Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION MCE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION MCE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | PB FICTION MCE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.
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.
Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan--a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
Author Notes
Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, England on June 21, 1948. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Sussex and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of East Anglia. He writes novels, plays, and collections of short stories including In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act and Nutshell.
He has won numerous awards including the 1976 Somerset Maugham Award for First Love, Last Rites; the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award and the 1993 Prix Fémina Etranger for The Child in Time; the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction for Amserdam; the 2002 W. H. Smith Literary Award, the 2003 National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, the 2003 Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel for Atonement; and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Saturday.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Not quite novel or novella, McEwan's masterful 13th work of fiction most resembles a five-part classical drama rendered in prose. It opens on the anxious Dorset Coast wedding suite dinner of Edward Mayhew and the former Florence Ponting, married in the summer of 1963 at 23 and 22 respectively; the looming dramatic crisis is the marriage's impending consummation, or lack of it. Edward is a rough-hewn but sweet student of history, son of an Oxfordshire primary school headmaster and a mother who was brain damaged in an accident when Edward was five. Florence, daughter of a businessman and (a rarity then) a female Oxford philosophy professor, is intense but warm and has founded a string quartet. Their fears about sex and their inability to discuss them form the story's center. At the book's midpoint, McEwan (Atonement, etc.) goes into forensic detail about their naive and disastrous efforts on the marriage bed, and the final chapter presents the couple's explosive postcoital confrontation on Chesil Beach. Staying very close to this marital trauma and the circumstances surrounding it (particularly class), McEwan's flawless omniscient narration has a curious (and not unpleasantly condescending) fable-like quality, as if an older self were simultaneously disavowing and affirming a younger. The story itself isn't arresting, but the narrator's journey through it is. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In previous novels, McEwan has measured the effect of the cataclysmic moment on personal lives. And he has never shied away from full-tilt exploration of the tensions inherent in human sexuality. These two predilections merge, almost gently, in his new novella, which, despite its short length, is anything but small in its creative concept and the consequent poignancy it arouses in the reader. This achingly beautiful narrative, which seamlessly flows between the points of view of the two primary characters, peers behind closed doors, but never lasciviously, at a young married couple on their honeymoon night. The time is the brink of the 1960s, but the young couple's virginity, and their stiltedness in general and certainly with each other (McEwan makes certain to take several glances backward to fill in their separate biographical and psychological profiles), seems a remnant of Victorian times rather than anticipating the free and easy sexuality of the decade to come. The cataclysmic moment here is simply a case of premature ejaculation during the couple's first lovemaking; and from that incident, which under normal circumstances, with normally accepting and loving individuals, would have been a minor glitch in their marital history, immediately arises a deep misunderstanding that proves disastrous to the marriage. Conventional in construction and realistic in its representation of addled psychology, the novel is ingenious for its limited but deeply resonant focus. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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. But it is never easy. The geographical distinction that marks Chesil Beach in England is the grading of the shingle - the pebbles, that is - that forms its 18 miles: the pebbles are arranged, by wind and rain, in a spectrum of sizes and textures, so that the beach forms a spatial map of time. Each stone confesses a part of its relation to the whole. Local fishermen brag of the ability to make a blind identification of the original placement, on Chesil Beach, of a given stone. Among the encompassing definitions we could give "the novel" ("a mirror walking down a road," "a narrative of a certain size with something wrong with it") is this: a novel is a vast heap of sentences, like stones, arranged on a beach of time. The reader may parse the stones of a novel singly or crunch them in bunches underfoot in his eagerness to cross. These choices generate tension: in my eagerness to learn "what happens," might I miss something occurring at the level of the sentence? Some experience this as a delicious agony, others distrust it. Our appetite for Ian McEwan's form of mastery is a measure of our pleasure in fiction's parallax impact on our reading brains: his narratives hurry us feverishly forward, desperate for the revelation of (imaginary) secrets, and yet his sentences stop us cold to savor the air of another human