Reductive Review Time: Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach

At the beginning of Beckett’s Molloy, the reader finds a narrator atop a hill, from which the narrator can view the travelers below simultaneously from afar, from above and from very near. While Beckett plays with the omniscient and omnipresent perch of the narrator, the problem of perspective has provided ample fodder for the struggles of many a novelist and her narrator, back to Ford’s cuckolded husband in The Good Soldier and beyond. Ian McEwan has made a career in fiction in this line, dissecting the flesh of the moment in which competing narratives clash, as well as its subsequent ossification in memory.

McEwan’s novels give us repeated examples of the elevated perspective brought low – Briony Tallis’ misinterpretation of the fountain scene from a nursery window in Atonement; Henry Perowne’s inspection of London’s skyline and a comet that becomes a burning plane piloted by terrorists in Saturday (until he finds it was merely a cargo plane with engine trouble); Clive’s view, while perched on a Lake District cliff, of what could be an argument or a prelude to rape in Amsterdam. While acknowledging the problems of perspective has become almost a requirement in a post-foundational literary world (if it ever wasn’t) few writers do so with McEwan’s urgency and skill.

McEwan’s latest work, On Chesil Beach, revisits these problems in a much smaller universe – the fragile world of two newlyweds attempting to forge a common narrative without the ability to express either of their own. While the Cold War and vague plans of musical fame and academic authorship weigh on Edward and Florence’s minds, the majority of the novel takes place in the first few hours of the protagonists’ honeymoon on the titular beach. As usual, McEwan’s forte lies in his detailed exploration of the internal condition of his characters. Florence and Edward’s conscious co-narrative of the mundanities of their relationship (“how did they meet?”) outwardly related to friends, rapidly dissolves into separate, less confident internal narratives of their separate conceptions of love, marriage, and ultimately, sex.

While set mainly in the early Sixties, ostensibly a period in which polite English society prevented frank discussion of the physical realities of marriage, an exploration of the times is subordinate to a greater conception of the individual’s movement between poles of internal/personal narrative, extrapersonal/communal narrative, and heteronormative pressures to be “normal.” These pressures are such that Florence can think “in triumph, she belonged among the generality.” Edward and Florence are under stress to create a home in the image of a norm neither of them have ever seen exemplified. Fittingly, Edward’s mother lives in a fog of dementia, seeing a perfectly organized family and household where there is none. (While nowhere is McEwan’s technique lacking, the figure of the brain-damaged character is almost to be expected in his work. Such characters lend much to the discussion of perception and memory in relation to societal norms, but the trick loses its luster when it pops up in novel after novel.)

As critical to McEwan’s novelization of the problems in expressing perspective is memory’s place in narrative. Edward’s recollection of a walk with Florence exists with “a penumbra of oblivion around it,” at a point when novelistic narrative envelops disparate mental scenes connected only by vague impressions. (It is also the point when McEwan seems most indebted to Ford.) The penultimate scene is McEwan at his finest, when the travails of two greatly unremarkable people would descend into melodrama in less capable hands.

Edward’s confident assertions of the nature of the past in the final pages acknowledge the mistakes he could have forestalled with a more perfect reading of the present. Considering the difficulties he and Florence come upon in the previous two hundred pages, this seems of comfort only to him, while the reader is left upon Beckett’s magical hill.

Beware the Fariy Tale Ending

How could we have been so mistaken? There was the promise of making history, the sense that a victory was part of a larger, predestined plan. The tremendous momentum. The opponent with a fancy pedigree but not much to show for it. The outcome seemed inevitable. Obvious, really. And still, the journalists got it wrong – almost twenty points wrong.

Only this time, the journalists weren't political writers covering New Hampshire. They were sitting at the sports desk, covering the Super Bowl as if the New England Patriots had already beaten the New York Giants.

Of course, the means by which one predicts political victories (polling) is a different animal than by which you predict sporting outcomes (point spreads). And yet, the impulse to create a narrative based on little more than a gut feeling and some hastily assembled numbers has dominated both Super Bowl and Super Tuesday coverage over the past few weeks.

It’s no secret that a narrative arc makes for a better read than just a rote recapping of the facts as they happened. And a narrative arc requires one to tell a story with a foreshadowed outcome, even when reporters can’t even truly predict what that outcome will be. This is why we get both the elections and sports, not to mention a lot of other things, wrong. So Obama ahead in the polls after a win in Iowa is too easily turned into a larger narrative: a young icon winning over the hearts and minds of a cynical electorate, a sea change in the Democratic Machine. The Patriots heading to the Super Bowl is no longer just another Big Game; after an unbeaten season it becomes an even Bigger Game, one that will go down in the record books and make for good Monday Night trivia.

The irony is that Clinton winning in New Hampshire and The Giants winning in Arizona are better stories, specifically because the narrative favored by the press is so predictable and preordained. With Clinton’s victory, the election became a nail-biting, delegate-counting horserace; a real competition that’s lead to increased news coverage and increased interest on the part of news consumers. Had Obama won in Iowa, then New Hampshire, then in South Carolina, the story becomes one sided and predictable. The first headline would have been great (and easy to write beforehand) but the excitement would soon wear off.

Likewise, the New England Patriots winning the Super Bowl would have made for good copy – but as the coda to a story that had been building all season. It was the Hollywood ending, the final world. Now, sportswriters will keep busy analyzing what went wrong, how the Giants stopped the unstoppable, and what this means for next year. There will be off-season reports and player profiles with more color, and more interest – an “Eli as underdog made good” piece is so much more compelling than another fawning profile of Tom Brady.

The players and the politicians have it right: “I know it’s a very important game, but we cannot play it like that, like it’s history being played out,” said Tom Brady in a Sunday New York Times article. “It is a football game we want to win, and the only way to do that is to treat it like a football game.” It’s worth noting that the article began proclaiming that “New England Patriots take the field Sunday for Super Bowl XLII seeking perfection and a place in sports history,” then proceeded to seek insight history-making sports figures of years past: Nadia Comaneci, UCLA’s former basketball coach, John Wooden, and the first man to bowl three consecutive perfect 300 games.

In the end, it didn't matter what advice Glenn Allison, that legendary kegler, had to say - with less than two minutes remaining to play, the Giants rewrote what had seemed like a perfect ending to a perfect season. And in doing so - no matter how much stress it may have caused for reporters who thought they had it all figured out - created something even better.