From the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie comes this long-awaited follow-up, an enchanting, beautifully crafted novel that explores a mystery only heaven can unfold.Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. As the park has changed over the years -- from the Loop-the-Loop to the Pipeline Plunge -- so, too, has Eddie changed, from optimistic youth to embittered old age.
His days are a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret.Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his -- and then nothing.
He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it.
These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.One by one, Eddie's five people illuminate the unseen connections of his earthly life. As the story builds to its stunning conclusion, Eddie desperately seeks redemption in the still-unknown last act of his life: Was it a heroic success or a devastating failure? The answer, which comes from the most unlikely of sources, is as inspirational as a glimpse of heaven itself.In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom gives us an astoundingly original story that will change everything you've ever thought about the afterlife -- and the meaning of our lives here on earth. With a timeless tale, appealing to all, this is a book that readers of fine fiction, and those who loved Tuesdays with Morrie, will treasure.
1. At the start of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Albom says that "all endings are also beginnings." In general, what does this mean? How does it relate to this story in particular? Share something in your life that has begun as another thing ended, and the events that followed.
2. What initially grabs your attention in The Five People You Meet in Heaven? What holds it?
3. How does counting down the final minutes of Eddie's life affect you as a reader? Why does Albom do this? Other storytelling devices Albom uses include moving from past to present by weaving Eddie's birthdays throughout the story. How do these techniques help inform the story? What information do you learn by moving around in time? How effective is Albom's style for this story in particular?
4. What does Eddie look like and what kind of guy is he? Look at and discuss some of the details and descriptions that paint a picture of Eddie and his place of business. What is it about an amusement park that makes it a good backdrop for this story?
5. Consider the idea that "no story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river." How does this statement relate to The Five People You Meet in Heaven?
6. How does Albom build tension around the amusement park ride accident? What is the significance of Eddie finding himself in the amusement park again after he dies? What is your reaction when Eddie realizes he's spent his entire life trying to get away from Ruby Pier and he is back there immediately after death? Do you think this is important? Why?
7. Describe what Albom's heaven is like. If it differs from what you imagined, share those differences. Who are the five people Eddie meets? Why them? What are their relationships to Eddie? What are the characteristics and qualities that make them the five people for Eddie?
8. Share your reactions and thoughts about the Blue Man's story, his relationship with his father, and his taking silver nitrate. What, if anything, does this have to do with Eddie? Why does he say to Eddie, "This is not your heaven, it's mine"?
9. How does the Blue Man die? What affect does it have on you when you look at the same story from two different points of view -– his and Eddie's? Can you share any events that you have been involved in that can be viewed entirely differently, from another's point of view? How aware are we of other's experiences of events that happen simultaneously to us and to them? Why?
10. Discuss what it means that "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind." Even though Eddie hasn't been reincarnated, consider karma in Eddie's life (where Eddie's actions would affect his reincarnation). If it isn't karma, what is Albom telling us about life, and death?
11. Think about Eddie's war experiences and discuss your reactions to Albom's evocation of war. What did Eddie learn by being in war? How did he "come home a different man"? Why did the captain shoot Eddie? Explore what it means when the captain tells Eddie, "I took your leg to save your life." Why does the captain tell Eddie that sacrifice is not really a loss, but a gain? Examine whether or not Eddie understands this, and the significance of this lesson.
12. Discuss what you might say to Eddie when he asks "why would heaven make you relive your own decay?".
13. Examine whether or not you agree with the old woman when she tells Eddie, "You have peace when you make it with yourself," and why. Consider what she means when she says, "things that happen before you are born still affect you. And people who come before your time affect you as well." How does this relate to Eddie's life? Who are some who have come before you that have affected your own life?
14. What is Eddie's father's response each time Eddie decides to make an independent move, away from working at the pier? Examine how Eddie's father's choices and decisions actually shape Eddie's life. Why does Eddie cover for his father at the pier when his father becomes ill? What happens then? Share your own experience of a decision your own parents made that affected your life, for better or for worse.
15. Who tells Eddie that "we think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do we do to ourselves"? What is the significance of this particular person in Eddie's life? Why is this important for Eddie to understand? Is it important for all of us to understand? Why? Discuss whether or not you agree that, "all parents damage their children. It cannot be helped." How was Eddie damaged?
16. Why does Marguerite want to be in a place where there are only weddings? How does this relate to her own life, and to her relationship and life with Eddie?