being's (imaginary) consciousness. McEwan's books have the air of thrillers even when, as in "On Chesil Beach," he seems to have systematically replaced mortal stakes - death and its attendant horrors - with risks of embarrassment, chagrin and regret. ... young, educated ... virgins ... wedding night ... sexual difficulties. The first stone on McEwan's new beach indulges his radical efficiency with a hook. If McEwan's first chapters generally ought to be sent, like Albert Pujols's bats, to the Hall of Fame, then we may agree that in this instance his first sentence is a first chapter of its own, as well as doing extra duty as its host book's perfect piece of ad copy. (Here's my spoiler warning: "On Chesil Beach" is far too lean and pure for me to muse on more than a few of its sentences without giving some secrets away. If you're inspired by the hook above, read the book - it'll be nearly as quick as reading my review, and more fun.) Then comes a second thought: But it is never easy. With startling ease these five words deepen and complicate the book. Who speaks, and from what historical vantage? The sentence entrenches the facts that precede it - and the facts to follow - in the oceanic retrospect of a ruminative mind, even as they claim to universalize the lovers' predicament, to forgive them their place in the history of sexual discomfort. With his lips clamped firmly onto hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved around inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. ... He wanted to engage her tongue in some activity of its own, coax it into a hideous mute duet. ... She understood perfectly that this business with tongues, this penetration, was a small-scale enactment, a ritual tableau vivant, of what was still to come, like a prologue before an old play that tells you everything that must happen. The bulk of "On Chesil Beach" consists of a single sex scene, one played, because of the novel's brevity and accessibility, in something like "real time." Edward and Florence have retreated, on their wedding night, to a hotel suite overlooking Chesil Beach. Edward wants sex, Florence is sure she doesn't. The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan's written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls "the secret affair between disgust and joy." That horror is located in the distance between two selves, two subjectivities: humans who will themselves to be "as one," and fail miserably. The horror is in the distance between these sentences, which reside terrifyingly near to one another on the page: Florence: In deciding to be married, she had agreed to exactly this. She had agreed it was right to do this and have this done to her. Edward: When he heard her moan, Edward knew that his happiness was almost complete. The horror further exfoliates in the (utterly normal) physical calamity that ensues: Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He ... emptied himself over her in gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities. ... If his jugular had burst, it could not have seemed more terrible. By this point McEwan hardly needs the specter of murder to convince us that mortal stakes lie behind closed doors. Embarrassment is the death of possibility. If "On Chesil Beach" is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones: The waiters were arriving with their plates of beef, his piled twice the height of hers. They also brought sherry trifle and cheddar cheese and mint chocolates, which they arranged on a sideboard. After mumbling about the summoning bell by the fireplace - it must be pressed hard and held down - the lads withdrew, closing the door behind them with immense care. Then came the tinkling of the trolley retreating down the corridor, then, after the silence, a whoop or a hoot that could easily have come from the hotel bar downstairs. For need of surviving the folly of his own desire, Edward mustn't observe the satirical similarity in McEwan's descriptive language (pressed hard and held down, withdrew, immense care, trolley retreating down the corridor) to the language of pornography, to paraphrases of what will or won't occur soon in the suite's four-poster bed: The bed squeaked mournfully when they moved, a reminder of other honeymoon couples who had passed through, all surely more adept than they were. He held down a sudden impulse to laugh at the idea of them, a solemn queue stretching out into the corridor, downstairs to reception, back through time. It was important not to think about them: comedy was an erotic poison. In the painstaking and microscopic one-night structure of "On Chesil Beach," McEwan advances his exploration of slowness in fiction (early evidenced in "Black Dogs" and "Amsterdam," and exemplified in the 24-hour time scheme of "Saturday"). This suggests modernist experiment - not only James and Woolf, but even, in its combination with McEwan's legendarily "forensic" vocabulary (here we're greeted by the most instrumental pubic hair in the history of fiction), the chilly Alain Robbe-Grillet. But McEwan's tone is more normative than that of his forebears, and it may be worth asking: Why doesn't he feel like a "late" modernist? And what does he feel like instead? The answer may lie in the fact that modernism in fiction was partly spurred by the appearance of two great rivals to the novel's authority, psychoanalysis and cinema - one a rival at plumbing depths, the other at delineating surfaces. McEwan, who comes along later, shrugs at such absolutist contests, and has for that matter already engulfed (most brilliantly in "Enduring Love") the latest challenger to the novel's throne: neurology. In fact, McEwan may in retrospect be seen as