On Chesil Beach (Iain McEwan)****

I hated Atonement so much, I was reluctant to give Ian McEwan another go. But he’s my boyfriend’s very favourite writer in the whole world (except me) so he told me I had to try On Chesil Beach because I’d love it. I was quite annoyed when he turns out to be right but at least it meant I didn’t have to suffer like I did with Atonement.

One of the things I hated about Atonement was that Ian McEwan copied bits from other sources. I don’t know if he’s done the same thing in On Chesil Beach or not but in a way I don’t want to know. I really enjoyed it and it will spoil it a bit if it turned out not to be an original work of fiction.

It certainly seemed original. It’s set in the fifties. Florence and Edward are on honeymoon. It’s their wedding night and they’re both virgins so they don’t know what to expect. Edward can’t wait (typical man) but Florence is a bit freaked out by the whole idea of it. It starts off with them eating their first meal alone as a married couple, then they go into the bedroom. Then we start seeing a series of flashbacks. We hear about the first time they encountered one another and the time when they finally met (these are not the same thing). We see how their relationship progressed from there and a bit about their contrasting home lives. We discover Florence went to music college to study the violin and Edward went to university and got into brawls.

The parts of the book set in the present (the wedding night) are told in chronological order but the rest is told in quite a random way. However it is very effective. The more you read, the more you unravel, the more things start to make sense. It’s only annoying when McEwan has left you at a very exciting point and then he goes off and talks about something else instead. But a lot of good authors do that.

Edward is a bit of a strange character. He turns out to be a very different character from how he seemed at the beginning of the book. He’s very polite and slightly reserved towards Florence so I thought he was quite a gentle sort of person. Then it turns out he likes getting into fights. Edward as a character is full of surprises but McEwan doesn’t reveal Edward’s character in an unrealistic way. I had no trouble believing he really was as he was being described. I wasn’t sure I liked him but I did find him very interesting.

Florence I identified with quite a lot. At first, I thought she was naturally nervous about her wedding night because she didn’t really know much about it but it turns out she is quite repulsed by the whole idea. I find this completely reasonable. I love my boyfriend and we’re very happy and, well, use your imagination, we have been together for nearly two years. But the idea of having his urinating apparatus inside me isn’t one that gets me particularly excited. And the thought of him… exploding all over me is a bit ewwww when you think about it. It’s not that I don’t get excited, it’s just I get more excited when he’s got his clothes on (or, well, my clothes on). So I really felt for Florence and McEwan described her feelings really well.

I liked the parts about music too. Often when people write about music you can tell whether they actually know anything about it or not. Like there was one book with a character who wanted to play a particular flute piece slowly. Reasonable in theory but that particular piece you have to play really fast because you can’t take breaths in the middle of the phrases. Then you get the occasional violin with frets and or a clarinet with a double reed which really does get on my nerves. (The violin does not have frets and the clarinet has a single reed.)

But I had no trouble with Florence’s being a really good, professional standard violinist. There weren’t many descriptions of it but there was nothing that stood out as ridiculous. Maybe she spent a bit more time practising her scales and arpeggios than she needed to – you do need to practise them a lot but you get to practise pieces too - but it wasn’t so much it was actually unbelievable. The descriptions of the Wigmore Hall were also excellent. It has been refurbished at least once since the book and the only place I’ve been backstage is the Green Room but it was mostly possible to imagine the Wigmore Hall, read the descriptions, know exactly what he was talking about and have no doubt that he really was talking about the Wigmore Hall.

Some of the sentences might have been just slightly longer than they needed to be but only if I’m being really fussy. I actually really liked McEwan’s use of language. It was sort of gentle, like the waves undulating near Chesil Beach. At the very start McEwan showed a slight inclination to sneer at his characters but after that he really seemed to be inside their heads rather than laughing and pointing.

There isn’t much dialogue. Most of it is descriptions. Usually this sort of thing annoys me as I love dialogue but this book seemed right without dialogue. It’s about two people who have a lot of thoughts, feelings and memories they haven’t shared – and to an extent can’t share - with one another. When a conversation is described, it’s not necessarily the words that are spoken that are the most important thing. So I really like the book as it is.

