Ian McEwan's coastal romance

Ian McEwan
ON CHESIL BEACH
166pp. Cape. £12.99.
978 0 224 08118 4

Tony Blair is said to have mistaken the novelist Ian McEwan for a painter of pictures. To be fair to the unconscionably departing Prime Minister, McEwan’s artistic identity is far from straightforward. He is a Dutch-interior realist (in that sense a painter) who is also a romantic fabulist, a specialist in what once was called the “frightful” and the “unaccountable” – an old word employed by him in something like the old spirit. He is a springer of shocks and horrors of the sort that electrified the Jacobean stage. He goes in for secrecy and uncertainty, for dual identity and for often mysterious memorable episodes – among them, the pub scene of filial and primordial déjà vu in The Child in Time of 1987, which turns out to support the ensuing plot. Some of this can make him look like an entertainer, or a writer of thrillers. But such terms are apt to seem out of place when applied to his writings, which are also, for one thing, those of a learned man, whose accounts of quantum electrodynamics and other arcana have instructed and abashed a generation of literary readers. Novels are not always informative, as McEwan’s are.

He is now, at no great age, the author of a body of fiction full of range and change and invention. A new book by him has long been an event. This new book, though, On Chesil Beach, is more than an event. It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly.

Of his novel of 1993, Black Dogs, a critic claimed that it was a “regeneration”: it represented “McEwan’s transformation from a purveyor of knowingly nasty tales to a novelist unsurpassed for his responsive, responsible humanity”. This is to speak ill of The Cement Garden (1978), his earliest novel and one of his best, which has its element of the macabre and untoward (incest, the hugger-mugger of a premature burial of a kind), but which isn’t nasty or inhumane. By the same token, it would be wrong to hail the new book as a regeneration. But it’s true that the macabre of the earlier fiction, and the youthfulness that shaped it, are not in evidence. The new book is shocking, dark, at times. But it has very little of the romantic material of several of the foregoing fictions. It is not fabulous. It is accountable, domestic. It imagines, with humanity, the plight of a severely bashful virgin.

The virgins, Edward and Florence, who are the heart of this closely focused work were born around 1940, some eight years before their author, and they are at the cusp of a development, an exposure to changing times, which ran in parallel with the youth of Ian McEwan, who went off with the loot from his first published short story and blissed out in Afghanistan. In 1972, he returned to England and got on with an exemplary professional career. He had suffered the 1960s liberations which the experience of his courting couple predates. As in the case of Alice Munro, these liberations are a pivotal matter in McEwan’s stories.

Even when they are alone, Edward and Flo are oppressed by “a thousand unacknowledged rules”. They don’t do childish things: “being childish was not yet honourable, or in fashion”. A flower was a thing of beauty – not yet a statement. Ahead lies the famous decade of “new excitements and freedoms and fashions”, and a “chaos of numerous love affairs”: an era in which chaste women (and men) were swept into a preached and prescribed libertinage, and sweet girl graduates could feel that they had to oblige. Too late for Philip Larkin: as he proclaimed, sexual intercourse began in 1963, which is about the time when the option raises its lizard head for Florence. For her, the words for it are virtually unspeakable, rather as she finds the word “cancer”. Flo’s time is that of the county bride who was reported to have sent a telegram the morning after her wedding night: “Coming back immediately. Johnny’s gone mad”.

The novel opens as the pair sit down to dinner, on their wedding night, at a seaside hotel in Dorset, and it embarks on a journey to the end of that night, with cunning flashbacks designed to establish parentage and background: tenses are kept in control, as they frequently aren’t with such customary interminglings of present and past. This is a tight ship, moored by Chesil’s celebrated shingle beach, no less important to its novel than is the Cobb at nearby Lyme Regis to Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Florence is “serious”, her bridegroom rightly thinks: she is blossoming into the first violin of her own string quartet, very much intent on success and on the Wigmore Hall. Her father is a brooding presence: a constraint has fallen on the two of them, and they don’t find it easy to speak or to stroke. Edward is a strong lad from the Chilterns – serious too, a historian at the university he attended, yet a scrapper outside pubs, now set to join his father-in-law’s science business.

He is charged with seed-spilling physical desire for Alice-banded Florence, who loves him back, but in her own shy way, a way that grew to be unpopular in the 1960s in many circles, and thereafter to be left unsung in literary circles – which is one reason why the idea of the book may present itself as original. Novelists acquired a habit of ignoring or disrespecting the fear of physical love. There must have been a lot of it still about in later decades (as there no doubt was in the eighteenth century, whose gifted memorial writer Louisa Stuart held that to read in books about l’amour physique was like being forced into the kitchen and the slaughterhouse when all you wanted was your dinner); but the novelists of the later twentieth century were to turn away their eyes, in a reversal of Victorian practice. McEwan respects Flo’s visceral reluctance, while also respecting her lover’s attempt to cope with her shyness and to be forbearing. Much of the book describes – in a Kama Sutra of clumsiness and deferment, told to the last trapped pubic hair – the foreplays that anticipate and accompany their nuptials: the inordinate foreplays of the 1950s.

