On Chesil Beach: Ian McEwan

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Lessons should have made the Booker longlist (and shortlist) but no matter. It marks a significant new phase in McEwan’s already astonishingly productive career – and may well be remembered as one of the finest humanist novels of its age.” - New Statesman There is plenty of see-sawing in the book: the ebb and flow of the sea on the stones of Chesil Beach; of desire; of who to blame for what goes wrong (both in the minds of the characters and the readers); and Florence’s feelings about her father, and whether or not she thinks there is something wrong with Edward or herself. However ..I may re- read this book soon ( it only takes a few hours) with an open mind to see if my thoughts have changed. Gleiberman, Owen (8 September 2017). "Toronto Film Review: 'On Chesil Beach' ". Variety. Penske Business Media . Retrieved 10 September 2017.

Ian McEwan’s Art of Unease | The New Yorker Ian McEwan’s Art of Unease | The New Yorker

Both are used to leaving things unsaid: Florence is “adept at concealing her feelings from her family” and “lived in isolation within herself”, while Edward grew up in a family that colluded in his mother’s fantasy of a well-run household by not talking about it. He secretly chose a London university instead of nearby Oxford as part of “his sense of a concealed life”. The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls "the secret affair between disgust and joy. " (…) If On Chesil Beach is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones" - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review They're very different people, yet McEwan convincingly presents them as in love -- the one constant, that, however, becomes yet another complicating factor. On the surface, that doesn’t sound very interesting, but McEwan manages to suggest so much. There’s obviously lots of humour in the young couple’s awkward fumblings: waiters barge in and out of the room serving them their bland, proper meal (although they’re not hungry); neither the man (Edward) nor the woman (Florence) knows who should make the first move; and when they eventually start to get intimate, things like zippers don’t behave... In 1979, McEwan bought a house in Clapham, in South London. McEwan and Allen married three years later, and she and her daughters moved into the house. In 1984, after their son William was born, the McEwans left London for a larger house in Oxford. McEwan was immediately embraced by a literary crowd that included Craig Raine and James Fenton. Allen was a less natural fit. Redmond O’Hanlon, a travel writer who was part of the circle, recalls an incident at a dinner party: “She declared that on Oxford High Street everyone had these brown auras, which was apparently the pits.” O’Hanlon responded incredulously, and, as he recalls it, “Ian said, ‘Redsy, you know we all have a weak magnetic field round us.’ At that stage, he was defending her.” McEwan speaks of Allen with reticence, saying only, “My first wife was very New Age. I tried to accommodate it.”

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Lodderhose, Diana (17 February 2016). "Saoirse Ronan to Star in 'On Chesil Beach' ". Variety. Penske Business Media . Retrieved 6 May 2016. The film had its world premiere in the Special Presentations section at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2017, and was released in the United States and United Kingdom in May 2018. [2] [3] Plot [ edit ]

On Chesil Beach (film) - Wikipedia

On Chesil Beach is a period-piece, McEwan focussing very hard on that time before the so-called sexual-revolution. Mary Ward, The Literature of Love (Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 0521729815), p. 61: "the author hints earlier in the novel that Florence may have been abused by her father. McEwan had stated in a pre-2008 Booker prize interview: 'In the final draft it's there as a shadowy fact for readers to make of it what they will. I didn't want to be too deterministic about this. Many readers may miss it altogether, which is fine.'"In Spitsbergen, McEwan found the catalyst that he needed. He recalls, “On the boat, we were asked to store outer clothing—heavy shoes, splash suits, goggles, balaclavas, gloves—in a boot room. I spent seven years in boarding school, and I took one look and said, ‘I’m putting my stuff under my bed.’ Within three days, the boot room was chaos. People were losing their stuff, stealing things. Meanwhile, we’d be sitting inside our little ark, with the whole of the planet’s population below us, talking about how we were going to save the world. These were motivated, decent, kind people. I thought, Ah. The interesting thing here is human nature. Global warming suddenly wasn’t an abstract issue, because humans had to solve it—untrustworthy, venal, sweet, lovely humans.” In the mid-seventies, McEwan fell in love with Penny Allen, whom he had met at East Anglia. She was divorced and had two daughters, Polly and Alice. James Grant, a philosopher who was friends with them both, describes Allen as “quite prominent in the feminist movement” and an “intelligent student of literature. She would read his stuff and talk seriously about it.” Allen admired the poet Adrienne Rich. McEwan’s epigraph to “The Comfort of Strangers” quotes Rich’s verse: “How we dwelt in two worlds / the daughters and the mothers / in the kingdom of the sons.” Martin Amis said that McEwan was attracted to Allen’s ideological stance: “Ian was saying things in the mid-seventies like the immediate future of the novel was to deal with the emancipation of women.” Allen wrote fiction herself, but she did not find success. She was also fascinated with astrology and spirituality, and eventually began teaching a class called “Meditation, Healing, Astrology, and Creativity.”