Both Edward and Florence fear that she is 'frigid', that antique word, and view that state as an affliction or curse with no remedy. McEwan is word-perfect at handling the awkward comedy of this relationship and, as ever, turning it into something far more disturbing. Feeling something stir there, beneath the flannel of his trousers, she has leapt into the aisle, screaming. Though carefully planned at every stage, Edward's campaign had earlier been set back months by his sudden placing of Florence's hand in the vicinity of his groin while they sat together at the cinema watching A Taste of Honey (that harbinger of possibility). These are still worsted postwar years, at least among Edward and Florence's milieu, and the assault on female virtue and, specifically, on Florence's virtue, has been an attritional endeavour of advance and retrenchment. The 'sort of bargaining' identified by Larkin has at times threatened open conflict. Inevitably, these two worlds have collided several times already, and not favourably. Edward, meanwhile, dreams fervently, silently, of the uninterrupted pleasure that will be theirs now the 'wrangle over the ring' has been sorted. She has been undone by the language of the wedding manual she has been reading (all 'mucous membranes' and 'glans' and 'penetration'). The beach, that unique spit of shingle which runs between the Fleet Lagoon and the Channel, immediately seems emblematic of several things: of this moment of certainty in lives that might never again seem certain of the path that they have just embarked on together, a path which, like all married couples in love they believe they will be making new but also of a romance that has taken place between the devil of Middle English rectitude and the deep blue sea of the coming sexual revolution.įlorence yearns for the former she would rather never have anyone touch her, she believes, even this man she loves. They eat their nuptial supper - melon with glace cherries, slabs of beef with overcooked veg, in their room overlooking the bay - while a pair of waiters, local lads, stands by intrusively. The honeymoon is to take place beside Chesil Beach, in a Georgian hotel.

Their love story and their tragedy grows out of McEwan's opening sentence, which contains within its careful confines almost everything you need to know about what follows: 'They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.' It is July of 1962 and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, he an ardent graduate historian, she the tremulous lead violinist in a string quartet with aspirations to Wigmore Hall, both 22, have just got married in Oxford.

Ian McEwan's story exists exactly in that hinterland in British courtship between repression and licence, the Lawrence litigation and 'Love Me Do'.

On chesil beach goodreads