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On Chesil Beach
by: Ian Mcewan

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Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780307386175
ISBN: 0307386171
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: June 10, 2008
Publisher: Anchor
Release Date: June 10, 2008
Studio: Anchor
Sales Rank: 1281

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
In 1962, Florence and Edward celebrate their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Yet as they dine, the expectation of their marital duties weighs over them. And unbeknownst to both, the decisions they make this night will resonate throughout their lives. With exquisite prose, Ian McEwan creates in On Chesil Beach a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Amazon.com:
Such is Ian McEwan's genius that, despite rambling nature walks and the naming of birds, his subject matter remains hermetically sealed in the hearts of two people.

It is 1962 when Edward and Florence, 23 and 22 respectively, marry and repair to a hotel on the Dorset coast for their honeymoon. They are both virgins, both apprehensive about what's next and in Florence's case, utterly and blindly terrified and repelled by the little she knows. Through a tense dinner in their room, because Florence has decided that the weather is not fine enough to dine on the terrace, they are attended by two local boys acting as waiters. The cameo appearances of the boys and Edward and Florence's parents and siblings serve only to underline the emotional isolation of the two principals. Florence says of herself: "...she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires...."

They are on the cusp of a rather ordinary marital undertaking in differing states of readiness, willingness and ardor. McEwan says: "Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness." Edward, having denied himself even the release of self-pleasuring for a week, in order to be tip-top for Florence, is mentally pawing the ground. His sensitivity keeps him from being obvious, but he is getting anxious. Florence, on the other hand, knows that she is not capable of the kind of arousal that will make any of this easy. She has held Edward off for a year, and now the reckoning is upon her.

McEwan is the master of the defining moment, that place and time when, once it has taken place, nothing will ever be the same after it. It does not go well and Florence flees the room. "As she understood it, there were no words to name what had happened, there existed no shared language in which two sane adults could describe such events to each other." Edward eventually follows her and they have a poignant and painful conversation where accusations are made, ugly things are said and roads are taken from which, in the case of these two, the way back cannot be found. Late in Edward's life he realizes: "Love and patience--if only he had them both at once--would surely have seen them both through." This beautifully told sad story could have been conceived and written only by Ian McEwan. --Valerie Ryan

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Short story
Am I the only person who read this McEwan piece as a short story in the New Yorker in September, 2006?

I thought it was a brilliant short story. However, when it was published as a new hardback, I forgot I had seen that title before. The book was what it was, a short story force-fed into becoming a publishable, hard-back book. The additional pages written by the author added nothing, except royalties.

The short story contained every thing necessary to convey what I thought was an interesting, tense and surprising story.

Authors and publishers should reveal somewhere on the cover of the "book" it has been previously published in another form. I was disappointed in this little charade.

Rating:

- The power of words. The power of misunderstanding.
In "On Chesil Beach" Ian McEwan, as usually, delivers what expected of him. Exeptionally good literature, exceptionally good character study and background.
Florence, a violinist, and Edward, a historian, young college graduates and, what is more important, newlyweds, are about to spend their first night together. The honeymoon started well, they are in a hotel suite overlooking the beach, but none of them is happy - they fear what happens when they attempt intercourse., And, although they fear for totally different reasons (or maybe partly because of this?) it leads them to the tragic misunderstanding and puts the end to their marriage.

McEwan, like in his previous novel, "Saturday", connects the central conflict between the pair of protagonists with the place and time ... Read More

Rating:

- They Should Have Talked

It seems as though each time you check his website, Ian McEwan has collected another award, and with the success of Atonement he has to be considered one of the great living novelists in English. Although On Chesil Beach (Nan A. Talese, 2007) lacks the scope of Atonement, it is clearly a product of the same artistic sensibility.

The recent novel is set in 1962, on the eve (ironically) of the decade that brought fundamental changes in lifestyles, especially in regard to sexual mores. McEwan's young newly weds are both products of older times, virgins who have never spoken to one another about such things. Florence assumes that Edward has the required minimal sexual experience, and he assumes that she is eager for a sex life within the sacrament of marriage. Neither ... Read More

Rating:

- Not Good
I have to give this "book-ette" two stars because it is very well written, but the story is truly dreadful and, in the end, uninteresting. This is my first McEwan book, and despite stellar reviews of his other works, I will have a difficult time trying them.

Rating:

- Um... anti-climatic?
I'm sorry but this story stank! It was far too rambling, considering how short it was. I skipped huge parts just to get to the end, only to find out they'd called it quits before the end of their wedding night? It also didn't ring true that they wouldn't have confided in each other it was their first time. I don't know, I'm not too keen to read more by this author based on this book.

Books : On Chesil Beach