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Friday 5 December 2008

Private faces are wiser and nicer

As an account of the individual psychology, On Chesil Beach proves strong. Edward’s frustration and rage after a particularly humiliating episode of ejaculatio praecox is absolutely convincing — historically convincing, too, since it wouldn’t occur in quite that way these days, and his responses are very much of their time. Plausible and touching, too, is Florence’s bearing of responsibility for the episode, and a painful sense of self- punishment. The novel plays, too, to McEwan’s strengths as a contriver of architecture by being jolly short. One of his problems as a novelist is the invention of a powerfully gripping initial episode which utterly fails to turn into anything resembling a donnée, in Henry James’s terms. The first chapters of The Child in Time and Enduring Love — the permanent loss of a child in a supermarket and a horrifying balloon accident — are powerful inventions. But critical ingenuity is required to attach them to what follows, respectively rather a routine sort of ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ whinge of the sort much admired in the 1980s and something about the nightmare of being followed around by a gay person.

On Chesil Beach sticks firmly to the single episode. It is tactfully disentangled from details of the participants’ previous lives — Florence’s culturally and financially confident background, Edward’s heartbreaking upbringing in a family with a brain-damaged mother. It makes its exchanges intricate, too, with psychological analysis, often very acute. Where it decidedly fails, however, is in the painful passages of ‘research’ in the most banal sense. It reminds one, as McEwan often does, that if one doesn’t actually know about a subject, research alone isn’t going to produce a convincing result.

I had a number of small problems with Atonement, for instance, and one large one. The small ones might be exemplified by references in it to a vase which, if real, would be not just a valuable object but one of the most famous items of decorative art in England. The large one was that I simply couldn’t imagine what sort of novelist its heroine was supposed to be; she sounded absolutely nothing like any woman novelist of the supposed period.

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