the quintessential example of the recent integration of scientific interest into fiction, precisely because in McEwan (as opposed to, say, Richard Powers) such matters cease to be in any way remarkable. SIMILARLY, in "Atonement," McEwan showed a capacity for writing in a more pressured modernist style and then, in the metafictional post-lude, to gently amplify it with an air of sympathetic diagnosis. It was as if to say: We want to feel our reading minds bear down on character and consciousness with the intensity of Joyce or Woolf, those stream-of-consciousness titans, but we also want access to the retrospective embrace of our more forgiving and homely hearts. McEwan's mode is synthesis, his signature the reconciliation of diametric modes - scalpel observation and civilized compassion - into a persuasive and relaxed whole. His style, too easily taken for complacent, is recuperative. His confidence in the authority of his chosen form is absolute, which is why he conveys such dazzling authority of his own. To paraphrase Paul Nelson, as Greil Marcus does in his book "The Old Weird America": the tests have been passed, and what we're seeing are the results. Just before dawn he got up and went through to the sitting room and, standing behind his chair, scraped the solidified gravy from the meat and potatoes on his plate and ate them. After that, he emptied her plate - he did not care whose plate it was. Then he ate all the mints, and then the cheese. In the genuinely heartbreaking aftermath of the newlyweds' disastrous night, our sympathies are in no way undermined by this late return to mutedly sniggering comedy, and body horror too (the solidified gravy recalling those vigorous but diminishing gouts). How Hitchcockian the linkage between food and sex. And what detail could speak more eloquently of the compulsive, cyclical humiliations of the life of our poor minds (stuck inside our bodies forever, until death do us part) than that we might make note of ourselves gobbling the mints before the cheese? This seeming novel of manners is as much a horror story as any McEwan has written.
Guardian Review
When you first dip into the opening pages of Ian McEwan's new novel, you're likely to find it surprisingly low-key. Here is a quiet middle-class couple's wedding night in a Dorset hotel at the beginning of the 1960s, described in a style that is very leisurely for such a short novel. "The garden vegetation rose up, sensuous and tropical in its profusion, an effect heightened by the grey, soft light and a delicate mist drifting in from the sea, whose steady motion of advance and withdrawal made sounds of gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles." This is McEwan's mature style, one we have come to recognise from Atonement and Saturday . It is a polished, civilised style, and very distant from the shock tactics of his early work. McEwan sets up this opening scene with great care, making 1962 feel as distant from us as the 40s did in Atonement , with allusions to everything from the poor cooking ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine. . .") to the old-fashioned manners ("This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance . . .") Yet despite this rather ponderous authorial interjection, as they sit there over their touchingly formal meal, with its melon and cherries, its roast beef and nasty wine, the virginal Florence and Edward quickly become alive for us. Soon we are propelled into a dance of "advance and withdrawal" within the room which echoes that outside the window, and which also has its intimations of "gentle thunder". The sexual tensions on this wedding night are almost unbearable from the start, and gradually become absolutely disastrous. While Edward is only suffering first night nerves, Florence is suffering from something more, a "visceral dread". As Edward and she move gradually towards the bed, hardly anything is said, but the fluttering, nervous encounters of hand and mouth are intensely expressive. The problem is that they cannot achieve any communication; each of them misreads the other. "She was doing all she could to prevent a muscle in her leg from tightening, but it was happening without her . . . she felt it was letting her down, giving the first indication of the extent of her problem. He surely felt the little storm . . . he was impressed, even in awe, as he mistook her turmoil for eagerness." These currents of excitement and dread are following such different directions that it is hardly surprising that by the end of the novel, which comes quite quickly, just a few hours and about 150 pages later, the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach has become the backdrop to solitude rather than communion. This plot may sound inconsequential - bad sex in English hotel shock! - but McEwan manages to give it almost tragic impact. This is partly because we come to sympathise so intensely with Florence and Edward's idealistic expectations of intimacy, in which sex becomes an "awesome experience that seemed as remote from daily life as a vision of religious ecstacy, or even death itself." It is partly also because their unique tragedy is deliberately linked to wider forces: "What stood in their way?" asks the narrator, "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." History itself. . . Indeed, it is central to the novel that it takes place before 1963, when, as Philip Larkin told us, "sexual intercourse began". As McEwan shows, "they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible." Caught in this narrow moment between one sexual epoch, when traditional expectations might have carried them further than this one night, and the epoch about to unfold, when