17. Discuss why Eddie is angry at his wife for dying so young. Examine what Marguerite means when she says, "Lost love is still love. It takes a different form. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around on the dance floor. But when these senses waken, another heightens. . . . Life has an end. Love doesn't." Why does she say this to Eddie? Do you think he gets it? Discuss whether or not you agree with her, and why.
18. Why does Eddie come upon the children in the river? What does Tala mean when she says "you make good for me"? Discuss whether or not Eddie's life is a penance, and why. What is the significance of Tala pulling Eddie to safety after he dies? Why is it Tala that pulls him to heaven and not one of the other four?
19. What would you say to Eddie when he laments that he accomplished nothing with his life? Discuss what has he accomplished.
20. Briefly recall the five lessons Eddie learns. How might these be important for all of us? Share which five people might meet you in heaven, and what additional or different lessons might be important to your life. Discuss how Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven has provided you with a different perspective of your life.
"Sincere. . . . A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers."
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times"Simply told, sentimental, and profoundly true, this is an contemporary American fable that will be cherished by a vast readership."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Fans of Tuesdays with Morrie will be delighted with this novel."
—People magazine"Transcendent. . . . Albom has aimed high here, and there's a whiff of paradise as a result."
—Atlanta Journal Constitution"Albom has a gift for tapping into readers' sincerely sentimental spots, and he will undoubtedly connect again here."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer"Albom has the ability to make you cry in spite of yourself."
—The Boston Globe"Albom has done a masterful job."
—Oakland Press"There's much wisdom here . . . An earnest meditation on the intrinsic value of human life."
—Los Angeles Times"This is the fable you will devour when you fall in love. This is the tale you will keep by your side when you are lost. This is the story you will turn to again and again, because it possesses the rare magic to let you see yourself and the world anew. This book is a gift to the soul."
—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter's Daughter"Anyone who loved Tuesdays with Morrie should delight in reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Mitch Albom has populated his larger-than-life tale with memorable characters and filled it with the abundant warmth and wisdom that we've come to expect from this gifted storyteller."
—John Burnham Schwartz, author of Claire Marvel"This is a lovely book, sweet, entertaining and wise. What a gutsy, surprising follow-up to Morrie."
—Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies and Blue Shoe"Deep, profound, superbly imaginative, written with the quiet eloquence of a storyteller who dares to leap into the most magical of places. This poetic book is full of lessons and hope."
—James McBride, author of The Color of Water and Miracle at St. Anna"A moving flight of fantasy come to teach us that Heaven is where we finally learn what our life was about."
—Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People"In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom lifts us to a new level. You'll find here echoes of the classics -- The Odyssey, for one -- and that puts Albom's book in the best of company."
—Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis"One of the best books I've read. Very well written. Touching and very comforting. Makes you stop and think of how people affect each others lives under the simplest circumstances, and no matter who and what you are in life, you can always make a difference."
—Maria Linsangan, book buyer, The News Group, Sacramento"I was changed by this book. It has that wonderful ring of truth that stories have which affirm the value of the individual."
—Donna Cressman, Maxwell Books, DeSoto TX"A books that you find yourself thinking about days...even weeks later, reading favorite sections to others and thinking about how your own actions and choices ripple through life and affect those around you."
—Julie Smith, Auntie's Bookstore, Spokane WA
Showing posts with label Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Review. Show all posts
Monday, February 23, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Different Approaches to & Reviews of CHESIL BEACH.......
