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On Chesil Beach
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On Chesil Beach (ISBN 0385522401) is a 2007 novel by the Booker Prize-winning British writer Ian McEwan. An is available from The New Yorker in its January 1, 2007, double issue. The novel was selected for the 2007 Booker Prize shortlist.
The Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Jonathan Yardley placed On Chesil Beach on his top ten for 2007 and praises its author: "McEwan's fiction just gets better and better, and even when he's in a minor mode, as he is here, he is nothing short of amazing." Fellow Washington Post book critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda also cites it as a favourite 2007 read: "Excellent novel of lost opportunities and sex (or lack of) in the pre-sex revolution '50s.
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Encyclopedia
On Chesil Beach (ISBN 0385522401) is a 2007 novel by the Booker Prize-winning British writer Ian McEwan. An is available from The New Yorker in its January 1, 2007, double issue. The novel was selected for the 2007 Booker Prize shortlist.
The Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Jonathan Yardley placed On Chesil Beach on his top ten for 2007 and praises its author: "McEwan's fiction just gets better and better, and even when he's in a minor mode, as he is here, he is nothing short of amazing." Fellow Washington Post book critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda also cites it as a favourite 2007 read: "Excellent novel of lost opportunities and sex (or lack of) in the pre-sex revolution '50s. Think partly of Larkin's famous poem!"
Plot summary
In July, 1962, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, young people deeply in love and of drastically different backgrounds (he's the son of a schoolmaster and a brain-damaged woman, whereas she is the musically gifted daughter of a wealthy industrialist and an Oxford philosophy lecturer), have just been married and are spending their honeymoon in a small hotel on the Dorset seashore. (See Chesil Beach.)
During the course of an evening, both reflect upon their upbringing and the prospect of their futures. Edward is sexually motivated and though intelligent has a taste for rash behaviour and Florence, bound by the social code of another era, is terrified of sexual intimacy: eventually this leads to an experience that will change their relationship irrevocably.
The novel focuses upon the couple's different personalities and attitudes and the development of their love in the dawning of a sexual awakening in 1960s Britain.
Controversy
In a BBC Radio 4 interview, McEwan admitted to taking a few pebbles from Chesil Beach and keeping them on his desk while he wrote the novel. Protests by conservationists and a threat by Weymouth and Portland borough council to fine him £2,000 led the author to return the pebbles.
"I was not aware of having committed a crime," he said. "Chesil Beach is beautiful and I'm delighted to return the shingle to it."
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