No Sex on this Beach

Ian McEwan’s novel, On Chesil Beach begins in 1962, when Florence and Edward, a nice young couple get married.  Like many of their generation, they approached the altar, as the saying goes, chaste and pure, with Florence’s white dress perfectly justified.   Edward eagerly anticipates the long-dreamed-of conjugal bliss awaiting him as the couple eat their late dinner in their hotel room on Chesil beach.  The butterflies in Florence’s stomach, though, are not from nerves, or not the nerves one would expect.  She is not merely apprehensive about the approaching consummation but is positively dreading the act and the horrifying repetition of that act for years and years.  Although she loves her new husband, she is repulsed by too much physical contact; his kisses disgust her, and the thought of getting naked in front of him and actually touching…well…that…is almost more than she can bear.

McEwan begins the action slowly, teasing his readers with tiny, titillating details of the courtship and intimate glimpses at the couple’s thoughts.  During their first married meal, Edward thinks longingly of his moment of triumph, the culmination of his erotic desires, when he can finally take his beloved to bed.  He thinks of the time they met at a nuclear disarmament meeting.  He thinks of their early dates.  He fondly recalls their first kiss, the first time he touched Florence’s breasts (safely encased in bra, shirt, sweater), the first time he was allowed to see (but definitely not touch) those breasts.  In the meantime, Florence recalls the same episodes, but her anxiety about the physical aspect of their relationship overwhelms her memories.

After many pages of flashbacks, fondly recounted in both their memories, Florence, wishing simply to get it over with, suggests moving to the bedroom, and Edward is too happy to follow.  With the coldly clinical yet somehow pornographically disturbing words of a marriage manual singing maddeningly in her mind, Florence is determined to close her eyes and think of England.  Or something else equally quiet and pleasant–anything, in fact, other than the reality of such horrifying things as “mucous membranes” and “testicles.”  Gross.  Predictably, the grand First Time ends disastrously.  Edward, in his eagerness to elevate his experience to Romantic heights, had foregone his habitual masturbation for the week before the wedding.  He is thus overeager, and, we may infer from McEwan’s description, overfull, so he prematurely ejaculates all over his blushing bride, and her dress, and the bed.  She, horrified and disgusted, runs from the room.  The marriage is over before it had really begun.

The emotional core of the novel slips and slides around.  Most of the interior scenes take place in Edward’s head, though we do frequently see Florence’s thoughts as well.  As a result, Florence at first comes across as a frigid, imperious, and haughty person, more interested in her musical ambitions than in Edward.  Her domineering mother (an Oxford don) and her strangely ineffectual father live cold, distant lives in a cold, distant house.  On the other hand, Edward’s family is rough, dirty, troubled, much more human.  His mother has had brain damage for the past 18 years, and his father, the village schoolmaster, tries his best to keep the household minimally functional.  Their little cottage, in dramatic contrast to Florence’s family’s large house in town, is a cluttered, dirty, chaotic mess.  Edward seems the wrongly spurned man, the eager, passionate lover thwarted by the cold, narcissistic, haughty bitch-goddess.

But the operative word here is “seems.”  When we get to the emotionally torturous encounter the two have on the beach after the failed attempt at sex, we see Edward as a loud, harsh, critic, whose failure to understand his wife’s fears makes him at least as blameworthy if not more so.  When Florence begs him to consider some alternative to the usual sexual arrangements, some sort of open marriage, he flies into a disgusted rage, tossing Florence away from him.  Only later does he realize that her offer is really a plea for more time, a plea for understanding and compassion and not a morally depraved arrangement.  Florence’s apparent selfishness becomes a sort of selflessness while Edward’s righteous anger decays into self-righteous petulance.

The novel could be read as a comment on the crucial transition in Britain from the straight-laced postwar years to the freewheeling hedonism of the latter part of the decade that was ushered in by the Pill and the Beatles.  This is, though, oversimplifying a complex and deeply sad book.  The last portion of the novel delivers a sort of epilogue and eulogy to the marriage that never was.  We follow Edward as he jumps into the sixties scene in London, with brief, shadowy glimpses of his scattered and unfulfilling relationships.  We catch rumors of Florence’s musical career, and realize that she has directed all of her passion into her violin and her quartet.  Finally, by the end, Edward appears to be a small shadow of himself, a man approaching old age with nothing much to show for it and no great deeds or great love to warm his cooling heart.  Loss, sadness, failed connections, the very inability to forge emotional bonds haunts the novel.