Just Read: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

If there's one thing that distinguishes McEwan from all other English writers, it's his pessimism. No other writer of his era has so thoroughly assimilated that sophomore realization -- that we all will die, that everything ends -- and turned it into a model of a world. Though his last novel, Saturday, ended less unhappily than it could have, that's very much the exception for McEwan. In his worlds, everything ends badly, because that's what endings are. Endings are deaths, and deaths are never pleasant.

On Chesil Beach takes place essentially in one evening -- at dinnertime, and afterward, of the wedding day of two ordinary people, in an English sea-side town in 1962. Their tragedy is that the world is about to change around them, but it won't change in time to save them from themselves.

This is a book about sex. Not about triumphant, glorious sex, or sweet, loving sex, or even funny, awkward sex. It's about dreaded sex; the sex you think is going to happen, or fear might happen, or are sure will happen even though you'll do anything to stop it. Even more so, it's about what you think sex is, or will be, before you have any -- especially in a world where talking about sexuality at all is more than slightly naughty, and never done between the sexes. Florence and Edward know less about sex, and about each other, than they should, and they live in a time and a place when they simply can't tell each other what they need to say. They each have their own fears that they couldn't possibly explain, and, unfortunately, they are in a Ian McEwan novel, where the worst happens with clockwork regularity.

What most impressed me about On Chesil Beach was that aspect of communication. Writers have used the term "idiot plot" for years, to describe a story in which all the complications would disappear if only the characters would sit down and tell each other simple things. Miscommunication, or lack of communication, doesn't inherently create an idiot plot, of course: the traditional farce is based on characters who can't say the important things until the very last moment. But On Chesil Beach is something else; it's a book in which the barriers to speaking, the things this couple simply cannot say to each other, even after they're married, are a living, almost physical force in the novel. In another time, or another place, the story of Florence and Edward would not be a tragedy. But in Dorset, in 1962, it was, and had to be.

On Chesil Beach is an amazing achievement: a short book with all of the power and emotional force of a longer novel, a book that implies not only its own world of 1962, but all of the changes from that world to our own. This is what a major novelist can achieve at the height of his powers; it's simply brilliant.