Edward had known that on a certain 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”. Florence’s trouble was a good deal worse. She did not wish to be “entered”, “penetrated”, as her sex manual had let her to expect. Sex was the price that love had to pay. Falling in love had led her to think “just how odd” she was in her dismay. Compared with her girlfriends at the Royal College of Music, “she felt the peculiar unshared flavour of her own existence: she was alone”. Florence is wonderfully characterized, as indeed Edward is: she’s a decisive leader of the quartet, but “whenever she was anxious or too self-conscious, her hand would repeatedly rise to her forehead to brush away an imaginary strand of hair, a gentle, fluttering motion that would continue long after the source of stress had vanished”.

What is it to love someone you fear to touch, or be touched by, sexually? What is likely to be in store for such a shyness? What does it stand to lose? These are among the questions asked or adumbrated here.

The novel reaches its climax in the newly-weds’ four-poster bed and in the fraught conversation that follows in the twilight of Chesil’s shingled beach. This scene is perhaps the greatest of Ian McEwan’s memorable episodes, generating an even more forceful and an even finer suspense than any in his writings, and the outcome is all the more impressive for being well judged and true to life, just as the grisliness of their sexual turmoil is the more impressive for lying within the boundaries of common experience. It’s worth adding that the same can often be said of the “nastiness” once attributed to his earlier fictions. There is a weirdness of the home to be met with in those books, and in this one.

The novel has felicities which ensure, rather than embellish, the humanity of its treatment of the lovers’ predicament. This appears when Florence, stretched out fearfully in the four-poster, glances up and notes a green stain on the fabric: “How had that got there?” she thinks to herself. The sight ties in with an earlier stain and looks forward to a possible later one. Is she too to be stained? She is reminded of being with her father in the cabin of his sailing boat: his rustles then are like those of her undressing husband now.

Ian McEwan is serious, but not solemn, in his unfolding of this predicament, and of surrounding disorders. The painful subject of Edward’s “brain-damaged” mother has its funny side. Marjorie has been struck by a railway carriage door thrown open by a disappearing toff, and been rendered more or less useless about the house. She fills an eternal scrapbook with cuttings, paints ineffectual watercolours, and is demurely self-deprecating about the meals cooked by her headmaster husband: “I do hope you enjoy this. It’s something new I wanted to try”. The house is a tip. “The accepted view locally – or this was all they ever heard – was that Mrs Mayhew was artistic, eccentric and charming, probably a genius.” Marjorie’s trouble is not obscured or belittled by the comedy it evokes.

The scene where, at their house in the country, Edward’s father lets him know, while he is still a boy, what his mother’s condition means is very persuasive. It may be more contingent than thematically compelled, but it has its place in the story. This is just how someone like that would, then and there, say something of the kind. Florence’s mother is an Oxford philosopher of the modern world, Iris Murdoch’s thin and thorny friend, who puts people right and goes to conferences. She too has a place in the story.

The composer of music in McEwan’s novel Amsterdam (1998) aims to create a pleasure at once “sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this non-language whose meanings were for ever just beyond reach, suspended tantalisingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused”. The composer’s florid creativity is itself beyond reach, uncertain; and in the final pages of the novel it is denied a triumph. And yet the ambition spoken of here is one that may possibly relate to the cultivation of uncertainty apparent in some of the earlier fictions. This new novel is not, in this sense, beyond reach, and the association between outrage and uncertainty, mystery and atrocity, noticeable in his novels and in many novels of the past, is also missing. This helps to portray it as a less romantic work than most of his others.

McEwan’s earlier fictions show a concern with much else besides outrage. He has written about sexual awakening and oddities, about second childhoods – reversions to a childish state – about lost children, and about partners estranged by crisis or bereavement. Old themes are sometimes traceable in the new book, but there is no sense of having been here before. On Chesil Beach achieves its overwhelming suspense without recourse to romantic fabulation, to mystery and imagination, or to brilliant tricks and turns. Those readers, however, who notice a difference between this book and some of McEwan’s earlier ones can hardly fail to see that it is richly preceded in them, and may feel that there is no need to talk of a regeneration, secured by a flight from romance. Such talk belongs to the history of McEwan’s engagement with the traditions of Romanticism, an engagement which has come and gone within his works, which has inspired him and which he can’t be due to desert. Meanwhile the new book is at least as good as any he has written.

Karl Miller's books include Electric Shepherd: A likeness of James Hogg, 2003, Dark Horses: An experience of literary journalism, 1998, and Boswell and Hyde, 1995.