required reading

"...photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression." Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

The cover of On Chesil Beach fairly perfectly represents the contents within. A pacific blue dominates the scene, with a beach to the foreground, and, in the middle distance, the figure of a woman. The moment is frozen; we don't know whether the woman is walking or running away, or about to turn. In the same way, On Chesil Beach examines discrete moments in the lives of Florence and Edward, who are "young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night... in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible". (Larkin famously quipped that "sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three" and McEwan seems to have taken him literally, setting his novella in 1962.)

There are five chapters in the book, each featuring a fairly static description of present or past. So the first chapter describes the honeymooning couple's meal in the bridal suite, the next reveals details about their adolescence, and the third then returns to the hotel room, and so on. The action barely moves, but the reader's understanding is deepened, sentence by sentence. And within the chapters, description is often like a set piece. In the following paragraph from early in the book, the description of the characters' feeling and of their motion of turning is quickly subsumed by the depiction of the garden, as if we see through a camera lens, panning over a scene before some action begins:

Desperate for the waiters to leave,he and Florence turned in their chairs to consider the view of a broad mossy lawn, and beyond, a tangle of flowering shrubs and trees clinging to a steep bank that descended to a lane that led to the beach. They could see the beginnings of a footpath, dropping by muddy steps, a way lined by weeds of extravagant size -- giant rhubarb and cabbages they looked like, with swollen stalks more than six feet tall, bending under the weight of dark, thick-veined leaves. The garden vegetation rose up, sensuous and tropical in its profusion, an effect heightened by the grey, soft light, and a delicate mist drifting in from the sea, whose steady motion of advance and withdrawal made sounds of gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles.

This paragraph exemplifies some of the trickiness of reading On Chesil Beach. It is difficult to accustom yourself to the voice of the narrator. On the previous page, he has jumped right into the story with an observation on a slice of melon topped with a glazed cherry: 'This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time.' Right before the passage quoted above, he interjects again with the comment that 'It would not have crossed Edward's mind to order a red.' The effect of this seems to me to be deliberate - that of making the reader into an awkward onlooker, an intruder into thoughts and events.

Another sticky aspect is point of view, and how it shifts and winds. In the passage above, Edward and Florence are 'desperate' to be alone, and they turn to consider the landscape. And so, we might think, the description ofthe landscape that follows must belong to Edward and Florence too. Certainly, the description of the 'swollen stalks more than six feet tall, bending under the weight of dark, thick-veined leaves' seems so overtly sexual to be almost ridiculous, and it seems almost certain that this is the view of the garden as seen by either Edward or Florence, in their preoccupation with sex. This in turn makes us reconsider the opening phrase: 'Desperate for the waiters to leave, he and Florence...', because, of course, the description of the garden can't occur in both of their minds, like some shared hallucination. Neither is the desperation shared. It is Edward's desperation, and Edward's erotic description, because, of course, Florence is not desperate for the waiters to leave, she is terrified of what will happen when they do. And here we see that Edward has taken Florence by the arm, and dragged her into his desires and feelings (do they really even both turn to look at the garden simultaneously?).

This kind of shiftiness continues throughout the novel, and it is obviously not a problem but a triumph. It gives the lie to reviews such as this one, by John Harding in the Daily Mail, who praises the book for being 'carefully crafted' yet suggests that it is 'thin material stretched to breaking point', or this in the New York Times, which engages with the story at the level of action and event only, claiming that it gives us 'no geniune psychological insights' into the characters. On Chesil Beach does appear at first to deal with the surfaces of things, in clipped and clear prose, but there is, for the careful reader, a fascinating kind of slipperiness underneath that will have me re-reading this book within a few weeks.

Other reviews:

Edward's End in the New York Times Sunday Book Review

Colm Toibin writing in London Review of Books

both of which acknowledge that 'the pleasures of reading' the book' are 'rather greater than knowing what happened in the end'.