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by Ian McEwan
reviewed by John Murphy
Ian McEwan has built his reputation on elegant sentences describing horrific events: the abduction of a child, an out-of-control air balloon, an imagined rape, a break-in. In novels like Enduring Love, Atonement, and Saturday, these are personal calamities, domestic disasters, that burst lava-like from the dormancy of dailiness. On Chesil Beach seems at first like McEwan mellowing into a moderated naturalism, but soon there is no doubt that his version of a Wedding Night Gone Wrong belongs in his bulging file labeled “Humanity as Horrorshow.”
Pregnancies aside, can the course of a person’s life be altered by one premature ejaculation? That is the essential premise of On Chesil Beach. It is a lean little book that examines the nuptial night of a pair of twenty-two year olds in the early sixties. For this young English couple, the “little death” might instead refer to embarrassment, a fate actually worse than death to some Englishmen.
Marriage is supposed to make two bodies one flesh, one spirit; McEwan revels in undermining such a sacramental ideal with his irony. A devout atheist, McEwan thinks of writing like a surgical procedure (the metaphor is obvious in Saturday, featuring a neurosurgeon non-believer uncannily like McEwan); if he digs deep enough with his scalpel then motives and meaning reveal themselves as little more than synaptic firings.
McEwan’s uses subjectivity to underscore the unbridgeable distance between these two tense, inexperienced selves. We are in the groom’s mind for a few paragraphs (he is excited to have sex) and then the bride’s (she has a ‘visceral dread’ of sex), and each person’s thoughts contradict the other’s. Love should have bridged the gap, but self-giving love was not the nature of this consummation — each wanted something from the other, and the rift results from humiliation and dashed expectations. This, however, is not McEwan’s point, so much as it can be gleaned from the short narrative. The message seems to be to upend conventional (and certainly theological) wisdom. It might be summarized thusly, “Waiting to have sex until you are married could ruin your life.” McEwan is a fine writer, but the “climax” of his short novel leaves much to be desired.
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