Unenduring love

"Sexual intercourse began
in nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
between the end of the Chatterley ban
and the Beatles' first LP"

Thus begins Philip Larkin's poem 'Annus Mirabilis' - and, it hardly surprises me to discover, Tim Adams' review of 'On Chesil Beach' in the Guardian as well as my own.

Sexual intercourse for Ian McEwan's two protagonists, Edward and Florence, begins a year earlier, in July 1962, and the first sentence tells us: "They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible".

This is typical of the way in which McEwan constructs the context in which events will subsequently unfold - carefully and concisely, without affectation or clumsiness. At the time at which the novel is set, youth is not yet something to be enjoyed and celebrated, but "a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure". Sat at dinner in their beachfront hotel, neither one hungry, the newlyweds are "in theory" free to "abandon their plates, seize the wine bottle by the neck and run down to the shore and kick their shoes off and exult in their liberty". But they don't, or rather can't, condemned to polite restraint and inertia: "for now, the times held them".

As the novel's first sentence hints, 'On Chesil Beach' focuses specifically on the way in which the characters' sexual interactions are conditioned or even determined by a dense matrix of factors beyond their control: "And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all". Even when alone together in intimate contact, they still aren't able to shut themselves off from everything but the thought of each other: "The bed squeaked mournfully when they moved, a reminder of other honeymoon couples who had passed through, all surely more adept than they were".

As Edward and Florence's backstories are revealed, partly through the window of their reveries, we discover that their courtship has, for Edward at least, been measured in his gradual but not always steady advance from base to base (to use a term from American teen movies that he might like): "The day in October he first saw her naked breasts long preceded the day he could touch them - December 19. He kissed them in February, though not her nipples, which he grazed with his lips once, in May". Tellingly, it was the sensation of her hand through his trousers, resting in his lap, that impelled him to propose to her.

For Florence, however, the overriding feeling was one of revulsion, as she recoiled from touching "the living thing, quite separate from her Edward". It becomes clear that she suffers from something approaching a pathological fear of sex, a disgust at the mechanics of intimate relations, even with the man she loves enough to have married. The symbolism of her regarding "his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room" hardly needs spelling out, not least because McEwan has already underlined her horror at the word "penetration" which recurs in the wedding manuals and which suggests "nothing to her but pain, flesh parted before a knife".

But, this being 1962, Florence is effectively sworn to silence, her private agonies a secret from the person with whom she is most intimate. Acutely aware that "sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy, but was the price she must pay for it", she resigns herself to playing out a role for her new husband: "Playfully, she sucked [the glazed cherry] from his fingers and held his gaze as she deliberately chewed, letting him see her tongue, conscious that in flirting with him like this she would be making matters worse for herself". Even when she does feel for the first time the faint and not unpleasurable stirrings of desire, the experience is only fleeting, strangulated almost at birth by that familiar revulsion.

'On Chesil Beach' is in some respects a classically English comedy of awkwardness and embarrassment, and contains a number of passages that induce a smile if not an outright laugh. (An aside: Edward trying to stave off premature ejaculation by thinking "of the news, of the face of the Prime Minister, tall, stooping, walrus-like, a war hero, an old buffer - he was everything that was not sex, and ideal for the purpose", made me wonder whether McEwan had watched 'Austin Powers' recently, and chosen to filch and adapt the repeated line:"Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day! Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day!"...)

But it also manages to be much more than simply comical, which is quite remarkable for so slight a novel that essentially focuses on two characters for a period of around an hour in a single day. Edward and Florence's tragedy is the inescapability of their fate - one which, McEwan implies, is not theirs alone but that of a whole generation.