In my admittedly narrow reading so far, I haven't encountered someone who can equal Ian McEwan's style. Some books can recapture the sense of wonder at the convolutions of human relationships, others can reproduce the phenomenon of universal sympathy for all parties of a protracted conflict, and few examine the problem of interpersonal communication as eloquently as he. But reading the best of McEwan is like partaking in a slowly unraveling miracle, a wonder of pattern. He weaves emotions and ideas linguistically and clearly, and when I read his work, I get the feeling that I really sincerely know what he is talking about. Sometimes he induces a sort of eerie déjà-vu, making me understand the intricacies of situations I have yet to experience myself. This inducing of sympathy towards an experience grasped only theoretically and not personally - that is a rare gift indeed.
His most powerful ability, I think, is to humanise every aspect of a central conflict. His best works show that very human misunderstandings, preconceptions and prohibitions interact to deepen a conflict. Society plays a big role in circumscribing the limits of acceptable interactions for his characters; it comes to the point where they are locked on an inevitable collision course by politeness and sociability, even though a radical departure from accepted practice could save the characters a lot of guilt and anguish. Thus the actions of individuals, be they well- or ill-intentioned, compounded by and interpreted in the social context, give rise to catastrophic results that no one could have foreseen.
External social conventions, therefore, play a central role in catalysing human conflicts, but that is not to say that the characters are absolved, in the postmodern sense, of responsibility for their actions. McEwan uses the characters' intentions to reveal their culpability. On Chesil Beach's Edward and Florence thus bear echoes of Atonement's Briony and Robbie; both pairs have moments when they are vengeful, and both have moments when they try to reach out to each other. Both pairs' most passionate intentions are never immune from the miscarriage brought on by the alchemical properties of the societies they live in.
But they are spared condemnation, because McEwan is careful to show the basis of their intentions. They may be susceptible to folly and impulse, or they may fall prey to a cold, logical desire to inflict an almost surgical harm on another, but at no point does McEwan allow the reader to develop the sense that his characters are acting out of a core of evil. The sometimes disturbing, and always redeeming, thing is that the reader can see himself plausibly doing the exact same things in their shoes, given their exact circumstances; and in this way McEwan harnesses the reader's own guilty conscience to redeem his characters.
In this way, therefore, McEwan manages to exquisitely immunise his characters against too-harsh blame. We hold them responsible for their mistakes and actions, but it's not a personal thing; their humanity is culpable, through no fault of their own. And this is the very sympathetic view of humanity that, so far, I have only seen McEwan carry off successfully, and not only creditably, but excellently.
In On Chesil Beach as in Atonement, the central problem revolves around an inability to express oneself. While in Atonement, this communication failure resided ironically in an aspiring writer, this failure in On Chesil Beach resides equally poignantly though, perhaps, less ironically (though this is a comparison taken in the view of prevailing social attitudes towards marriage) between a pair of newlyweds. The couple is cloistered, no, positively chained in the niceties of social norms in the dying years of the '60s, and Edward can't articulate his repressed violent and sensual nature to his chosen, while Florence is equally devoid of the necessary words to express a pathological revulsion towards sex. In the first parts of the book, we see the couple in their honeymoon suite, sitting down to dinner with the air thickening with tension, as Edward's eagerness to consummate the union is contrasted with Florence's mounting terror at the ordeal to come. This is contrasted in turn with flashbacks to their past, in which we see them growing closer in the natural fashion, going out for walks, tentative intimacy, shadows of reticence on Florence's part notwithstanding. But what strikes me is that their closeness is assumed to be natural by both parties, and is not really confirmed unambiguously by them, either verbally or physically. They take it for granted that they should be close, drawing from the conventions of society, and thus they do not disturb this socially-sanctioned serenity, even though both have issues that the other should know about. Their drifting along the conventional path brought them to the final impasse in the Chesil Beach hotel that they are honeymooning in.
As the night draws inexorably onward to the socially mandated consummation, Florence tries to take charge of the situation to abate her fears. But the only way her habits and her conscience would allow her to do so is to lead Edward towards the bed, thereby trading her security for a brief temporary respite. This perverse trade, in which she wins some breathing room for herself in the hopes that some miraculous change of heart would spawn in her before she had no more ground to give, is predictably misinterpreted by Edward as sensuous eagerness. And when the time comes, she also predictably flees from the act, unable to control a revulsion that is not her own fault, in such a way as to assure the reader that her fleeing was also fundamentally not her own fault.