Review Consensus: Not quite a consensus, but the majority are impressed
From the Reviews:
"This is a small novel, 160 pages, but a very concentrated one; a miniature aware of the world beyond it. So when the powerful ending comes (and two years later we could have witnessed a completely different outcome), there's a lot behind it. Some might find the summing up a bit too neat; I didn't. It's the necessary step back, the distancing effect that puts one rotten hour into historical perspective." - Steven Carroll, The Age
"McEwan, a '60s child if ever there was one, comes to remind us that there were losers, all right, and that there still are. It would be less interesting to term this a generational achievement than a national one. Only Philip Larkin has ever decribed sex more bleakly than McEwan does here. No fumble, miscue, or calamity is omitted." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly
"Mr McEwan's prose is, as always, intense and visually descriptive, but in this elegantly crafted novel his skill lies in his illumination of an evening taut with emotional paralysis and in his portrayal of missed opportunity. As events move forward to the book's dénouement, On Chesil Beach becomes much more than a simple story of emotions held in check by convention. It is a memorable exposé of how terrible wounds can be inflicted and the entire course of a life changed -- by doing nothing." - The Economist
"To reveal what lies in store would lessen the pleasure of reading this small masterpiece, though it's hard to imagine that anything could spoil it." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
"Yet it would be wrong to see this novella as showing the liberated, therapeutically enabled present triumphing unambiguously over the past's stifling repressions and conventions. For, paradoxically, the fullness with which Edward and Florence's inner lives are explored depends wholly on their reticence and embarrassment, on their inability to talk to each other. Indeed, the power of the narrative as a whole derives from the painful seriousness with which they brood, from their antithetical perspectives, on the moment when, as Edward imagines it, "the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman". The book's poignant final pages evince an almost wistful nostalgia for the years before." - Mark Ford, Financial Times
"Kühl und mit einer Präzision, die ans Bösartige grenzt, verfolgt McEwan in dieser genialen Tragödie der Verkennungen, wie zwei Liebende einander immer wieder verfehlen, um Millimeter nur und am Ende endgültig." - Hubert Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"These currents of excitement and dread are following such different directions that it is hardly surprising that by the end of the novel, which comes quite quickly, just a few hours and about 150 pages later, the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach has become the backdrop to solitude rather than communion. This plot may sound inconsequential -- bad sex in English hotel shock! -- but McEwan manages to give it almost tragic impact. This is partly because we come to sympathise so intensely with Florence and Edward's idealistic expectations of intimacy (…..) No, what matters is whether the novel works as fiction. And it does. Some of the prose in the passages away from the bedroom is more workaday than we have come to expect from McEwan, and lacks the panache of his recent work. The exploration of Florence's love of music, particularly, never quite flares into life. Yet within the bedroom this couple's hesitant attempts at intimacy are nuanced and delicately realised." - Natasha Walter, The Guardian
"The unease in this book is mostly sexual. The young couple are hopelessly mismatched sexually (…..) (I)t is a fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowering to devastating effect." - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday
"On Chesil Beach, however, is full of odd echoes and has elements of folk tale, which make the pleasures of reading it rather greater than the joys of knowing what happened in the end. (…) The style of the book may seem plain: there is no recourse to the use of cadence for effect, and there are no elaborate sentences or pyrotechnics of any sort. We are, after all, in England, where words mean what they say. So numerous are the images of stability and continuity in these years of peace and prosperity, that the reader takes them for granted. The sheer skill in holding tone, and playing with it, is hidden much of the time. The novel is a pure comedy, but it is told from the point of view of the two protagonists who do not think it is funny at all, and this is managed without making either of them seem tedious." - Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books
"On Chesil Beach is a linguistic balancing act, each sentence delicately positioning itself both by historical co-ordinates -- an early-Sixties world of Austin 35s and wireless news bulletins -- and by more private reference points -- the separate anxieties and assumptions of the young bride and groom. McEwan, as Atonement demonstrated, is at his best with this finely tuned historical pastiche. The period detail allows him some virtuosic touches (…..) McEwan's forensic account of the warring couple's partialities (…) is perfectly constructed, but fails to throw off the feel of a private technical exercise. In a novel so reliant on bias and conviction, a little more authorly engagement would be welcome." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman
"(A) small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses none of those earlier books’ emotional wisdom, narrative scope or lovely specificity of detail. (…) (H)e’s given us a smarmy portrait of two incomprehensible and unlikable people." - Michiko Kautani, The New York Times
"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
"There is a fairy-tale quality to the book, in that everything that follows seems inevitable. The minute currents of tension that change a conversation and a life are so crucial to McEwan's method that it would be unfair to give away every last turn in his narrative. Towards the end, when fates have been sealed, it seems to Edward 'that an explanation of his existence would take up a minute, less than half a page'. Such is the deft compression of McEwan's art here that, in his hands, such a formulation does not seem far from the truth." - Tim Adams, The Observer
