Writers have long been content to generate such insights on their own—somebody without the aid of a brain scanner came up with “revenge is sweet”—but McEwan is wary of relying too much on intuition. He has what he calls an “Augustan spirit,” one nourished equally by the poems of Philip Larkin and by the papers in Nature. Indeed, he told me that his 1997 novel, “Enduring Love,” in which a relentlessly rational man defeats a relentlessly irrational stalker, was conceived as a reply to the “unexamined Romantic assumption that still lingers in the contemporary novel, which is that intuition is good and reason bad.” Barraclough, Leo (31 October 2016). "Lionsgate Acquires U.K. Rights to 'Churchill', starring Brian Cox". Variety. Penske Business Media . Retrieved 1 November 2016. On Chesil Beach is a 2017 British drama film directed by Dominic Cooke (in his feature directorial debut) and written by Ian McEwan, who adapted his own 2007 Booker Prize-nominated novella of the same name. It stars Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle and tells the story of virgins, Florence and Edward, and their first disastrous attempt at having sex on their wedding night. The initial experience and their differing responses to the failure have lifelong consequences for both. There was however a dissonance. It seemed to me almost until the end that McEwan had been leaving a trail of word crumbs that would take us to a revealing monstrosity that would however explain the tragedy. But these were lost or dispersed by the waves or the wind in Chesil beach. Successful in large part, the book nevertheless falls short of its larger ambitions, as McEwan chose a middle-ground that isn't entirely satisfying.

On Chesil Beach Summary | GradeSaver On Chesil Beach Summary | GradeSaver

McEwan offsets the hopeless inability of the characters to communicate with each other with the splendid flow of his writing. For if the words that ought to have been said in the story falter, and those that should have been buried in silence explode, the reader is left with McEwan’s language. This novel is set with crafted, contrasting, balanced, nuanced, full-bodied, sweet and sharp words that evoke the completeness of chamber music. For music is always in McEwan’s writing. This deceptively light novella describes the events of Florence and Edward’s disastrous honeymoon night in 1962, interspersed with details of their childhoods and courtship to suggest how those influenced what happened. In the mid-seventies, McEwan fell in love with Penny Allen, whom he had met at East Anglia. She was divorced and had two daughters, Polly and Alice. James Grant, a philosopher who was friends with them both, describes Allen as “quite prominent in the feminist movement” and an “intelligent student of literature. She would read his stuff and talk seriously about it.” Allen admired the poet Adrienne Rich. McEwan’s epigraph to “The Comfort of Strangers” quotes Rich’s verse: “How we dwelt in two worlds / the daughters and the mothers / in the kingdom of the sons.” Martin Amis said that McEwan was attracted to Allen’s ideological stance: “Ian was saying things in the mid-seventies like the immediate future of the novel was to deal with the emancipation of women.” Allen wrote fiction herself, but she did not find success. She was also fascinated with astrology and spirituality, and eventually began teaching a class called “Meditation, Healing, Astrology, and Creativity.” A) small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses none of those earlier books’ emotional wisdom, narrative scope or lovely specificity of detail. (…) (H)e’s given us a smarmy portrait of two incomprehensible and unlikable people." - Michiko Kautani, The New York Times Music is often important in McEwan's works. Florence and Edward's musical tastes are fundamentally incompatible (though they try), yet for Florence music is her “path to pleasure”, rather than physical intimacy.

In this confined living room, Edward and his wife, Florence, dine alone on the first floor of this Georgian-style Dorset inn. After the St Mary's Church ceremony in Oxford and the festive reception, the young couple offers a wedding night. What could be more beautiful and romantic than this suite in this inn, in front of the open French window, overlooking the Chesil beach with its pebbles as far as the eye can see? But, then, the four-poster bed and its pure white quilt are in the next room. This bed on which they would lie and the fruit of their first antics. But, each side dreads this moment and worries about what should happen now that the wedding had celebrated. On Chesil Beach, however, is full of odd echoes and has elements of folk tale, which make the pleasures of reading it rather greater than the joys of knowing what happened in the end. (…) The style of the book may seem plain: there is no recourse to the use of cadence for effect, and there are no elaborate sentences or pyrotechnics of any sort. We are, after all, in England, where words mean what they say. So numerous are the images of stability and continuity in these years of peace and prosperity, that the reader takes them for granted. The sheer skill in holding tone, and playing with it, is hidden much of the time. The novel is a pure comedy, but it is told from the point of view of the two protagonists who do not think it is funny at all, and this is managed without making either of them seem tedious." - Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books As for Florence, being a late bloomer is hardly explanation enough for her pathological feelings about sex. The dramatic views of Chesil Beach are perfect, avoiding the cliché of extreme weather, but having a vaguely brooding heaviness. You hear the crunch of the pebbles, underfoot, and as waves wash up and percolate down. The lagoon behind is still and silent. Florence and Edward are the only people in sight.

