Jump to content

Asexual character in new novel


Philip

Recommended Posts

'On Chesil Beach' the new novel by Ian McEwan tells the story of Edward and Florence, a young couple in their twenties, their wedding night in a hotel overlooking Chesil Beach in 1962 and their lives up to that night.

Chesil Beach is an 18 mile long shingle bank off the coast of Dorset in southern England. It consists of pebbles which originate from rocks dating from the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesil_Beach .

The book was reviewed in the Guardian on 31st March. See http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2046512,00.html.

Florence doesn't want to have sex with Edward and towards the end of the novel she tells him that she doesn't need sex like other people do, and doesn't like it.

The novel was serialised as the 'Book at Bedtime' on BBC Radio 4 two weeks ago. McEwan writes in beautiful lyrical prose. I have not read the book, but I certainly intend to.



2014 Mod Edit - For future reference:


Young love, old angst
Natasha Walter applauds Ian McEwan's subtle tale of a wedding night on the eve of the sexual revolution, On Chesil Beach

Natasha Walter
The Guardian, Saturday 31 March 2007


On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan
166pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99

When you first dip into the opening pages of Ian McEwan's new novel, you're likely to find it surprisingly low-key. Here is a quiet middle-class couple's wedding night in a Dorset hotel at the beginning of the 1960s, described in a style that is very leisurely for such a short novel. "The garden vegetation rose up, sensuous and tropical in its profusion, an effect heightened by the grey, soft light and a delicate mist drifting in from the sea, whose steady motion of advance and withdrawal made sounds of gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles."

This is McEwan's mature style, one we have come to recognise from Atonement and Saturday. It is a polished, civilised style, and very distant from the shock tactics of his early work. McEwan sets up this opening scene with great care, making 1962 feel as distant from us as the 40s did in Atonement, with allusions to everything from the poor cooking ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...") to the old-fashioned manners ("This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance ...") Yet despite this rather ponderous authorial interjection, as they sit there over their touchingly formal meal, with its melon and cherries, its roast beef and nasty wine, the virginal Florence and Edward quickly become alive for us. Soon we are propelled into a dance of "advance and withdrawal" within the room which echoes that outside the window, and which also has its intimations of "gentle thunder".

The sexual tensions on this wedding night are almost unbearable from the start, and gradually become absolutely disastrous. While Edward is only suffering first night nerves, Florence is suffering from something more, a "visceral dread". As Edward and she move gradually towards the bed, hardly anything is said, but the fluttering, nervous encounters of hand and mouth are intensely expressive. The problem is that they cannot achieve any communication; each of them misreads the other. "She was doing all she could to prevent a muscle in her leg from tightening, but it was happening without her ... she felt it was letting her down, giving the first indication of the extent of her problem. He surely felt the little storm ... he was impressed, even in awe, as he mistook her turmoil for eagerness."

These currents of excitement and dread are following such different directions that it is hardly surprising that by the end of the novel, which comes quite quickly, just a few hours and about 150 pages later, the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach has become the backdrop to solitude rather than communion. This plot may sound inconsequential - bad sex in English hotel shock! - but McEwan manages to give it almost tragic impact. This is partly because we come to sympathise so intensely with Florence and Edward's idealistic expectations of intimacy, in which sex becomes an "awesome experience that seemed as remote from daily life as a vision of religious ecstacy, or even death itself." It is partly also because their unique tragedy is deliberately linked to wider forces: "What stood in their way?" asks the narrator, "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself."

History itself ... Indeed, it is central to the novel that it takes place before 1963, when, as Philip Larkin told us, "sexual intercourse began". As McEwan shows, "they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible." Caught in this narrow moment between one sexual epoch, when traditional expectations might have carried them further than this one night, and the epoch about to unfold, when they might have talked through their problems with greater ease, Florence and Edward have little room to manoeuvre.

