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Books On Chesil Beach

McEwan seems highly alert to the comic possibilities of this story, which could well be a bawdy ballad, and, as a way of keeping the reader’s face straight, manages a tone of almost reverent care for all their responses, for each moment in their history.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at London Review of Books Colm Tóibín London Review of Books 2007
Edward wants sex, Florence is sure she doesn’t. 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…

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Times Jonathan Lethem New York Times 2007

As a product of that drab decade (born 1929), I am here to attest that it was nothing like as inhibited as McEwan makes out. Practical experience may have been difficult to acquire before the Pill, but sexual ignorance as profound as that of Edward and Florence seems hard to credit in an era when most college students, even those who weren’t literary, worshiped D.H. Lawrence, believed in his cult of orgasm, and measured themselves accordingly.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Al Alvarez New York Review of Books 2007

A perfect single-sitting remedy for when one is feeling altogether too cheerful. On Chesil Beach is deeply affecting, and the effect is gloomy.

— Brian Flanagan