they might have talked through their problems with greater ease, Florence and Edward have little room to manoeuvre. Part of the novel is taken up by flicking backwards through Florence and Edward's lives prior to their wedding night; their apparently ordinary, middle-class existences; her love of music, his love of history, their education and their families, and the meeting and growing intimacy that brought them to this point. In some ways these are unexciting lives, but both of them carry secrets which they cannot quite shrug off. While Edward's secret may seem at the outset the more difficult to cope with - his brain-damaged mother has for many years been incapable of looking after him and his siblings, and the family chooses not to refer to her disability, but to keep up a facade of normality - in fact he seems to have freed himself pretty successfully from the dragging encumbrance of that embarrassment. Florence's family secrets are much less easily pinned down. Since this is a time in which sexual difficulties could not be referred to, McEwan never lays those secrets on the table. We have to follow their trail through glancing references and metaphors, and our desire to understand what her sense of shame stems from is never sated. While everything is going so horribly wrong for Florence's wedding night, something comes rising up from her childhood: "Here came the past, anyway, the indistinct past. It was the smell of the sea that summoned it. She was twelve years old, lying still like this, waiting, shivering in the narrow bunk with polished mahogany sides . . . It was late in the evening, and her father was moving about the dim cramped cabin, undressing, like Edward now . . . She was usually sick many times on the crossing, and of no use to her father as a sailor, and that surely was the source of her shame." If there is another source of her shame, we realise that Florence will never be able to enunciate it. Whatever the "shameful secret locked in musty confinement" is, whose smell seems to erupt into the room later in the evening, it is not fully disclosed. In many ways, Florence and Edward are the incarnation of an innocence, or an ignorance, that has died. That innocence is seen as political as well as sexual. They meet at a CND meeting in Oxford, and McEwan seems to suggest that anyone who was active in the peace movement then was naive - as he suggested about those who protest against war in our time in Saturday . "Florence knew in her heart that the Soviet Union, for all its mistakes - clumsiness, inefficiency, defensiveness surely, rather than evil design - was essentially a beneficial force in the world." This characterisation of peace activists as hopeless naifs stuck in my throat, but you cannot judge a novelist for his political views. No, what matters is whether the novel works as fiction. And it does. Some of the prose in the passages away from the bedroom is more workaday than we have come to expect from McEwan, and lacks the panache of his recent work. The exploration of Florence's love of music, particularly, never quite flares into life. Yet within the bedroom this couple's hesitant attempts at intimacy are nuanced and delicately realised. In these scenes we can wonder at how McEwan has matured from the writer who revelled in depicting chilly sexual games and sporadic violence into a writer who explores with grave candour the importance and impossibility of love. Despite the brevity and formality of this novel, McEwan brings Florence and Edward touchingly alive for us; and their seriousness, their idealism, and their desire for love draw us towards them. I have often heard readers say that they find it hard to sympathise with McEwan's recent characters - that they seem too much like vehicles for a clever plot and too little like living, breathing people. I disagree; and just as Bryony Tallis in Atonement and Henry Perowne in Saturday were coolly and carefully drawn, but still shuddered into imaginative life, so the elegant, polished construction of Florence and Edward does not detract from the emotional impact of their first night together. Although it's impossible for a reviewer to tease apart the implications of that night without ruining the book for readers to come, I felt that the last passages of the novel suffered from their brevity. We are told, rather than shown, how Edward's life progressed, or regressed, after their stay on Chesil Beach. Yet it is possible to say this, that at the end of the novel McEwan still puts his faith in love and patience, whatever other experiences life may have had to offer as the 60s moved on. It is a curiously chastened view of the excitements of that decade, but it resonates in these chastened times. Natasha Walter's The New Feminism is published by Virago. To order On Chesil Beach for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/ bookshop Caption: article-natmcewan.1 This is [Ian McEwan]'s mature style, one we have come to recognise from Atonement and Saturday . It is a polished, civilised style, and very distant from the shock tactics of his early work. McEwan sets up this opening scene with great care, making 1962 feel as distant from us as the 40s did in Atonement , with allusions to everything from the poor cooking ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine. . .") to the old-fashioned manners ("This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance . . .") Yet despite this rather ponderous authorial interjection, as they sit there over their touchingly formal meal, with its melon and cherries, its roast beef and nasty wine, the virginal Florence and Edward quickly become alive for us. Soon we are propelled into a dance of "advance