"Communication failure is at the center of his tale, and he evokes it with heartbreaking eloquence." - Kyle Smith, People
"But after On Chesil Beach climaxes, the masterfully modulated denouement fast-forwards through the decades to come to our present day -- and prods us to consider what this book really is." - Ed Park, Salon
"Every detail in On Chesil Beach tells the reader that the new age has not yet dawned (…..) Some may call this book a novella, because it is a mere 30,000 words long, but it is in fact a fully realized novel, more than worthy of the grander appellation. Not only is it full of meaningful, organically significant details, but its narrative ebbs and flows in a way that demonstrates the most masterly narrative control. The story unfolds in a perfect manner, withholding now and then for effect, even omitting sometimes, with the result that On Chesil Beach is not only a wonderful read but also perhaps that rarest of things: a perfect novel." - Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle
"The finest passages in On Chesil Beach are the tremulous vacillations experienced by the couple, a sad mixture of stage-fright, clumsy slapstick and tender awkwardness. In the bleak aftermath, the emotional pendulum swings between pity and fury, embarrassment and apology, with each partner's self-doubts and aggrieved resentments interlocking and interchanging. It might, in a way, have been a rather good short story. On Chesil Beach, however, manages to feel too thin and too long simultaneously. (...) The concentration on the consequences of their unfortunate first night seems bizarrely disproportionate, a feeling exacerbated by McEwan's sometimes slapdash plotting elsewhere. (...)On Chesil Beach leaves the reader, like its two confused, disgusted and recriminating characters, utterly unfulfilled." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
"As it turns out, McEwan’s concern for his characters’ individual humanity and his interest in the larger historical movement end up being somewhat at odds; they refuse, in the end, to embody sociological analysis. Liberation, in this novel, happens somewhere else. But that can only be to the benefit of the humanity of this small but interesting novel. I like it much more than McEwan’s last six novels, at least. (…) The novel is saved by an honest familiarity with individual psychology, and by the fact that it is, really, all about sex, which McEwan certainly does understand. The larger movements of history, however, enter into these lives in ways which are all too much like the novel that Professor Peter Hennessy might write about the period." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator
"Clean of sprawl and clutter -- not a word, incident or image seems slackly placed -- the book never hardens into the schematic. Where McEwan’s earliest handlings of one of his dominant themes -- attempts to attain and sustain loving partnerships -- often seemed diagrams of male and female stereotypes, everything here is alive with human complexity. (…) Subtle, witty, rueful and sometimes heartrending, On Chesil Beach coalesces these perceptions into a novel that is a master feat of concentration in both senses of the word." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"McEwan exposes the rationalisations and self-deceptions we all succumb to in situations of great emotional uncertainty, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another. In doing so, the book takes us deeper into two people's lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see." - Mark Mordue, Sydney Morning Herald
"Writing in the third person, McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous. (…) It's a pleasure to watch McEwan fleshing out his characters, expertly shifting chronology and point of view around as he prepares for the coming bedroom scene and its aftermath. (…) Part of the problem might be that McEwan's use of suspense makes you forget that startling revelations aren't the point, that his writing is strongest in its texture and detail and masterly narrative set-pieces." - Christopher Tayler, The Telegraph
"Because this is a slight book, it would be unfair to detail the unfolding of this evening any further. Suffice it to say that the tiny tragedy of one wedding night -- which has large-scale implications -- is heartbreaking, understandable from both parties' perspectives, and sickeningly unnecessary." - Lionel Shriver, The Telegraph
"For the reader, the ending of On Chesil Beach comes too soon. Its devastating concluding passage, in which we glimpse the future that flows from the events of the honeymoon night, feels almost like the sketch of a larger novel of which this is merely the first section. Still, the experience of finishing a novel with regret is not so frequent that one should complain of it. Better to say with gratitude that McEwan’s latest fiction is full of richness: of serious thought about the nature of love and human relationships, informed by a poetic sensibility and expressed in prose whose lyricism never errs on the side of self-indulgence." - Jane Shilling, The Times
"A new book by him has long been an event. This new book, though, On Chesil Beach, is more than an event. It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly. (…) The novel has felicities which ensure, rather than embellish, the humanity of its treatment of the lovers' predicament. (…) Ian McEwan is serious, but not solemn, in his unfolding of this predicament, and of surrounding disorders." - Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement
"This slim novel -- a novella, really -- works as a parable of failed empathy. (…) This backward-looking stance, this assumption that the couple may have prospered had they been born a few years later, risks a charge of smugness. It carries more than a whiff of author knows best. The chapters detailing their respective childhoods and schooling sometimes have the same tone, a too-assured intimation that their pasts neatly account for their present difficulties. But such criticisms fall away when McEwan returns to the wedding night itself, scrupulously describing the mordant, melancholy comedy of it, the tragedy it gives rise to." - Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice
