On Chesil Beach Audiobook By Ian McEwan cover art

On Chesil Beach

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On Chesil Beach

By: Ian McEwan
Narrated by: Ian McEwan
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It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast.

At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence's response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence's anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite.

Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan: a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

©2007 Ian McEwan (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc. Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Marriage Heartfelt
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Critic reviews

"Masterful." (Publishers Weekly)
"Conventional in construction and realistic in its representation of addled psychology, the novel is ingenious for its limited but deeply resonant focus." (Booklist)

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Beautiful Writing • Compelling Portrait • Excellent Narration • Brilliant Storytelling • Fine Author Voice

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Mr. McEwan's writing is very beautiful, and he will always be one of my favorite writers; the main reason I read or listen to his work is to help improve my own writing. With that said, I have to complain: he loves to summarize huge swaths of his story, not just for this novel, but others as well, and I find that frustrating. I get it though, because the way he summarizes is so very elegantly and beautifully written that I can only imagine that it would be difficult to achieve the same level of beauty in his prose had he chosen to write detailed scenes. But for those of you who finished the book, wouldn't the ending have been so much more potent, a blow to the stomach, if McEwan had illustrated the two falling in love with each other by showing us actual scenes? Close the psychic distance between the reader and the characters in the story? Let us see and feel these characters falling in love with each other rather than summarizing their courtship? Experience it for ourselves rather than being told with lovingly wrought sentences? (If you disagree, saying, "no, there were a few scenes showing their courtship," I would argue that these scenes were so short that I hardly remember them. The scene in which Edward first meets Florence is described in Edward's POV with one paragraph and four sentences, followed by nine Kindle pages summarizing Florence's life until we get something resembling another scene (I got the e-book too)). Summarizing is too distant, pulls us away; scenes give us a close-up view. The wedding night is not summarized; it's very well described in painful, awkward detail, scene by scene, moment by moment. It's the rest of their lives that's summarized, before and after (especially before), and I think it's a mistake (and frustrating as a listener) that their courtship was not illustrated in specific, concrete, detailed language so that we could experience it too. That would have made the ending so much more... well, you should read the novel to find out what happens.

I wish their courtship was not summarized so much

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About the naivite' of intimacy of a young couple and how it ruled the rest of their lives.

A book for everyone!

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Short book, under 5 hrs total. Decided to read after seeing new film. Many details are different from cinematic version, and I ended the story with more questions than I had after the movie. McEwan is a brilliant writer and narrator of Audible version. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Haunting and complex

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Would you listen to On Chesil Beach again? Why?

Yes, not to miss anything.

What did you like best about this story?

How we are all victims of our ingnorance.

Have you listened to any of Ian McEwan’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No. But I plan to.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No

Any additional comments?

I was facinated with the iterview with the author that came after the story end.

Inthrolling story many of us have faced in life.

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This does not approach "Atonement" (one of my all-time favorite books) in quality, but is quite worth reading. The situation is infuriating, and the ending a bit bland compared to the heart of the story, but it certainly is a compelling portrait of the clashing mores of its time (early sixties). The author interview after the book is a significant value-added feature that makes the audio version preferable to the print.

Short One, But Decent

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