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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Private faces are wiser and nicer

That, thankfully, hasn’t transpired, but On Chesil Beach is a sequel nonetheless. Readers will recall that, at the climax of Saturday, a member of the underclasses forces his way into the Fitzrovia drawing- room of a brain surgeon where his threats of direct violence are headed off by the timely recitation of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. Some of McEwan’s readers, I would hazard from a number of ribald and unrespectful conversations, thought this somewhat implausible, or at any rate not a form of self-defence likely to be taught in municipal evening classes any time soon. Personally, I was more troubled by the fact that Arnold was present in the novel merely as someone who wrote about culture and anarchy, though, as it happened, not in that particular poem. The meaning of Dover Beach — the 19th-century abandonment of religious faith — seemed to have no real relationship with anything Saturday might be about.

That objection is the exact point from which On Chesil Beach begins. Just as Dover Beach concerns itself with the ‘melancholy long withdrawing roar’ of religious belief, and the doubt and freedom of a pair of lovers in its wake, so On Chesil Beach, set 100 years later, concerns itself with the loss of sexual restrictions ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.’ It is a neat implicit comparison. As it turns out, McEwan’s concern for his characters’ individual humanity and his interest in the larger historical movement end up being somewhat at odds; they refuse, in the end, to embody sociological analysis. Liberation, in this novel, happens somewhere else. But that can only be to the benefit of the humanity of this small but interesting novel. I like it much more than McEwan’s last six novels, at least.

A pair of newly-weds, Edward and Florence are having a nervous first-night dinner in a hotel in Dorset in 1962. Both are virgins, and having anxious thoughts about the prospect of sexual contact. Both have read something about what lies ahead; Florence is openly dreading it, but Edward thinks it mostly improbable. Through the stages of an absolutely disastrous sexual encounter and its traumatic consequences, their separate lives are explored. Florence is a violinist; Edward is fumbling about for a career after having graduated with a first in history from London university. The larger historical setting gets filtered through these characteristic lives — there is a good deal of talk about CND and ‘politicians like Gaitskell, Wilson, Crosland’. The real historical movement, however, is surely the sexual liberation which happened across the Western world in the course of the decade which, as it happens, proves painfully irrelevant to Edward and Florence’s wedding night.

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