New fiction ... Ian McEwan, Beach music - back to the top of his game?

IAN McEWAN is back on form. Following “Saturday”, his enjoyable but overly safe previous novel, this master of fiction has written a poignant new book that in terms of its diminutive size—though not its emotional range—is reminiscent of his Man Booker-prize-winning “Amsterdam”.

It is July 1962. Edward and Florence, both 22 years old, educated yet innocent, have been married for just eight hours after a courtship bound by unspoken protocols. In their honeymoon suite overlooking Chesil Beach on the Dorset coast they are served a formal dinner of long-ago roasted beef in thickened gravy, soft-boiled vegetables and white wine: “It would not have crossed Edward's mind to order a red.” Neither has any appetite. There is a starched, stilted feeling in the tepid evening air as, almost strangers, they stand, “strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence”.

They believe their marriage will bring them happiness and the freedom to realise the plans “heaped up before them in the misty future”. Yet, despite this joyful promise neither is able to suppress fully the anxieties about the moment when, after dinner, they must “reveal themselves fully to one another” on the narrow four-poster bed with pure white covers.

For Edward, who is suffering first-night nerves, this moment will be the resolution of a prospect that has mesmerised him for more than a year. But for Florence a “visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness” is overwhelming her. Here is a woman who knows that sex will never be the “summation of her joy” but the price she must pay for love—an emotion she sees as “a comforting broth...a thick winter blanket of kindness and trust”.

Mr McEwan's prose is, as always, intense and visually descriptive, but in this elegantly crafted novel his skill lies in his illumination of an evening taut with emotional paralysis and in his portrayal of missed opportunity. As events move forward to the book's dénouement, “On Chesil Beach” becomes much more than a simple story of emotions held in check by convention. It is a memorable exposé of how terrible wounds can be inflicted and the entire course of a life changed—by doing nothing.


New fiction Beach music Economist.com