In the wake of this, their exchange on the beach is an extension in a night of miscommunications. Florence tries to explain herself to Edward, but though he tries hard to remember his love for her, his humiliation and anger prove too powerful. Her anger at Edward is also juxtaposed with her continued love for him and her impression that she had failed him, cheated him in some way by running from the bed. In the light of this, her anger at Edward, the hurtful things she says, are transformed into a form of self-punishment. And in both cases, their anger at each other is somehow beyond themselves, drawn from social expectations unfulfilled. In this most personal moment of truth, one gets the impression that their complaints are not fundamentally personal; they are seemingly just products of psychologies befuddled and bewildered in the wake of an incomprehensible turn of events. Their combativeness is thus a form of self-defenec against confusion; they have their cozy and secure social model demolished from under their feet and, reeling from the shock, they inexorably, inevitably turn against each other despite their sincerely held regard for each other, like two large, lumbering ships locked into a collision course.
Out of all this, one gets a deep sense of waste. Edward certainly realises this in the closing pages of the book, when, in his old age, he acknowledges what he lost, all too easily, on Chesil Beach all those years ago. If they had met a few years later, when attitudes were changing in Britain, perhaps they could have articulated themselves to each other more freely and comfortably, thereby avoiding their awkwardness. Or, all it would have taken, McEwan reveals, was a stab of sympathy, a shout after Florence's retreating form along the shingle, and he would have been able to call her back. But because Edward's and Florence's respective viewpoints are necessarily restricted to their own thoughts by their inabilities in communication, they miss this pivotal moment, in which they both want to stay together, but neither can conceive that the other is feeling the same way. It is tragic, really, the way that they slip away from each other. Granted, their love may have been too immature in that they did not explore it very carefully or sensitively before committing to each other, but if you accept that any love is better than no love at all, then their relationship was worth saving on that basis alone.
I know that I should substantiate the points above in the usual literary fashion, with quotes and commentary. But I am too taken by the moment to indulge in rigour and convention. Certainly if I ever get to do literary criticism again, I would take another look at this book. It has been a very good and impactful read. Here, though, are some quotes that have been especially incisive on first reading:
"A month ago they had told each other they were in love, and that was both a thrill and afterwards, for her, a cause of one night of half waking, of vague dread that she had been impetuous and let go of something important, given something away that was not really hers to give. But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper."
"And what stood in their way? Their personalities and 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."
"...she suddenly thought she understood their problem: they were too polite, too constrained, too timorous, they wern around each other on tiptoes, murmuring, whispering, deferring, agreeing. They barely knew each other, and never could because of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences and blinded them as much as it bound them."
It is very rare that I have the good fortune of reading a book that portrays love so humanely. Not many authors would examine carefully what it means to be in love, what are the very human caveats and exceptions that make idealised love impossible, and what we should accept as an adequate facsimile. And lately I've been looking for someone to provide a new language that can be used to describe such a crucial feeling in individual terms, in terms that do not resort to oft-repeated formulations, conventional interpretations, or socially safe platitudes that not only do not fit the individual situation adequately, but also do not do it justice. What I was looking for was a language that was worthy of describing and communicating love in all its intricacy and uniqueness, that brought out its individual imperfections and made them part of the glorious and beautiful pattern of the experience as a whole, rather than typecasting them as anomalies to be worked out of a socially accepted framework. Most authors fail at this; love in their books may be cute and pleasant, but strike me as somehow wistful, and false. Some authors come close; Murakami especially presents strange and interesting romantic situations, but he too gives in to socially conventional devices and vocabulary in the end. Only very few remarkable writers seem to provide what I am looking for.
In the last pages of On Chesil Beach, McEwan writes a review for the quartet that Florence dedicated herself to after leaving Edward. "Then came a searingly expressive Adagio of comsummate beauty and spiritual power," McEwan writes. "Miss Ponting, in the lilting tenderness of her tone and the lyrical delicacy of her phrasing, played, if I may put it this way, like a woman in love, not only with Mozart, or with music, but with life itself." With a few obvious variations, I could say the same for this book as well. And it is somehow fitting that McEwan himself puts it better than I can.
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