Review

"Cut to the Chaste"

June 3, 2007
by Sylvia Brownrigg

It is a truism that the sexual revolution changed everything dramatically: relations between men and women, the role and timing of marriage, and of course sexual behavior itself. If there can be no better medium, probably, than the novel for bringing that truism to life, making us understand its human dimensions, there can be no better candidate than Ian McEwan to write such a novel—making of it a small, perfect, haunting work of art.

It sounds so simple. In On Chesil Beach, his tenth novel, McEwan takes two virginal twenty-two-year-olds—Edward Mayhew, who has recently completed a degree in History, and Florence Ponting, a talented violinist—and observes them in painfully exquisite detail on their wedding night. Specifically, he watches them over long minutes during and after dinner, in their Dorset hotel room, as they inexorably approach the consummation of their marriage. Alternating between Edward’s perspective and Florence’s, McEwan draws a humane, touching, sometimes comic portrait of marital misunderstanding in an era when so much less was sayable, or said. The novel is set in 1962.

The worst and simplest truth of this union is that the meaning of the act which will complete the marriage is so profoundly different for these two sympathetic characters. For Edward, sexual intercourse is the great reward for months of patience and perseverance. McEwan describes Edward’s campaign in strategic terms: “Between Edward and Florence, nothing happened quickly. Important advances, permissions wordlessly granted to extend what he was allowed to see or caress, were attained only gradually… Sudden moves or radical suggestions on his part could undo months of good work.” [26] Because, as McEwan reminds us, this is still an era in which such matters are unbroachable in conversation, Edward can only guess, haplessly, the meanings of Florence’s gestures and disappointments, rerouting his approaches accordingly.

For Florence, whose sensibility McEwan captures with equal grace and economy (and humor), the act that she knows full well to expect this night fills her with distress and revulsion. Florence views intercourse with Edward as the price she must pay for having such a wonderful, intelligent lover, a man she adores—if not perhaps quite in the way she should. “She loved Edward, not with the hot, moist passion she had read about, but warmly, deeply, sometimes like a daughter, sometimes almost maternally.” [11] The incestuous undertone here has dark echoes throughout the novel’s short arc.

Such is McEwan’s empathy both with sexual impatience and sexual dread that it is possible to pity both Edward and Florence for their distinctive predicaments. There are occasional hints of an earlier traumatizing episode that may explain Florence’s peculiarly heightened fear of sexual congress, but McEwan is too discreet to give us any direct account of earlier abuse, leaving whatever is in Florence’s past obscure and shrouded, as it is shrouded in her own memory. Suffice it to say that her relationship with her father Geoffrey, a businessman whose successes funded Florence’s privileged Oxford upbringing, seems to contain elements of some discomfort.

Because this is a novel by Ian McEwan, a novelist who in earlier novels has, famously, written of dismemberment, murder, incest, obsession, and rape, a reader crouches internally for some time, awaiting some possible gothic element. When McEwan has employed the novella-length fiction before—in works like The Cement Garden or The Comfort of Strangers, once quippingly referred to as “nasty, British and short”—there has generally been a short concluding crescendo to something gruesome, something hidden, something shocking.

Only gradually does one accept that it is a gentler, more subtle McEwan at work here. In its reticence, On Chesil Beach marks an interesting departure for a writer who with every novel seems to deepen some aspect of his talent, to mine some new territory. (Atonement proved McEwan capable of richly textured historical fiction; Saturday of the most pleasing, nuanced observations of contemporary urban life.) Certainly in other works McEwan has shown a wry tenderness toward couples and their intimacies—even in The Innocent, before things turn violent, there are some wonderful descriptions of eager sexual awakening in a bitterly cold Berlin flat—but there is a distinctive sadness hovering on the edges of Florence and Edward’s story. Although McEwan frequently plays the chasm between Edward and Florence’s desires and experiences for comedy (there’s a very funny passage in which Edward focuses keenly on a mental image of prime minister Harold Macmillan to forestall premature ejaculation), the novel is not a farce, and as with any story that has so much in it of the failure of two people to communicate, there is finally a melancholy in the situation, which McEwan captures with lovely simplicity.

Along the way the novel is replete with other pleasures: keen observations of family dynamics, of 1950s English life, of the randomness of fortune. A moving, underplayed side story is that of Edward’s mother, who lives at home in a mentally compromised state whose contours only slowly emerge. If there is an occasional obtrusive note, it is perhaps that of the cool narrator who enters from time to time to place the habits and mores of Edward and Florence’s time in perspective. “This was not a good time in English cuisine…” [5] the narrator notes dryly early on, describing the couple’s dismal hotel dinner, though later we discover that in the Pontings’ well-heeled and progressive Oxford home Edward has been introduced to exotic food items such as zucchini, olives, “and, at breakfast, yogurt—a glamorous substance he knew only from a James Bond novel.” [142]

Some of this social metacommentary seems unnecessary, because McEwan gives us so much, so sparingly, within the perspectives of Florence and Edward themselves. (Also, that distant authorial voice can occasionally sound a trifle smug.) This paradox— so much conveyed, and yet so little said—is reflected in the narrative itself, the story of Edward and Florence’s awkward, anguished progress toward union. If only these two knew how to speak to one another, their marriage might have been so different! Later in that decade such conversations will, McEwan reminds us, become not just possible, but commonplace; until then, real human misunderstandings, like those captured brilliantly in On Chesil Beach, will leave their dark and painful marks.