On Chesil Beach: Ian McEwan

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B)reathtaking (…..) (I)t is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest -- innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected -- and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

ON CHESIL BEACH | Kirkus Reviews ON CHESIL BEACH | Kirkus Reviews

Over the months Edward made some headway, but it never came easy, and Florence doesn't really take to much physical intimacy -- his tongue in her mouth when they, kiss for example. For the reader, the ending of On Chesil Beach comes too soon. Its devastating concluding passage, in which we glimpse the future that flows from the events of the honeymoon night, feels almost like the sketch of a larger novel of which this is merely the first section. Still, the experience of finishing a novel with regret is not so frequent that one should complain of it. Better to say with gratitude that McEwan’s latest fiction is full of richness: of serious thought about the nature of love and human relationships, informed by a poetic sensibility and expressed in prose whose lyricism never errs on the side of self-indulgence." - Jane Shilling, The Times It is a raw and painful book in places, all the more ironic given that it is set in the allegedly “swinging 60s”. There is additional irony in the fact that Florence takes Edward’s cherry – but only at dinner (an image oddly missing from the film). Although Edward’s family home was chaotic and somewhat repressed, it was loving. He enjoys the “exotic opulence” of Florence’s home, and although not a social climber, “his desire for Florence was inseparable from the setting”. McEwan, a '60s child if ever there was one, comes to remind us that there were losers, all right, and that there still are. It would be less interesting to term this a generational achievement than a national one. Only Philip Larkin has ever decribed sex more bleakly than McEwan does here. No fumble, miscue, or calamity is omitted." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic MonthlyN.E.G. (19 September 2017). "The temptations and pitfalls of adapting your own novel for the screen". The Economist . Retrieved 18 June 2018.

On Chesil Beach’: Did You Catch Florence’s Backstory? ‘On Chesil Beach’: Did You Catch Florence’s Backstory?

It stars the luminously vulnerable and always watchable Saoirse Ronan, who first rose to prominence in another McEwan adaptation, Atonement. The rest of the cast are good, too. See On Chesil Beach on imdb. On Chesil Beach is a linguistic balancing act, each sentence delicately positioning itself both by historical co-ordinates -- an early-Sixties world of Austin 35s and wireless news bulletins -- and by more private reference points -- the separate anxieties and assumptions of the young bride and groom. McEwan, as Atonement demonstrated, is at his best with this finely tuned historical pastiche. The period detail allows him some virtuosic touches (…..) McEwan's forensic account of the warring couple's partialities (…) is perfectly constructed, but fails to throw off the feel of a private technical exercise. In a novel so reliant on bias and conviction, a little more authorly engagement would be welcome." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman Jaremko-Greenwold, Anya (31 May 2018). " "On Chesil Beach" and What Is Expected of Women". FLOOD Magazine. Anthemic Agency . Retrieved 4 June 2018. In the beginning, Edward and Florence prepare each other for their wedding night. It is the year 1962; a time when talking about sexuality was not as easy and natural as it would be fifty years later. Both Edward and Florence are virgins; however, Florence believes Edward to be experienced with other women, and Edward doesn't know about Florence's anxiety to even think of sexual relationships, of the disgusting feeling which builds in her stomach whenever her thoughts wander off to this night she fears so much. It is a simple premise, a fact which keeps this book from becoming as interesting and masterful as the complex Atonement, yet a premise intriguing enough for me to become interested in the characters. And interesting and complex they were indeed. Florence's parents are an academic (her mother) and a successful businessman; complicating the picture is the fact that Edward is hired by her father, his first real job.But after On Chesil Beach climaxes, the masterfully modulated denouement fast-forwards through the decades to come to our present day -- and prods us to consider what this book really is." - Ed Park, Salon In crucial respects, this novel should not be linked with his early fiction, for those novels were not only shorter than Atonement, they were colder, frequently darker and more sinister. There was almost a clinician’s precision in the bloodlessness of McEwan’s prose. By contrast, On Chesil Beach allows readers to achieve an empathy with both of its 22-year-old characters that perhaps they are incapable of achieving with each other. Their marriage is an accident that became an inevitability, as two people who have little idea how compatible they are do what young people did before the sexual revolution that the novel anticipates: When they reached a certain age, they married whomever they were dating. This was still the era – it would end later in that famous decade – when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure. Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth – Edward and Florence, free at last!” Marvellously, it comes even worse than expected, as Edward contributes to the mess with his own sexual difficulties (let's just say that his decision to lay off gratifying himself in the days before the wedding looks like it left him more precariously bottled-up than is healthy). being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now."

On Chesil Beach - Penguin Books UK

Neither a compact novella nor a full-blown novel On Chesil Beach is a very good book, but not entirely satisfying. On Chesil Beach centres around the wedding night of Edward and Florence, and McEwan gets right to the point in his opening line:Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life. Lodderhose, Diana (22 August 2016). "Billy Howle Boards 'On Chesil Beach' For 'Carol' Producer Number 9 Films". Deadline Hollywood. Penske Business Media . Retrieved 20 October 2016. They finally get some of the words out into the open, as they finally try discuss sex, but they're not very good at that either -- hardly surprising, given that they've never had a go at talking about it to anyone, on top of the terrible pas-de-deux they were just part of. McEwan doesn't let it end there; indeed, what's decisive is how they handle this mess they've gotten themselves into. 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.