and withdrawal" within the room which echoes that outside the window, and which also has its intimations of "gentle thunder". These currents of excitement and dread are following such different directions that it is hardly surprising that by the end of the novel, which comes quite quickly, just a few hours and about 150 pages later, the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach has become the backdrop to solitude rather than communion. This plot may sound inconsequential - bad sex in English hotel shock! - but McEwan manages to give it almost tragic impact. This is partly because we come to sympathise so intensely with Florence and Edward's idealistic expectations of intimacy, in which sex becomes an "awesome experience that seemed as remote from daily life as a vision of religious ecstacy, or even death itself." It is partly also because their unique tragedy is deliberately linked to wider forces: "What stood in their way?" asks the narrator, "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." In these scenes we can wonder at how McEwan has matured from the writer who revelled in depicting chilly sexual games and sporadic violence into a writer who explores with grave candour the importance and impossibility of love. Despite the brevity and formality of this novel, McEwan brings Florence and Edward touchingly alive for us; and their seriousness, their idealism, and their desire for love draw us towards them. I have often heard readers say that they find it hard to sympathise with McEwan's recent characters - that they seem too much like vehicles for a clever plot and too little like living, breathing people. I disagree; and just as Bryony Tallis in Atonement and Henry Perowne in Saturday were coolly and carefully drawn, but still shuddered into imaginative life, so the elegant, polished construction of Florence and Edward does not detract from the emotional impact of their first night together. - Natasha Walter.
Library Journal Review
It is 1962, and college graduates Florence and Edward, very much children of late 1950s London, are ready to launch themselves as a couple. Musical Florence is hoping for a concert career and looking forward to the wedding she believes will truly define her adulthood. Edward, a budding historian from a troubled family, envisions lifelong domestic joy with his beautiful fiancee. However, both are plagued by private anxieties they can't bring themselves to discuss. As Edward plans an idyllic beachside wedding night, he broods about overcoming Florence's physical shyness given his own sparse experience. He has no idea she is terrified of sex but has grimly resolved to do her submissive duty. The results are false assumptions, confusion, and a nightmarish (and graphically described) sexual disaster that destroys the marriage even before it starts. McEwan's (Saturday) brief, affecting tale of romantic dreams overthrown by adherence to social constructs that are about to change radically is a strong effort from this Booker Prize winner. Recommended for most adult fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/07.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
ONE 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. But it is never easy. They had just sat down to supper in a tiny sitting room on the first floor of a Georgian inn. In the next room, visible through the open door, was a four-poster bed, rather narrow, whose bedcover was pure white and stretched startlingly smooth, as though by no human hand. Edward did not mention that he had never stayed in a hotel before, whereas Florence, after many trips as a child with her father, was an old hand. Superficially, they were in fine spirits. Their wedding, at St. Mary's, Oxford, had gone well; the service was decorous, the reception jolly, the send-off from school and college friends raucous and uplifting. Her parents had not condescended to his, as they had feared, and his mother had not significantly misbehaved, or completely forgotten the purpose of the occasion. The couple had driven away in a small car belonging to Florence's mother and arrived in the early evening at their hotel on the Dorset coast in weather that was not perfect for mid-July or the circumstances, but entirely adequate: it was not raining, but nor was it quite warm enough, according to Florence, to eat outside on the terrace as they had hoped. Edward thought it was, but, polite to a fault, he would not think of contradicting her on such an evening. So they were eating in their rooms before the partially open French windows that gave onto a balcony and a view of a portion of the English Channel, and Chesil Beach with its infinite shingle. Two youths in dinner jackets served them from a trolley parked outside in the corridor, and their comings and goings through what was generally known as the honeymoon suite made the waxed oak boards squeak comically against the silence. Proud and protective, the young man watched closely for any gesture or expression that might have seemed satirical. He could not have tolerated any sniggering. But these lads from a nearby village went about their business with bowed backs and closed faces, and their manner was tentative, their hands shook as they set items down on the starched linen tablecloth. They were nervous too. This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time, except visitors from abroad. The formal meal began, as so many did then, with a slice of melon decorated by a single glazed cherry. Out in the corridor, in silver dishes on candle-heated plate warmers, waited slices of long-ago roasted beef in a thickened gravy, soft boiled vegetables, and potatoes of a bluish hue. The wine was from