On Chesil Beach

For me, writing has to be followed by reading aloud, Ian McEwan says in an interview included with this audiobook. His comment explains why his narration of this novella equals what the finest actors might accomplish. The story, however, is not McEwan at his best. Why this author, so adept at portraying the violence surrounding contemporary life, should draw us back to a nostalgic look at a doomed marriage in the early '60s, in which both the bride and groom were virgins, is a mystery in itself. But even here, there's a violent undercurrent. And even when he's not in top form, McEwan's writing draws in the listener. Shattered and dysfunctional as their lives may be, these are characters we care about. R.R. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 5, 2007
Not quite novel or novella, McEwan's masterful 13th work of fiction most resembles a five-part classical drama rendered in prose. It opens on the anxious Dorset Coast wedding suite dinner of Edward Mayhew and the former Florence Ponting, married in the summer of 1963 at 23 and 22 respectively; the looming dramatic crisis is the marriage's impending consummation, or lack of it. Edward is a rough-hewn but sweet student of history, son of an Oxfordshire primary school headmaster and a mother who was brain damaged in an accident when Edward was five. Florence, daughter of a businessman and (a rarity then) a female Oxford philosophy professor, is intense but warm and has founded a string quartet. Their fears about sex and their inability to discuss them form the story's center. At the book's midpoint, McEwan (Atonement
, etc.) goes into forensic detail about their naïve and disastrous efforts on the marriage bed, and the final chapter presents the couple's explosive postcoital confrontation on Chesil Beach. Staying very close to this marital trauma and the circumstances surrounding it (particularly class), McEwan's flawless omniscient narration has a curious (and not unpleasantly condescending) fable-like quality, as if an older self were simultaneously disavowing and affirming a younger. The story itself isn't arresting, but the narrator's journey through it is.