implacable machinery of his plots, which were as distinctive a feature of his early novels and stories as their infamously macabre subject matter.
But On Chesil Beach is different. It opens in a hotel room overlooking the eponymous stretch of Dorset coastline on the wedding night of a young couple, Edward and Florence. The year is 1962, a time when, we are reminded, 'conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible'. McEwan assembles a brief but intricately patterned novel out of this impossibility: Edward and Florence imagine marriage as a kind of liberation from the fog of adolescent 'misconception', yet worry separately about the moment 'when their new maturity would be tested'.
Edward is almost suffocatingly eager to consummate their union, while Florence looks forward to the act merely with gathering apprehension. Indeed, it's Florence's sexual dread, the origins of which are hinted at but never made wholly explicit, that becomes the medium of the story's telling and the source of its considerable suspense.
When the couple move from the dinner table to the bed, Florence is pleasantly surprised by her sensations. She wants to 'linger' in this unexpected pleasure, though she knows such lingering to be impossible and that 'one thing would have to lead to another'. It is a measure of McEwan's artistry that he is able here both to linger in the recording of sensuous particularities and at the same time to deliver the satisfactions of plot we are accustomed to deriving from his fiction.