Two hours that shape a lifetime

REVIEWING a new novel by Ian McEwan, it's difficult to know how much of the story you can tell. Not spoiling the suspense or giving away the ending is an important principle in all fiction reviewing, of course, but with McEwan the problem is particularly acute.

His novels centre on event. The momentary decisions people take and the life and death consequences that flow from them are his great subject. He is in this way, despite his weakness for schematic oppositions, far more truly a storyteller than such contemporaries as Amis and Barnes.

On Chesil Beach, no more than a novella, is another tour de force from McEwan. The main story occupies just a couple of hours on a mid-July evening in 1962. Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, both 22, have arrived at a hotel near Chesil Beach in Dorset for the first night of their honeymoon. They are both highly educated and both genuinely in love, but both also are virgins. Neither knows how to behave with the other or how to speak about the difficulties this presents. In the most minute and harrowing detail, McEwan describes their catastrophic evening, his pellucid, indirect style giving us access to the thoughts now of one, now of the other, an insight both disastrously lack themselves.

They are served an awful meal, beginning with "a slice of melon decorated by a single glazed cherry", followed by roast beef, sherry trifle, Cheddar cheese and mint chocolates. Throughout, Florence is in a state of sexual terror.

During their engagement, she has allowed Edward to kiss her breasts and has once touched his penis with the back of her hand through his trousers, an event so significant it causes him to propose. Now she is in a blind funk about what is going to happen, feeling "a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness". To her, "the idea of herself being touched 'down there' by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on her eye". Yet she fully intends to honour her marriage vows somehow.

Edward is full of excited anticipation but he too hasn't a clue. Nonetheless, in their hapless fumblings, there comes a point when Florence begins to feel arousal, as Edward's thumb brushes a stray pubic hair. "For the first time, her love for Edward was associated with a definable physical sensation, as irrefutable as vertigo."

But Edward is merely mystified as to what is going on. "He remembered a time, in a vast cornfield outside Ewelme, when he sat at the controls of a combine harvester, having boasted to the farmer that he was competent, and then did not dare touch a single lever. He simply did not know enough." Edward and Florence's fiasco has lifelong consequences for them both.

As their evening proceeds towards disaster, at a tempo close to real time (these 166 pages take a couple of hours to read), McEwan takes us back into their pasts, to show how they arrived at this impasse.

Edward is a clever country boy who has studied history. His mother has been severely brain-damaged in an accident - and Edward is given to occasional fits of violent rage. Florence is the daughter of a wealthy businessman and a dry Oxford philosophy don who has never shown her physical affection, either. She has poured her whole being into becoming a virtuoso classical violinist, but Edward loves rhythm and blues, another difference.

They meet by chance at a lunchtime CND meeting at a church hall in Oxford.

McEwan has situated his story at the last moment before the Sixties made such fatal shyness improbable. "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."

At the end of the book, McEwan suddenly changes the narrative pace, describing the rest of Edward's life in just a few paragraphs, as if this single evening was the main event of his life.

The effect is a little like the conclusion of Browning's beautiful poem, Life and Art: "This could but have happened once,/And we missed it, lost it forever."

McEwan wrote a lot about sudden sexual violence - incest, rape, murder, you name it - at the start of his career. Now he is describing inhibition at length.

But his conviction that what happens between men and women is the heart of the story remains consistent. On Chesil Beach isn't a major novel but it's as exquisitely crafted as any of his fiction.