"(B)reathtaking (…..) (I)t is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest -- innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected -- and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"So reich der schmale Roman an Beobachtungen, an Geschichten, an Beschreibungen gerade der immer wieder abstoppenden sexuellen Begegnungen der beiden ist (selten wurde ein Zungenkuss derart zum Abgewöhnen ausgenüchtert geschildert), so eng sind sie geführt. Wenn man diesem Schachtelalbtraum von einer Geschichte etwas vorwerfen kann, dann ist es -- neben der Kleinigkeit, dass McEwan sich im Epilog auf den psychologisch uninteressanteren Edward konzentriert -- ausgerechnet seine Meisterschaft: dass bis ins letzte Bild alles stimmt, dass noch die kleinste Subgeschichte ein Ziel hat, dass kaum Dunkelheiten bleiben. Wie ein wiedergefundenes Meisterwerk des Fin de siècle liest sich Am Strand" - Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt
"In seinem neuen Roman Am Strand nun überkreuzen sich diese sonst so genau kalkulierten Pläne, es geraten Literatur und Zeitdiagnose ordentlich durcheinander -- was vielleicht der Grund ist für das seltsam leblose und, schlimmer noch bei dem Thema, lustlose Scheitern dieses Sexromans vor dem Zeitalter des Sex." - Georg Dietz, Die Zeit
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
On Chesil Beach centres around the wedding night of Edward and Florence, and McEwan gets right to the point in his 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. But it is never easy. McEwan describes that wedding night in painful, exacting detail, from the meal they have in their room all the way through to the bitter end on the beach. He pulls back to fill in background -- their families and upbringing, their circumstances, their relationship -- but then always zooms back in to the wedding night. And you just know it's not going to go well. The time is 1962, and Edward and Florence are perhaps even worse equipped than most to deal with sexual difficulty than most of their contemporaries. They're deeply in love, but the physical has proved problematic during their courtship. Over the months Edward made some headway, but it never came easy, and Florence doesn't really take to much physical intimacy -- his tongue in her mouth when they, kiss for example. She has vague ideas of what to expect now, and she's dreading it:
Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.
Indeed:
being touched "down there" by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on the eye. Yes, Florence's attitude is pathological; worse yet, she hasn't made it entirely clear to Edward how she feels about this act they're supposed to engage in. Edward has some sense of Florence's qualms, but he's so over-excited about finally getting this far that he doesn't pay enough attention. The exquisitely awkward dance they do as Florence tries to maneuver herself around the inevitable is wonderfully captured by McEwan, from both their vantage points. Marvellously, it comes even worse than expected, as Edward contributes to the mess with his own sexual difficulties (let's just say that his decision to lay off gratifying himself in the days before the wedding looks like it left him more precariously bottled-up than is healthy). Instead of awkward consummation what we get is sexual disaster.
McEwan doesn't let it end there; indeed, what's decisive is how they handle this mess they've gotten themselves into. That's what what interests McEwan, and that's where their real failure lies. They finally get some of the words out into the open, as they finally try discuss sex, but they're not very good at that either -- hardly surprising, given that they've never had a go at talking about it to anyone, on top of the terrible pas-de-deux they were just part of. Both partners' pasts contribute to the situation. Edward is used to living if not a lie then at least a very warped truth, having been brought up to treat his mother as if everything she did was normal when, in fact, little is, as she's been unhinged since an accident that left her in a coma for a week when he was a young boy. His father finally tells him about the accident that left her brain-damaged when he is fourteen, news that's not really news but still changes everything. "What I've said changes absolutely nothing", his father insists -- but then that's part of the problem. As before: "the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed", and that's pretty much how they go on.
As for Florence, being a late bloomer is hardly explanation enough for her pathological feelings about sex. McEwan doesn't come right out and say it, but there are strong hints that a childhood trauma involving her father is at the root of it. Certainly, there's something off about that father-daughter relationship; even dense Edward notices that. (It's almost a shame that McEwan had to go that far; surely the unsettling weirdness of sex to a sheltered child of the times might have been enough to get him nearly as far.)
On Chesil Beach is a period-piece, McEwan focussing very hard on that time before the so-called sexual-revolution. It's not nostalgic, but he is trying to capture an era and he's very explicit about it, constantly reminding the reader of this different time (down to noting that: "This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine" when discussing their meal). It's not just the sexual mores and understanding that he wants to highlight, either: it's also very much a novel about family circumstances, opportunities, and, ultimately, class. Edward is the exception among his classmates in going on to university -- choosing London over Oxford, too, in a minor rebellion. Florence's parents are an academic (her mother) and a successful businessman; complicating the picture is the fact that Edward is hired by her father, his first real job.
