On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan
Cape £12.99, pp242

THERE IS no epigraph to this short, elegantly realised novel, but if there were it would surely be the celebrated opening couple of stanzas from Philip Larkin's 'Annus Mirabilis':

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) -

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been

A sort of bargaining,

A wrangle for the ring,

A shame that started at sixteen

And spread to everything.

Ian McEwan's story exists exactly in that hinterland in British courtship between repression and licence, the Lawrence litigation and 'Love Me Do'. It is July of 1962 and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, he an ardent graduate historian, she the tremulous lead violinist in a string quartet with aspirations to Wigmore Hall, both 22, have just got married in Oxford. Their love story and their tragedy grows out of McEwan's opening sentence, which contains within its careful confines almost everything you need to know about what follows: 'They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.'

The honeymoon is to take place beside Chesil Beach, in a Georgian hotel. They eat their nuptial supper - melon with glace cherries, slabs of beef with overcooked veg, in their room overlooking the bay - while a pair of waiters, local lads, stands by intrusively. The beach, that unique spit of shingle which runs between the Fleet Lagoon and the Channel, immediately seems emblematic of several things: of this moment of certainty in lives that might never again seem certain; of the path that they have just embarked on together, a path which, like all married couples in love they believe they will be making new; but also of a romance that has taken place between the devil of Middle English rectitude and the deep blue sea of the coming sexual revolution.

Florence yearns for the former; she would rather never have anyone touch her, she believes, even this man she loves. She has been undone by the language of the wedding manual she has been reading (all 'mucous membranes' and 'glans' and 'penetration'). Edward, meanwhile, dreams fervently, silently, of the uninterrupted pleasure that will be theirs now the 'wrangle over the ring' has been sorted. Inevitably, these two worlds have collided several times already, and not favourably.

The 'sort of bargaining' identified by Larkin has at times threatened open conflict. These are still worsted postwar years, at least among Edward and Florence's milieu, and the assault on female virtue and, specifically, on Florence's virtue, has been an attritional endeavour of advance and retrenchment. Though carefully planned at every stage, Edward's campaign had earlier been set back months by his sudden placing of Florence's hand in the vicinity of his groin while they sat together at the cinema watching A Taste of Honey (that harbinger of possibility). Feeling something stir there, beneath the flannel of his trousers, she has leapt into the aisle, screaming.

McEwan is word-perfect at handling the awkward comedy of this relationship and, as ever, turning it into something far more disturbing. Both Edward and Florence fear that she is 'frigid', that antique word, and view that state as an affliction or curse with no remedy. McEwan's subject has often been the way in which innocence goes bad; here, the serpent in the garden is the time-honoured one - desire and its discontents.

The novel that seems to hover around the edges of this book is Philip Roth's Everyman, another short, sharp shock of a story, a slow roasting of a single romantic life (see page 28). You might see McEwan's novel as a very English riposte to Roth; here, a man's life quietly founders not on shifting purpose and infidelity, but on frustration and embarrassment.

McEwan's brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate discrete moments in a life and invest them with indelible significance: the supermarket scene of The Child in Time, the balloon disaster of Enduring Love. On Chesil Beach is constructed around three such moments - the meal, the urgent fumbling towards consummation and a resultant exchange on the beach itself, which interweave with the grace of a chamber piece. Edward and Florence had always planned to wander the shingle with a risque open bottle of French wine: 'They were going to collect stones along the way and compare their sizes to see if storms really had brought order to the beach.' What they discover, instead, is a wild kind of disorder, where nothing means what they intend.

McEwan interrupts these exchanges with two wonderful chapters of description which detail the chance of Florence and Edward's meeting, and the little mythologies they had established with each other to make love seem like fate. He has the ability to make the conventions of their backgrounds tangible. The village idyll of Edward's childhood is upset by an accident sustained by his mother as the war ends that leaves her simple-minded. Florence is suffocated in a big house off the Banbury Road, overwhelmed by her philosophy don mother and corporate father. The implications of these different registers of upbringing reverberate in unexpected ways as McEwan's tale unfolds. Florence and Edward are relieved that the wedding was not marred by any hint of her parents patronising his, but the English in McEwan's novels do not escape class so easily.

There is a fairy-tale quality to the book, in that everything that follows seems inevitable. The minute currents of tension that change a conversation and a life are so crucial to McEwan's method that it would be unfair to give away every last turn in his narrative. Towards the end, when fates have been sealed, it seems to Edward 'that an explanation of his existence would take up a minute, less than half a page'. Such is the deft compression of McEwan's art here that, in his hands, such a formulation does not seem far from the truth.