France, though no particular region was mentioned on the label, which was embellished with a solitary darting swallow. It would not have crossed Edward's mind to have ordered a red. Desperate for the waiters to leave, he and Florence turned in their chairs to consider the view of a broad mossy lawn, and beyond, a tangle of flowering shrubs and trees clinging to a steep bank that descended to a lane that led to the beach. They could see the beginnings of a footpath, dropping by muddy steps, a way lined by weeds of extravagant size--giant rhubarb and cabbages they looked like, with swollen stalks more than six feet tall, bending under the weight of dark, thick-veined leaves. The garden vegetation rose up, sensuous and tropical in its profusion, an effect heightened by the gray, soft light and a delicate mist drifting in from the sea, whose steady motion of advance and withdrawal made sounds of gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles. Their plan was to change into rough shoes after supper and walk on the shingle between the sea and the lagoon known as the fleet, and if they had not finished the wine, they would take that along, and swig from the bottle like gentlemen of the road. And they had so many plans, giddy plans, heaped up before them in the misty future, as richly tangled as the summer flora of the Dorset coast, and as beautiful. Where and how they would live, who their close friends would be, his job with her father's firm, her musical career and what to do with the money her father had given her, and how they would not be like other people, at least, not inwardly. 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! One of their favorite topics was their childhoods, not so much the pleasures as the fog of comical misconceptions from which they had emerged, and the various parental errors and outdated practices they could now forgive. From these new heights they could see clearly, but they could not describe to each other certain contradictory feelings: they separately worried about the moment, sometime soon after dinner, when their new maturity would be tested, when they would lie down together on the four-poster bed and reveal themselves fully to each other. For over a year, Edward had been mesmerized by the prospect that on the evening of a given date in July the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman. How this was to be achieved without absurdity, or disappointment, troubled him. His specific worry, based on one unfortunate experience, was of overexcitement, of what he had heard someone describe as "arriving too soon." The matter was rarely out of his thoughts, but though his fear of failure was great, his eagerness--for rapture, for resolution--was far greater. Florence's anxieties were more serious, and there were moments during the journey from Oxford when she thought she was about to draw on all her courage to speak her mind. But what troubled her was unutterable, and she could barely frame it for herself. Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness. For much of the time, through all the months of merry wedding preparation, she managed to ignore this stain on her happiness, but whenever her thoughts turned toward a close embrace--she preferred no other term--her stomach tightened dryly, she was nauseous at the back of her throat. In a modern, forward-looking handbook that was supposed to be helpful to young brides, with its cheery tones and exclamation marks and numbered illustrations, she came across certain phrases or words that almost made her gag: mucous membrane , and the sinister and glistening glans . Other phrases offended her intelligence, particularly those concerning entrances: Not long before he enters her...or, now at last he enters her, and, happily, soon after he has entered her ...Was she obliged on the night to transform herself for Edward into a kind of portal or drawing room through which he might process? Almost as frequent was a word that suggested to her nothing but pain, flesh parted before a knife: penetration . In optimistic moments she tried to convince herself that she suffered no more than a heightened form of squeamishness, which was bound to pass. Certainly, the thought of Edward's testicles, pendulous below his engorged penis--another horrifying term--had the potency to make her upper lip curl, and the idea of herself being touched "down there" by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on her eye. But her squeamishness did not extend to babies. She liked them; she had looked after her cousin''s little boys on occasion and enjoyed herself. She thought she would love being pregnant by Edward, and in the abstract, at least, she had no fears about childbirth. If only she could, like the mother of Jesus, arrive at that swollen state by magic. Florence suspected that there was something profoundly wrong with her, that she had always been different, and that at last she was about to be exposed. Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated. She simply did not want to be "entered" or "penetrated." Sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy, but was the price she must pay for it. She knew she should have spoken up long ago, as soon as he proposed, long before the visit to the sincere and soft-voiced vicar, and dinners with their respective parents, before the wedding guests were invited, the gift list devised and lodged with a department store, and the marquee and photographer hired, and all the other irreversible arrangements. But what could she have said, what possible terms could she have used when she could not have named the matter to herself? And she loved Edward, not with the hot, moist passion she had read about, but warmly, deeply, sometimes like a daughter, sometimes almost maternally. She loved cuddling him, and having his enormous arm around her shoulders, and being kissed by him, though she disliked his tongue in her mouth and had wordlessly made this clear. She thought he was original, unlike anyone she had ever met. He always had a paperback book, usually history, in his jacket pocket in case he found himself in a queue or a waiting room. He marked what he read with a pencil stub. He was virtually the only man Florence had met who did not smoke. None of his socks matched. He had only one tie, narrow, knitted, dark blue, which he wore nearly all the time with a white shirt. She adored his curious mind, his mild country accent, the huge strength in his hands, the unpredictable swerves and drifts of his conversation, his kindness to her, and the way his soft brown eyes, resting on her when she spoke, made her feel enveloped in a friendly cloud of love. At the age of twenty-two, she had no doubt that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Edward Mayhew. How could she have dared risk losing him? There was no one she could have talked to. Ruth, her sister, was too young, and her mother, perfectly wonderful in her way, was too intellectual, too brittle, an old-fashioned bluestocking. Whenever she confronted an intimate problem, she tended to adopt the public manner of the lecture hall, and use longer and longer words, and make references to books she thought everyone should have read. Only when the matter was safely bundled up in this way might she sometimes relax into kindliness, though that was rare, and even then you had no idea what advice you were receiving. Florence had some terrific friends from school and music college who posed the opposite problem: they adored intimate talk and reveled in each other's problems. They all knew each other, and were too eager with their phone calls and letters. She could not trust them with a secret, nor did she blame them, for she was part of the group. She would not have trusted herself. She was alone with a problem she did not know how to begin to address, and all she had in the way of wisdom was her paperback guide. On its garish red covers were portrayed two smiling bug-eyed matchstick figures holding hands, drawn clumsily in white chalk, as though by an innocent child. *** They ate the melon in less than two minutes while the lads, instead of waiting out in the corridor, stood well back, near the door, fingering their bow ties and tight collars and fiddling with their cuffs. Their blank expressions did not change as they observed Edward offer Florence, with an ironic flourish, his glazed cherry. Playfully, she sucked it from his fingers and held his gaze as she deliberately chewed, letting him see her tongue, conscious that in flirting with him like this she would be making matters worse for herself. She should not start what she could not sustain, but pleasing him in any way she could was helpful: it made her feel less than entirely useless. If only eating a sticky cherry was all that was required. To show that he was not troubled by the presence of the waiters, though he longed for them to leave, Edward smiled as he sat back with his wine and called over his shoulder, "Any more of those things?" "Ain't none, sir. Sorry sir." But the hand that held the wineglass trembled as he struggled to contain his sudden happiness, his exaltation. She appeared to glow before him, and she was lovely--beautiful, sensuous, gifted, good-natured beyond belief. The boy who had spoken nipped forward to clear away. His colleague was just outside the room, transferring the second course, the roast, to their plates. It was not possible to wheel the trolley into the honeymoon suite for the proper silver service on account of a two-step difference in level between it and the corridor, a consequence of poor planning when the Elizabethan farmhouse was "Georgianized" in the mid-eighteenth century. The couple were briefly alone, though they heard the scrape of spoons over dishes, and the lads murmuring by the open door. Edward laid his hand over Florence's and said, for the hundredth time that day, in a whisper, "I love you," and she said it straight back, and she truly meant it. Edward had a degree, a first in history from University College, London. In three short years he studied wars, rebellions, famines, pestilences, the rise and collapse of empires, revolutions that consumed their children, agricultural hardship, industrial squalor, the cruelty of ruling elites--a colorful pageant of oppression, misery and failed hopes. He understood how constrained and meager lives could be, generation after generation. In the grand view of things, these peaceful, prosperous times England was experiencing now were rare, and within them his and Florence's joy was exceptional, even unique. In his final year he had made a special study of the "great man" theory of history--was it really outmoded to believe that forceful individuals could shape national destiny? Certainly his tutor thought so: in his view History, properly capitalized, was driven forward by ineluctable forces toward inevitable, necessary ends, and soon the subject would be understood as a science. But the lives Edward examined in detail--Caesar, Charlemagne, Frederick the Second, Catherine the Great, Nelson and Napoleon (Stalin he dropped, at his tutor's insistence)--rather suggested the contrary. A ruthless personality, naked opportunism and luck, Edward had argued, could divert the fates of millions, a wayward conclusion that earned him a B minus, almost imperiling his first. Excerpted from On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
