No emotions or insight
RUDOLF SIMONE
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McEwan tries to follow in the footsteps of D.H. Lawrence but succeeds only partially.
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On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan, Doubleday, $22.
Highly acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan returns to a familiar theme in his latest novel, On Chesil Beach: lost virginity or the attempted loss thereof. Only McEwan has traded the raw and scathing comic outlook of his early short stories and novels for greater compassion and gravitas. The transition is only a partial success.
That the novel is about sex is clear from the opening sentence, “They were young, educated and both virgins”, but McEwan has set himself the demanding task of portraying sex’s most archetypal facet: the first fumbling and often unsuccessful encounter between two newlyweds.
Set in 1962 on the south coast of England, Edward and Florence check into a hotel suite to consummate their wedding. In an awkwardly comic opening scene the fault line that runs through the novel is ominously traced: Edward is teeming with excitement and anticipation at the thought that “the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity…” while Florence is engulfed by a “visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness”.
Social context of sex
This tender story of lovers whose silence and physical inadequacy comes to an abrupt anticlimax is interspersed with chapters that frame the main narrative within the social and familial context of the early 1960s, a time when being young was still a “social encumbrance”, class still mattered and sexual mores were still Victorian. But sex is never easy to talk about and the social and familial factors he half-heartedly identifies as responsible for the failure of their wedding night are little more than a laundry list of platitudes: “Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then on the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself”. The more insightful truth is that certain human emotions and interactions do not fundamentally change. Women today take the pill and men keep condoms in their wallet like spare change, but discussions about sexual intimacy are still pervaded by silence. We remain reticent to divulge the desires and fears of our body lest we lay ourselves bare, and McEwan deftly portrays those muted exchanges more destructive than words that cultivate misunderstanding and gnaw at one as they unthread a relationship.
Writings about sex and first love often fall within two camps. There are writers such as Bataille, Henry Miller and Jelinek who describe the sexual act and its perversions with striking poetic brutality and there are those such as Leopardi, Turgenev and Pamuk who convey first love with visceral tenderness. McEwan, following in the footsteps of D.H. Lawrence, attempts to stride these two camps, and his only partial success stems from a jarring dissonance between the prose-style and content of his story. The prose of a successful novel enhances its content, shapes its characters; Lawrence’s poetic and incantatory descriptions of the woods and seasons surrounding Wragby in Lady Chatterly’s Lover tell us as much about Conn
ie’s feelings as they do about her surroundings. McEwan, by contrast, fails from the beginning to make his story ours, to set in motion a reverberation that will allow the reader to empathise with the characters and their predicament.
Inappropriate style
The clinical and crudely descriptive prose that roped the reader into McEwan’s earlier comic and horrific stories loses much of its force when applied to a more sentimental story. The prose no longer has a striking or unsettling effect, but appears bland and perplexing. The reader is baffled as to why McEwan chooses to describe a vagina as “a naturally formed cavity”, sperm as “a self-made teaspoon, leaping clear of his body…” or a kiss as a tongue moving “to the place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had grown crooked until removed”. Modernity has taught us that images do not have to be beautiful to be moving, but the physicality of many of these descriptions fails to capture any emotion or produce any insight into the thoughts and feelings of the characters. The attempted coarseness of many passages fails as the sheer incongruity between image and content distracts the reader from the main thrust of the paragraph and leaves him strikingly aware of a writer at work.
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