After reading ‘Enduring Love’ many years ago, I was exposed to Ian McEwan whilst doing my English A-Level, rather than stumbling upon him on Amazon or in the back of a bookshop. I then later thumbed through a copy of ‘Atonement’ when the film adaptation took the box office by storm. In that moment I realised I would never choose to buy a McEwan book out of anything other than necessity, so when ‘On Chesil Beach’ cropped up on my reading list for my Creative Writing degree I groaned with dismay. Nearly a year later, I decided to revisit the book that caused me so much pain.
I asked myself if I was being unfair to dismiss McEwan so brashly? Perhaps I have only ever had dislike for his works because I was made to read them for the sake of my education, and never allowed to just simply read the books. Yes, I flicked through ‘Atonement’ briefly and did not find it to my liking, but I did not actually read it. Perhaps I might like it if I gave it a read? So having ‘On Chesil Beach’ at hand from my recent move, I thought I might be surprised to find I did not have such distaste for McEwans liteary style after all.
I have to tell you I was not. What should have been a simple story of how a married couple engage (or attempt to) in sexual intercourse on their wedding night is actually one of the most frustrating and pontificated novels I have ever read. How the man managed to fit so much waffle into what is practically in fact a novella nearly caused my copy to become kindling for Bonfire Night.
There is discourse, and there is discourse. The age old adage of show and not tell immediately springs to mind when considering the way in which McEwan reveals the inner workings of his characters. I learned more about medieval history reading ‘On Chesil Beach’ than I imagine I would do reading a text book, due to the fact that Edward (our sexually frustrated groom) is a bachelor in the subject. However, does this knowledge add to our understanding of Edward or his relationship with Florence (his bride)? No, in short. If anything this subtracts from the narrative as a whole. Whether or not it is skill of the author making us ask the questions ‘Will they? Won’t they?’ to lead us on, or just his only mechanism of getting us to the end of the book, is entirely frustrating in it’s own right.
However, the egotistic showcasing of knowledge that the reader must endure at the hands of McEwan is overwhelming. It was only slightly less garish than John Fowles quotes at the beginning to each chapter of his novel ‘The French Lieutenants Woman’, but at least the division was clear that each citation had little or nothing to do with the chapter that followed. An impressive and intimate knowledge of both history and classical music, yes, but the facts do not lend to the novel at all. I rather felt that McEwan was a peacock at a safari park, showing off his factual feathers, when I had in fact come to see the giraffes.
I do not know if it was the briefness of the book, the small glimpse that we get from inside the characters heads, that made me feel alienated from the lovers. However, I feel that even if the book had been doubled in length I would never warm to the characters. McEwans writing style gave me the feeling that someone had cut and pasted pages from the Encyclopaedia Britannica so that as I flicked a page I went from fiction to text book. The psychic distance was too much, and I just couldn’t feel a note of sympathy for either character by the time I had shut the book shut.
I feel slightly awkward speaking out against a man that has received such praise from the literary community, but that is just me. I feel that there was the potential for such a good story in there somewhere, but he got lost along the way. Perhaps if Jeanette Winterson or Stephen King had written the story it would have been something I would have enjoyed, but alas.
Perhaps I do not see whatever McEwans fans see, but I am not sure that I don’t wish to see it. I have resigned myself to my previous opinion that Ian McEwan is not the author for me.
3/10
Buy ‘On Chesil Beach’ in paperback
