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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.” [Read more...]