On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.02 You Save: $10.98 (78%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of On Chesil Beach
Book Review: Bittersweet, heavy on the bitter
Summary: 4 Stars
On Chesil Beach is such an intimate look at one couple, married during the early 60s. I was continually impressed by McEwan's insights and how perfectly developed these two characters were. Florence and Edward are thrilled to begin their married life together, to be no longer seen as young and incomplete members of society. Florence, however, has a paralyzing anxiety about physical contact with her husband, something she has kept from him, dreading the moment that would consummate their marriage.
I loved the combined narratives in this novel. We are given glimpses into not only the wedding night, but also their courtship and their futures. The narration shifts focus from Florence to Edward so we are given both sides to the story. I really thought that this book was heartbreaking and honest, beautiful and quiet.
If I had one complaint, it is that the last chapter of the novel that explores life after that wedding night is almost exclusively about Edward. When the rest of the book had been so balanced, I was disappointed with the lack of information about Florence we received. Overall, I'm impressed with McEwan's attention to detail, especially the sensitivity he employed when portraying Florence. I'm so glad I finally picked this one up. It might be one of my favorite reads of 2010 and one that I see myself rereading again soon.
Book Review: Brilliant writing on the cusp of the 1960's sexual revolution,
Summary: 4 Stars
On the surface this is an account of a couple's first night of their honeymoon. McEwan brilliantly evokes the period, 1962, from the dinner in their honeymoon suite served by two Dorset young boys to the tensions building up to their first sexual emcounter. Edward and Florence both have very differnet reasons for being apprehensive and not surprisingly it is a ...! McEwan, elaborates on the background to their relationship whilst continuing the narrative in the present. Ths short novel was beautifully paced and voiced but I was left feeling that all too often writers choose difficult and negative subject matter, much like in McEwan's Saturday and most notably in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and it would be refreshing if these gifted writers wrote on something with more humour and joie de vivre. Nevertheless, the reader does get a wondreful perspective of the the conservative sexual repression which was still very much the norm on the cusp of the sexually liberating attitudes which had taken over ten years later.Book Review: Don't Let Your Hubris Be Your Hamartia
Summary: 4 Stars
This book says: Your life can change in one moment. One bad decision, one hour of inflated pride or of deflated self-confidence, and your way may be lost, your course derailed, and you may not be smart enough or brave enough to fix it when you should.
This book is poetic, brief, heart-wrenching. You will read it overnight.
McEwan's seamless movement through time - taking you from Point A (a second-by-millisecond play-by-play of the couples first and foiled attempt at making love) to Point B (a condensed reflection on the monotony of their regular and separate lives, two decades later) - accentuates the way memories of some painful, scary, awkward, unprecedented seconds (spent trying to navigate romance, sex, and love) last a lifetime, while the memories of the years between such episodes (spent naviating the more predictable terrain of career changes, aging, and self-improvement) blur together and dissolve, lose their shape and form, are boiled down into resumes instead of love letters.
This book says: Don't let pride, fear, or practicality ruin your shot at true love. Just. Don't. Do. It.
Book Review: Emotional Pornography
Summary: 2 Stars
Given that the stock of real Victorian novels is as limited as petroleum reserves, and that many avid novel readers have already exhausted it, it's no wonder that Ian McEwan is popular. "On Chesil Beach" is fundamentally a Victorian novel, and not just because the leading lady in it, Florence, is burdened with Victorian sensibilities, but also because the author passes just the kind of moral judgement on his own characters that George Eliot might have passed. Oh, mention is made of pubic hair and engorged penises, but it's still an archaic structure of a novel. Imagine all the "implicit" sexuality of a novel by Austen or Trollope, make it explicit on a bed with silk sheets, and you have Ian McEwan. Genteel voyeurism, ladies and gents!
The story told by "On Chesil Beach" is of a couple on their wedding night, with ample flashbacks to their earlier lives and courtship. They're both virgins. She is preposterously repressed. Intercourse fails, they flee from each other, and neither ever recovers from the trauma. The central bedroom catastrophe might have made a decent short story, but the flashbacks are mere back-fill, and the final chapter, rushing through the next forty years of the characters' lives, is schematic, smug, and dull.
Book Review: Engaging
Summary: 5 Stars
Ian McEwan has a brilliant mind, capable of illustrating wonderfully those intangible emotions of the individual. Somehow he makes it all tangible... this book captures.
It is a little succinct powerhouse.