They’re terribly in love and seem happy enough with their union, but for one pressing issue: the wedding night. On this particular July night in 1962, two newlyweds, Florence and Edward, are settling into their honeymoon suite in an old hotel on the Dorset beach. McEwan resists the urge, which is for the best, this is a book better suited for the sprint than the marathon he’s no Richard Ford, thank god. You can feel the author at times wishing to burst the bounds of his limited span, to go crashing past these tightly constrained boundaries and begin sweeping up the host of other generational topics available to him. It’s emblematic of a generation, a semi-scornful elegy for a repressed age, sarcastic about mores and unrelentingly honest about psychological and sexual intimacy. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, a crisp and pocket-sized novel that takes place - with the exception of a number of flashbacks - over the course of a single summer night in 1962, is as tautly constructed as anything he has written, though sprawling in imagination.
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