On Chesil Beach: Ian McEwan

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McEwan often has dinner at L’Étoile, and we were seated by the front window. The walls were covered with signed photographs of London celebrities, one of which was a recent acquisition: the snapshot of McEwan, Amis, and Hitchens that had perched on McEwan’s liquor table. (At the restaurant’s request, McEwan had donated the photograph.) In this public setting, the intimate picture had the outlaw air of a “Wanted” poster; for months, the London press had been criticizing the trio’s political stance on Islam. A commentator for the Independent had called them the “clash-of-civilisations literary brigade.” They are more or less in love and they are getting married because it’s what you do. “This was still the era…when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.” Kühl und mit einer Präzision, die ans Bösartige grenzt, verfolgt McEwan in dieser genialen Tragödie der Verkennungen, wie zwei Liebende einander immer wieder verfehlen, um Millimeter nur und am Ende endgültig." - Hubert Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung On Chesil Beach is a linguistic balancing act, each sentence delicately positioning itself both by historical co-ordinates -- an early-Sixties world of Austin 35s and wireless news bulletins -- and by more private reference points -- the separate anxieties and assumptions of the young bride and groom. McEwan, as Atonement demonstrated, is at his best with this finely tuned historical pastiche. The period detail allows him some virtuosic touches (…..) McEwan's forensic account of the warring couple's partialities (…) is perfectly constructed, but fails to throw off the feel of a private technical exercise. In a novel so reliant on bias and conviction, a little more authorly engagement would be welcome." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman

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Music is often important in McEwan's works. Florence and Edward's musical tastes are fundamentally incompatible (though they try), yet for Florence music is her “path to pleasure”, rather than physical intimacy. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life. When dusk arrives at the London Zoo, the animals let loose a collective bedtime squawk. And so the conversational hum of the two hundred and thirty guests arriving for McEwan’s sixtieth-birthday party was accompanied by a bestial din. The event was held in a ballroom overlooking the zoo’s grounds, and by the time some of London’s most esteemed writers—Tom Stoppard, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Edna O’Brien—showed up for the catered dinner the place felt like an aquarium overfilled with tropical fish. McEwan did not want his party to resemble a book launch. Accordingly, the invitation was insistently lowbrow—“ OLD MAN AT THE ZOO,” accompanied by the image of a gorilla with a raised middle finger—and the evening’s entertainment was a thumping blues band. I wonder things about him, like. . . does he have a particularly magical keyboard that only types out the right words? When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.a b Dana Rose Falcone (17 February 2016). "Saoirse Ronan to star in film adaptation of Ian McEwan's on Chesil Beach". Entertainment Weekly . Retrieved 23 August 2016. Florence's parents are an academic (her mother) and a successful businessman; complicating the picture is the fact that Edward is hired by her father, his first real job. being touched "down there" by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on the eye. Ian McEwan’s works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix You’re so wrong about this!” Raine said. “At first, I felt exactly the same thing. Then I read it again and realized how it all fitted together.”

On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan - Complete Review On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan - Complete Review

Writers have long been content to generate such insights on their own—somebody without the aid of a brain scanner came up with “revenge is sweet”—but McEwan is wary of relying too much on intuition. He has what he calls an “Augustan spirit,” one nourished equally by the poems of Philip Larkin and by the papers in Nature. Indeed, he told me that his 1997 novel, “Enduring Love,” in which a relentlessly rational man defeats a relentlessly irrational stalker, was conceived as a reply to the “unexamined Romantic assumption that still lingers in the contemporary novel, which is that intuition is good and reason bad.”Gleiberman, Owen (8 September 2017). "Toronto Film Review: 'On Chesil Beach' ". Variety. Penske Business Media . Retrieved 10 September 2017. During his apprenticeship, McEwan played one of his scientific games. “One day, Neil was operating on an aneurysm,” he said. “I was all scrubbed up, and two sixth-year students came in. They said, ‘Doctor, what’s going on in this procedure?’ I took them over to the light box and explained the route Neil was taking. They were very respectful.” The biggest difference in the movie, apart from the abuse being much clearer, is the ending. As I point out in my review of the movie, film and literature are different mediums. I think we want to see certain things play out in a movie that we don't necessarily need in a book. So the ending in the film has a certain power. (I cried both times I saw it.) I love the book's ending – it's quiet, subtle and more believable than what we're given in the movie. But even though it doesn't all work the old age-y makeup, especially for Edward, is a bit much, it's still very effective. As it turns out, McEwan’s concern for his characters’ individual humanity and his interest in the larger historical movement end up being somewhat at odds; they refuse, in the end, to embody sociological analysis. Liberation, in this novel, happens somewhere else. But that can only be to the benefit of the humanity of this small but interesting novel. I like it much more than McEwan’s last six novels, at least. (…) The novel is saved by an honest familiarity with individual psychology, and by the fact that it is, really, all about sex, which McEwan certainly does understand. The larger movements of history, however, enter into these lives in ways which are all too much like the novel that Professor Peter Hennessy might write about the period." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator