On Chesil Beach

by Ian McEwan
London: Vintage, 2008.

On Chesil Beach is the second Ian McEwan book that I have read; the first one is Atonement.

On Chesil Beach is a short story (160 pages) about a long night, telling about the mental and physical struggles endured by a newlywed couple on their wedding night.
Their respective anxiety over, resistance to, fear of, and longing for, physical intimacy, are narrated in a voice that feels quiet and calm but powerful and enchanting. The pace of the narrative is very steady and peaceful so that the climax simply catches one off guard. After a space of several lines of the climactic moment, the narrative flow resumes its normal pace, but the narrative impact is overwhelming.
McEwan's prose is a amazingly crafted tapestry of memory. Every moment is intricately intertwined with a long lost moment in the past; every thread of thought and doubt now is interlaced either with a unnamed cause in the past or a unknown consequence in the future. The hero and heroines are trapped in a uncomfortable moment in the history of sexual revolution and torn between their own selves and the world that has made them.

What is wanting more and desiring for just enough?
How can we say what we want to say? How can we avoid being driven by what has been said?

In a scene of reasoning/arguing, the heroine tries to sum up how she has felt but fails, perhaps, to grasp the entire picture of what has been going on in her mind.

She was not sure, but she knew it was the route she was taking. 'You're always pushing me, pushing me, wanting something out of me. We can never just be. We can never just be happy. There's this constant pressure. There's always something more that you want out of me. This endless wheedling.' (p. 145)

Is it still possible to feel certain about ourselves, when every moment of being is heavily ridden with memory, laden with feelings and emotions?

The last few pages of the novel quickly numerates what then has happened to the couple over a course of 50 years after the wedding night. The life of the total 50 years flies across the pages, so rapidly and so forward-moving, as if nothing is worth mentioning after that key moment of the wedding night. How true it is, sometimes, that many of the lives are pinned down at a certain moment/second of loss and regret despite that the course of time relentlessly continues.