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On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, Reviewed by Mike Peters
If we Baby-boomers sometimes forget how lucky we are, then Ian McEwan`s latest short novel should help remind us. Born a few years earlier, we too may have suffered the indignities and constraints that the two just-married protagonists of On Chesil Beach undergo.
Set in the long-fifties – 1962 to be exact – newly weds, Florence and Edward, eat their pre-consummation honeymoon dinner whilst British PM, Harold Macmilan`s voice can be heard on the radio beneath them, evoking a world of dull pipe-smoking comfort that is soon to be replaced; Harold Wilson`s modernising Labour Government, with its rhetoric of white hot technology, is only two years away.
Throughout McEwan`s subtly constructed narrative, in which time-shifts between the present moment of pre-nuptial bliss and the couples` individual and shared pasts, seamlessly inter-twine, the sense of being on the cusp between old and new worlds is pervasive. References to stodgy food, the second-world war and the end of empire etch into the reader`s mind a period of history that is on the verge of disappearance.
Waiting in the wings is a younger generation – `the term teenager had not long been invented` - with new ideas about society, international relations and sex. Or so it might be, except that the earlier era still clings to McEwan`s couple, still has the power to impinge and ultimately destroy their young lives.
Florence may be in rebellion against her parents` reactionary political ideas, as seen in her in her sympathies with the CND movement but her `visceral dread` of sexuality – most vividly presented when she runs from the marital bedroom when the marriage is close to consummation - is a product of a repressive pre-contraceptive Pill culture, in which even talk about sex is taboo. Edward, lower down the social hierarchy, may be more advanced and confident than his partner but he too is unable to escape the dominant social and moral attitudes of the age. Faced with Florence`s proposal to solve the sexual problem by adopting a free marriage, in which each (really Edward) would have the opportunity to pursue affairs, he turns it down, unable to imagine a form of living that challenges traditional notions of respectability and propriety.
Throughout the novel, using a series of retrospective short narrative, that depict the earlier selves and experiences of his central couple, McEwan suggests the various and complex ways in which the society in which we grow up, enters our consciousness. Born a few years later – in the middle or late Sixties when the permissive society had established its influence - Florence and Edward would probably have been able to achieve the fulfilled existences that seemed to beckon. As it is, the ending of On Chesil Beach is a deeply sad one. Little is said of Florence – she becomes a successful classical musician – but the silence seems to denote a life only partially lived after that fateful moment on the Dorset beach.
Edward drifts through 1960s` underground culture, running a record-shop, travelling abroad, marrying, divorcing and living on alone into old age with a sense of what his failure of vision and courage signified. The tone at the close is regretful for what might have been, for the missed possibilities that the couple could have enjoyed if each had been a little different, if each had been a little less locked into the mind-set of their particular age.
No-one can escape their history. Thus baby-boomers need to be grateful that the historical moment in which they were born and grew-up offered so many opportunities to challenge, experiment and achieve. Whilst the Sixties may have been a period with many problems and troubles, compared to what went before, or indeed after, there`s a lot to be said for the decade. McEwan`s novel is certainly a wonderfully melancholy reminder of that fact.
For more publication details visit Google Books.
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