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On Chesil Beach centres around the wedding night of Edward and Florence, and McEwan gets right to the point in his opening line:

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It's not nostalgic, but he is trying to capture an era and he's very explicit about it, constantly reminding the reader of this different time (down to noting that: "This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine" when discussing their meal). Finally, the time arrives to consummate the marriage. However, it is rather short-lived as Florence accidentally overstimulates Edward, causing him to ejaculate all over her body before they even have sex. This disgusts Florence on many levels, and she storms out. Edward goes after Florence to discuss what has happened and they have a heated argument. By the end of it, Florence has made it clear that she has no interest in ever having sex. It's not just the sexual mores and understanding that he wants to highlight, either: it's also very much a novel about family circumstances, opportunities, and, ultimately, class.

ON CHESIL BEACH | Kirkus Reviews ON CHESIL BEACH | Kirkus Reviews

On Chesil Beach is a period-piece, McEwan focussing very hard on that time before the so-called sexual-revolution. For the reader, the ending of On Chesil Beach comes too soon. Its devastating concluding passage, in which we glimpse the future that flows from the events of the honeymoon night, feels almost like the sketch of a larger novel of which this is merely the first section. Still, the experience of finishing a novel with regret is not so frequent that one should complain of it. Better to say with gratitude that McEwan’s latest fiction is full of richness: of serious thought about the nature of love and human relationships, informed by a poetic sensibility and expressed in prose whose lyricism never errs on the side of self-indulgence." - Jane Shilling, The Times You’re so wrong about this!” Raine said. “At first, I felt exactly the same thing. Then I read it again and realized how it all fitted together.” Florence's relationship with her father was still subtle (so much so, my husband, who hasn't read the book, was oblivious to its likely significance).From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means - music, literature, friends, sex, politics and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past? There is plenty of see-sawing in the book: the ebb and flow of the sea on the stones of Chesil Beach; of desire; of who to blame for what goes wrong (both in the minds of the characters and the readers); and Florence’s feelings about her father, and whether or not she thinks there is something wrong with Edward or herself.

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Evidently, Rose and David McEwan had begun an affair while Ernest Wort was fighting in North Africa. * She became pregnant, and in December, 1942, they placed an ad in the Reading Mercury: “Wanted, Home for Baby Boy, age 1 month; complete surrender.” Two weeks later, Rose and her sister stood on the platform of the Reading train station, and handed the baby off to the first couple that had answered the ad. Afterward, she could not offer her sister an explanation for her act; “I just had to,” she repeated. McEwan’s father may well have demanded that Rose give up the child. The British Army would likely have dismissed him for committing adultery with another soldier’s wife. They are more or less in love and they are getting married because it’s what you do. “This was still the era…when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.” The narrative is then taken over by Edward, who describes the following decades of his life. A year after the annulment, he finds himself mulling over Florence’s proposal and realizes that it no longer angers him. Still, he is reluctant to reunite with Florence. He explores relationships with other women, even marrying for a brief while, but admits that he never did love anyone as much as he did Florence. McEwan describes that wedding night in painful, exacting detail, from the meal they have in their room all the way through to the bitter end on the beach. As McEwan has grown more outspoken in his rationalism, his books have become fully anchored in old-fashioned realism. “It’s enough to try and make some plausible version of what we’ve got, rather than have characters sprout wings and fly out the window,” he says. His few gestures toward the postmodern have been gingerly. Although “Atonement” ultimately makes the reader uncomfortably aware of its status as fiction, McEwan achieves the effect in a manner often associated with Hollywood thrillers. The fact that Robbie’s story is a romantic fantasy invented by Briony, the person who betrayed him, is presented as a twist ending.

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A major theme is destiny, which is perhaps the converse of missed opportunities. “They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny”, yet it was a belief in destiny that prompted Florence to form her quartet, and Florence and Edward inferred the hand of destiny in the extreme improbability of their meeting, plus Edward wants to study and write about how powerful individuals can change destiny.