A mousetrap of a sexual thriller

ON CHESIL BEACH
By Ian McEwan
John Cape London, 166 pages
Available at Powerbooks

With On Chesil Beach, his 11th novel, Ian
McEwan can be considered the modern
British equivalent of Henry James, maybe
with a dash of gonzo filmmaker Ken Russell thrown in for good measure.

His biggest subject seems to be emotional hurt, and how small actions can reverberate through entire lives. While his novels have grown more somber, less sexually audacious than the early days of The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers, they are now more concerned with the delicacy of emotions and the play of manners in British society, marking him as a modern Jamesian.

On Chesil Beach is not as topical (and ultimately unsatisfying) as Saturday, McEwan’s last novel about a family facing a crisis in post-9/11 London days; and it’s not as grand as Atonement, considered a masterwork by many (though not by family members of a deceased female writer whose life they accused McEwan of plagiarizing).

Rather, this slim novel focuses on Florence and Edward, a young couple spending their nervous honeymoon at a seaside hotel on Chesil Beach, Dorset. Every detail of their tension and awkward attempts at (and fear of) intimacy is carefully noted by McEwan, who is a master at exploring human discomfort.  Though in his shorter novels, the British author does display a bit more compassion, it seems.

It is 1962. Florence and Edward are only eight hours married. And, as it turns out, the Oxford-trained pair are both virgins.

This may not seem like much, but it’s enough to set off a powder keg, as readers of McEwan’s work know. Neither Florence nor Edward possesses yet the language of sexual matters, let alone appetites — their own, or one another’s. And so they are trapped, for a time, in a limbo of confused questions, awkward pauses, fumbling and fear.

The brief pages flit back and forth, between their courtship and early love. We learn the two are dissimilar in class (Florence’s family are distinguished and rich; Edward’s father struggles with a mentally-ill spouse and a house full of kids), and in personality. But this doesn’t present a fatal block to their love.

As in much of McEwan’s world, sexuality is the dynamite that rips everything apart.

How simple it was: here was a boundless sexual freedom, theirs for the taking, even blessed by the vicar — with my body I thee worship — a dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they could weightlessly drift upwards in a powerful embrace and have each other, drown each other in waves of breathless, mindless ecstasy. It was so simple! Why weren’t they up there now, instead of sitting here, bottled up by all the things they did not know how to say or dared not do?

This is the bottled-up Edward pondering things, obviously. Florence’s perspective is much the opposite. Why not simply love, enjoying one another’s company for life? Why the sexual prerogative? Finally, she just grits her teeth and tries to soldier on, and it says a lot about the lack of communication and the self-obliteration common to that era.

She was going to get through this. She would never let him know what a struggle it was, what it cost her, to appear calm.

As in much of McEwan’s writing, the reader is invited to play an ironic game: consider the actions of a bygone era through our modern (or postmodern) eyes. Sometimes, he injects his third-person omniscience (“Being childlike was not yet honourable, or in fashion.”); other times, we are simply baffled by the couple’s sad fumbling. It’s actually painful. You want to introduce them to a good sex therapist by page 106.

McEwan has some things to say about young liberals in the early ‘60s, their first tentative confrontation with post-war fossils, the parents and politicians running things. It’s ironically juxtaposed against the much more liberal, if misguided, late ‘60s era, and perhaps our own times as well. There is a bit about history, and whether great men can alter it or not.

And there is some delicious business involving a single stray body hair that nearly provides the key to unlock their sexual awakening. You can almost sense the author’s wicked glee as he skillfully plays up this moment.

But suspense, too, is McEwan’s secret skill. He can make you wonder whether someone will discover the family members buried in the basement in The Cement Garden; he can have you worrying about the chopped-up body in a man’s suitcase in The Innocent. And he’ll have you guessing whether Robbie lived or died at Dunkirk in Atonement.

There is a perverse pleasure in reading On Chesil Beach, like waiting for a mousetrap to snap shut. But this is given needed emotional depth by the final moving pages. Like Atonement, but on a much smaller scale, McEwan’s house of pain has lifelong repercussions.