Chesil Beach is a fascinating location for a story but to an extent it’s wasted because Chesil Beach is one of the few places in the book that isn’t described in detail and also really the only part of the book where the words used in conversation become more important than the setting. There are probably many exciting stories that could be set on Chesil Beach and nowhere else but on Chesil Beach but the book On Chesil Beach could in theory have been set anywhere. There doesn’t even need to be a beach at all as far as I can see. Anywhere outdoors would do.

So in some ways I wish McEwan had set his story somewhere else as now I think writers will feel discouraged from using Chesil Beach as a setting even if they wrote a very different story because the book is so famous. But at the same time, Chesil Beach is an exciting, magical place and just the fact that it’s really there gives the story something extra.

Atonement (Ian McEwan)**

I feel really bad about writing this because I’ve just met a really nice girl online and she loves Atonement. But I just can’t think of anything nice to say about it.

But I’ll try. Ian McEwan’s writing is very flowery, almost poetic, and he handles some challenging subjects. The middle section, about Robbie’s life as a soldier, is very interesting and shocking. His characters are all real individuals and I’ve never read another book like it.

But I hate this book. I really do. McEwan almost seems to be sneering at his characters from a distance. I can’t blame him for that, as I got quite sneery about them too, but there’s not much point in writing about characters if you don’t have the slightest bit of affection for them. It’s probably worse than writers that insist on telling you their characters are wonderful. I suppose it is possible to write about villains you dislike, but the best books are those where you even like the villains in a way. Hating a character isn’t that much fun really, but loving to hate a character is great. I don’t love to hate the characters in Atonement. I’d rather not think about them at all.

Some of the incidents in the book just didn’t ring true. Like there’s a bit where Robbie writes a horny letter to weird Cecelia, then writes a more decent one. He asks freaky Briony to deliver the letter, even though he’s going to see Cecelia himself, but mixes the letters up. I have read a different story with an incident like this, and it worked brilliantly, but that story had a strong element of comedy, and I really wanted the two characters to get it together. Atonement seems deathly serious, and I couldn’t stand Robbie or Cecelia. Robbie’s okay, I suppose, but Cecelia’s scary.

As for that stripping off by the fountain incident – as if! I accept that Cecelia doesn’t want to bother the kitchen staff by using the kitchen taps, but are there really no other taps in the house? I’m sure the house has bathrooms. Even if they don’t have running water, is there no garden tap Cecelia could use? And even if the fountain really is the only source of water, you don’t take all your clothes off and jump in. You’d have to be seriously deranged to do that. Any normal person would just lean over the fountain and hold the vase she wants to fill underneath the water. Actually, forget normal people, even I wouldn’t throw myself in. Not even if I wanted to impress some guy. If I want to impress someone, I don’t usually try to pretend to be even madder than I am. Even if I was in the mood for doing something silly, I’d go in with my clothes on. Much more fun that way.

Briony is the little bitch who causes all the trouble, and one positive thing I can say is that McEwan almost manages to make her crime reasonable. It’s still incredibly stupid, but the little brat obviously suffers from severe immaturity, and anyone a bit stupid with a mental age of 5 might make the mistake she did. She’s actually 13, so she really should have known not to be so evil. Or maybe the character could have been written in a more sympathetic manner. Briony is supposed to be very upset and hurt when she commits her crime, and a lot of readers will have been in a similar position, so it should be possible to understand her feelings. But she’s such a horrible little brat, and McEwan’s habit of distancing himself from his characters doesn’t help.

It’s not all Briony’s fault though. Anyone with parents like Leon and Emily probably didn’t have much chance of becoming reasonable human beings. Neither of them is very sane or very likeable. Some of the characters who feature in the Robbie section are interesting, but they’re hardly in it really,

Another really annoying thing about this book (which is apparently also true of at least one of his others) is that the story isn’t original. He stole it from an autobiography from the time where the book is set (he has denied this, but it looks a bit suspicious to me). Moral issues aside, I just find this a bit of a cheat. It’s okay to find outside inspiration. All writers do it. But you need to bring something to the book to make it your own, and writing a bizarre story that is half-copied, half-nonsensical, isn’t really enough for me.

But Atonement does seem to have made a lot of people really happy. And that is good.