Part of the novel is taken up by flicking backwards through Florence and Edward's lives prior to their wedding night; their apparently ordinary, middle-class existences; her love of music, his love of history, their education and their families, and the meeting and growing intimacy that brought them to this point. In some ways these are unexciting lives, but both of them carry secrets which they cannot quite shrug off. While Edward's secret may seem at the outset the more difficult to cope with - his brain-damaged mother has for many years been incapable of looking after him and his siblings, and the family chooses not to refer to her disability, but to keep up a façade of normality - in fact he seems to have freed himself pretty successfully from the dragging encumbrance of that embarrassment.

Florence's family secrets are much less easily pinned down. Since this is a time in which sexual difficulties could not be referred to, McEwan never lays those secrets on the table. We have to follow their trail through glancing references and metaphors, and our desire to understand what her sense of shame stems from is never sated. While everything is going so horribly wrong for Florence's wedding night, something comes rising up from her childhood: "Here came the past, anyway, the indistinct past. It was the smell of the sea that summoned it. She was twelve years old, lying still like this, waiting, shivering in the narrow bunk with polished mahogany sides ... It was late in the evening, and her father was moving about the dim cramped cabin, undressing, like Edward now ... She was usually sick many times on the crossing, and of no use to her father as a sailor, and that surely was the source of her shame."

If there is another source of her shame, we realise that Florence will never be able to enunciate it. Whatever the "shameful secret locked in musty confinement" is, whose smell seems to erupt into the room later in the evening, it is not fully disclosed.

In many ways, Florence and Edward are the incarnation of an innocence, or an ignorance, that has died. That innocence is seen as political as well as sexual. They meet at a CND meeting in Oxford, and McEwan seems to suggest that anyone who was active in the peace movement then was naive - as he suggested about those who protest against war in our time in Saturday. "Florence knew in her heart that the Soviet Union, for all its mistakes - clumsiness, inefficiency, defensiveness surely, rather than evil design - was essentially a beneficial force in the world." This characterisation of peace activists as hopeless naifs stuck in my throat, but you cannot judge a novelist for his political views.

No, what matters is whether the novel works as fiction. And it does. Some of the prose in the passages away from the bedroom is more workaday than we have come to expect from McEwan, and lacks the panache of his recent work. The exploration of Florence's love of music, particularly, never quite flares into life. Yet within the bedroom this couple's hesitant attempts at intimacy are nuanced and delicately realised.

In these scenes we can wonder at how McEwan has matured from the writer who revelled in depicting chilly sexual games and sporadic violence into a writer who explores with grave candour the importance and impossibility of love. Despite the brevity and formality of this novel, McEwan brings Florence and Edward touchingly alive for us; and their seriousness, their idealism, and their desire for love draw us towards them. I have often heard readers say that they find it hard to sympathise with McEwan's recent characters - that they seem too much like vehicles for a clever plot and too little like living, breathing people. I disagree; and just as Bryony Tallis in Atonement and Henry Perowne in Saturday were coolly and carefully drawn, but still shuddered into imaginative life, so the elegant, polished construction of Florence and Edward does not detract from the emotional impact of their first night together.

Although it's impossible for a reviewer to tease apart the implications of that night without ruining the book for readers to come, I felt that the last passages of the novel suffered from their brevity. We are told, rather than shown, how Edward's life progressed, or regressed, after their stay on Chesil Beach. Yet it is possible to say this, that at the end of the novel McEwan still puts his faith in love and patience, whatever other experiences life may have had to offer as the 60s moved on. It is a curiously chastened view of the excitements of that decade, but it resonates in these chastened times.

· Natasha Walter's The New Feminism is published by Virago

Link to post
Share on other sites
Freed_Spirit

Cheers for the heads up - I'll keep an eye out for it.

Link to post
Share on other sites

posting to bring back the post...long story -- troll cleanup

Goonie -- admin

Link to post
Share on other sites

I was wondering if anyone else would mention this book. I'm not sure if Florence is asexual as there seems to be an indication to childhood sexual abuse, giving her a fear of sex, rather than just not being interested. But it is still a very good book, well worth reading.

Link to post
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...