On Chesil Beach

1258 Words6 Pages
Ian McEwan’s novel, On Chesil Beach, is set in 1962 England, describing the young, newly married couple, Florence and Edward’s, fears and struggles on their wedding night – he, a passionate graduate historian and she the timid lead violinist in a string quartet, aspiring to perform at Wigmore Hall. The tragic love story is set up immediately in McEwan’s opening line, ‘They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.’ In this sentence McEwan manages to confine almost everything the reader needs to know about Florence and Edward immediately, setting up the rest of the novel. The honeymoon location chosen by Florence and Edward, is ‘a Georgian inn’ ‘on the Dorset coast.’ The novel starts with McEwan describing the newlyweds’ nuptial dinner, ‘eating in their rooms before the partially open French windows’, where they start ‘with a slice of melon decorated by a single glazed cherry’ before ‘roasted beef in a thickened gravy, soft boiled vegetables, and potatoes of a bluish hue.’ This description hardly sounds like the perfect wedding night, hinting at the forthcoming doom already, as waiters stand by intrusively. There are also already hints from McEwan of the impending tragedy between the lovers, as Florence decided it was not warm enough to eat outside on the terrace, but ‘Edward thought it was, but, polite to a fault, he would not think of contradicting her on such an evening.’ showing how he is already hiding what he truly thinks from Florence. McEwan has structured the whole novel to revolve around the wedding night but continuously flashes back until it reaches the present. He uses flashbacks to create a whole story and to add more depth to his characters, saying, ‘They did not meet until their London courses were over’. By flicking between
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