The magus of Fitzrovia

7 April 2007

In the novel, Edward is already entranced by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and first meets Florence at a CND meeting in Oxford. They have premonitions of what is to come, the tremors beneath their feet. But, as with Larkin, the transformation does not come quite in time for their wedding night.

‘And what stood in their way?’ McEwan writes. ‘Their personalities and their pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all.’

The novelist, who is 58, has the sparkling eyes, gentle manner and easy smile of a compact magus. Remembering this line from the book, he chuckles over his duck starter: ‘It is meant to be a little joke. They can just tower over you and trap you, all those things, and yet somehow we do keep clear in our head a very powerful fiction of free will. The first few notes I wrote for this novel were all about the tone of the narration and the words were something like “forgiving” and “a little wry”. I wanted somebody who has already seen it, seen the whole story to its end and has forgiven everyone. It was no one’s fault. Edward and Florence are of their time, and they are not armed for getting themselves out of this mess.’

As the sexual débâcle unfolds, and Florence dashes out on to the elemental stretch of shingle, some of the first readers of the novel have anticipated an outburst of savagery — the literary terrors associated with McEwan’s early short stories and novellas. ‘A lot of people did say they expected Edward to pick up a rock and dash her head off with it, which would have been rather crass,’ he says, a little ruefully.

If anything, however, the repression of the primal as the lovers confront one another is more unsettling than its violent release would have been. We learn that Edward, the upright, bookish son of a schoolmaster, has previously discovered ‘a spontaneous, decisive self’ in fist-fighting. Florence’s horror of sex, meanwhile, has roots much darker than mere social conformity — abuse by her father, hinted at by McEwan but never spelt out, and all the more troubling for that. ‘There was another element,’ he writes, ‘far worse in its way and quite beyond her control, summoning memories she had long ago decided were not really hers.’