Sometimes the lives of Ian McEwan's protagonists are ruined by grandiose catastrophe, but more often he articulates the small misunderstandings as the cause for the derailment of life's expectations.
"On Chesil Beach" is McEwan's latest novel dealing with the difficulties and nuances of human relationships.
Florence and Edward are introduced in the 1960s on the threshold of the sexual revolution. It is the night of their wedding and they are both virgins. Though they come from different backgrounds, he from a moderately complicated family and she a member of the upper crust, they are equally ignorant of the details of sex but anxiously aware of its importance. Somewhat stereotypically, Edward is eager to consummate their union, while Florence is terrified that there is something wrong with her because everything she has gathered about sex from the whispers of her girlfriends has made her recoil.
Over a mere 200 pages, McEwan unfurls the events of the couple's first night together, weaving the history of their past into the present events on the beach. With the customary gentleness of tone and language that he employed in books such as "Amsterdam," and "Atonement," McEwan eases his readers into the shoes of the befuddled couple. The novel is propelled forward by the anticipation of what the bedroom holds for the newlyweds, but McEwan is in no rush, and his delay is bearable because his sentences are small worlds of delight. He is not one for extravagant language and he never once condescends to Edward and Florence's youth. In a delicate series of descriptions, he makes clear that all the signs Edward reads as coy encouragement on Florence's behalf are really her nervous evasions of his physical advances.
It is almost unbelievable that two people could find themselves married to each other without a frank understanding of their desire. Edward's proposal is prompted by the promise of sex as much as it is by his admiration of Florence. McEwan looks closely at the climate of discretion of which Edward and Florence are both products. He illustrates the impossibilities of frank connection and understanding in an environment where the knowing looks and half-hints that the lovers exchange are produced by ignorance rather than malicious or manipulative intent.
McEwan's novel is partly an exploration and critique of marriage. The world of adults is shrouded in mystery for Florence and Edward, and they are stifled by their own inability to express the convolutions of their emotions. Marriage figures as much as an emblem of their status as adults as it does as for their love for one another.
The realities and difficulties of married life are hardly less complicated or distorted for the members of the current generation, but a vocabulary for what goes on inside the bedroom has been developed and certainly eases some of the honeymoon jitters. The necessity of honest discourse about the subject is framed by something different than unwanted pregnancy in McEwan's novel. His magnification of the accepted tradition of silence about sex complicates the desire to preserve the mystery that tantalizes, and recognize the degree to which the absence of communication impacts the couple's understanding of each other. The tragedy that resides in "On Chesil Beach" is that love does figure in Edward and Florence's relationship, and it is the absence of a common language for what they desire that results in their predicament.