TITLE: On Chesil Beach
AUTHOR: Ian McEwan
STARTED: April 9, 2011
FINISHED: April 9, 2011
PAGES: 208
GENRE: Fiction
FIRST SENTENCE: They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.
SUMMARY: [From Amazon.com
] It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence's response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence's anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite. THOUGHTS: I found On Chesil Beach to be surprisingly enjoyable. I'm sure I missed a shload of stuff, but I enjoyed the couple's story greatly. McEwan has always go some sort of subtext going on in his books, but if it's in this one, it went over my head. I found the narrative to be fun and would read more of McEwan's works if they were like this one.
Edward and Florence. Wedding night. Awkward. In fact, the two are so dysfunctional when they're alone that I found myself cackling with laughter. That was probably not the response McEwan was hoping to achieve, but I sure found some scenes to be funny. Unlike some other McEwan works, this story felt realistic - there was no high-falutin' goings on or undertones, there was just a story of two people who did not know each other as well as they thought. The couple's story then serves to highlight the general ideas of the day with regards to gender, class, and sex. I loved it. When I'm not being hit over the head with communism, I can stand McEwan. Sure, his subtle digs and subtext might be there, but I didn't notice them and it was all for the better.
In this book, McEwan's writing style seems to flow. His descriptions of scenes are vivid enough to paint a picture, but not so over the top that they feel forced. The scene is presented and the reader fills in the details. The same goes for how he describes his characters. This is no love story where we learn every physical aspect of the characters, Edward and Florence as just people. The reader is given enough to know the tale, but still is allowed to develop their own mental image.
Also, this book made me want to say, "See! This is why we need realistic sex education in our schools." Ahem.
RATING: 6/10 [Good]
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