Florence is a gifted and ambitious violinist, torn between the different opportunities she has; Edward has little understanding (or true appreciation) of what she does, her classical music remaining all Greek to him. They're very different people, yet McEwan convincingly presents them as in love -- the one constant, that, however, becomes yet another complicating factor.
After the wedding night McEwan also offers an extended coda, of afterwards. He focusses almost entirely on Edward here, describing the changes he undergoes and what becomes of him. It allows McEwan to make his final points -- of realising that a bit of patience, a bit of dialogue, and the power of their love would have been enough, that awkward moments can be handled if they're tackled head-on -- but leaves too much open about Florence (including the question of whether she ever got over her sex-problems).
There's been some discussion of whether On Chesil Beach is a novel or a novella. The small American edition stretches the book out to just over 200 pages -- and has A Novel printed on the cover -- but it's less a matter of length than scope, and On Chesil Beach's failing is that it remains a mere novella even while McEwan suggests (but doesn't follow through on) much larger ambitions. McEwan packs events and character-description into it, but he doesn't dare really move beyond the small story of the wedding night. It's like the notes are here for a larger novel, but everything is like the coda, background to the essential tale, but so much of it that it constantly suggests there should be more.
Successful in large part, the book nevertheless falls short of its larger ambitions, as McEwan chose a middle-ground that isn't entirely satisfying. Neither a compact novella nor a full-blown novel
On Chesil Beach is a very good book, but not entirely satisfying. Still, well worth reading.
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Links: On Chesil Beach:
From the Reviews:
"This is a small novel, 160 pages, but a very concentrated one; a miniature aware of the world beyond it. So when the powerful ending comes (and two years later we could have witnessed a completely different outcome), there's a lot behind it. Some might find the summing up a bit too neat; I didn't. It's the necessary step back, the distancing effect that puts one rotten hour into historical perspective." - Steven Carroll, The Age
"McEwan, a '60s child if ever there was one, comes to remind us that there were losers, all right, and that there still are. It would be less interesting to term this a generational achievement than a national one. Only Philip Larkin has ever decribed sex more bleakly than McEwan does here. No fumble, miscue, or calamity is omitted." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly
"Mr McEwan's prose is, as always, intense and visually descriptive, but in this elegantly crafted novel his skill lies in his illumination of an evening taut with emotional paralysis and in his portrayal of missed opportunity. As events move forward to the book's dénouement, On Chesil Beach becomes much more than a simple story of emotions held in check by convention. It is a memorable exposé of how terrible wounds can be inflicted and the entire course of a life changed -- by doing nothing." - The Economist
"To reveal what lies in store would lessen the pleasure of reading this small masterpiece, though it's hard to imagine that anything could spoil it." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
"Yet it would be wrong to see this novella as showing the liberated, therapeutically enabled present triumphing unambiguously over the past's stifling repressions and conventions. For, paradoxically, the fullness with which Edward and Florence's inner lives are explored depends wholly on their reticence and embarrassment, on their inability to talk to each other. Indeed, the power of the narrative as a whole derives from the painful seriousness with which they brood, from their antithetical perspectives, on the moment when, as Edward imagines it, "the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman". The book's poignant final pages evince an almost wistful nostalgia for the years before." - Mark Ford, Financial Times
"Kühl und mit einer Präzision, die ans Bösartige grenzt, verfolgt McEwan in dieser genialen Tragödie der Verkennungen, wie zwei Liebende einander immer wieder verfehlen, um Millimeter nur und am Ende endgültig." - Hubert Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"These currents of excitement and dread are following such different directions that it is hardly surprising that by the end of the novel, which comes quite quickly, just a few hours and about 150 pages later, the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach has become the backdrop to solitude rather than communion. This plot may sound inconsequential -- bad sex in English hotel shock! -- but McEwan manages to give it almost tragic impact. This is partly because we come to sympathise so intensely with Florence and Edward's idealistic expectations of intimacy (…..) No, what matters is whether the novel works as fiction. And it does. Some of the prose in the passages away from the bedroom is more workaday than we have come to expect from McEwan, and lacks the panache of his recent work. The exploration of Florence's love of music, particularly, never quite flares into life. Yet within the bedroom this couple's hesitant attempts at intimacy are nuanced and delicately realised." - Natasha Walter, The Guardian
"The unease in this book is mostly sexual. The young couple are hopelessly mismatched sexually (…..) (I)t is a fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowering to devastating effect." - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday
"On Chesil Beach, however, is full of odd echoes and has elements of folk tale, which make the pleasures of reading it rather greater than the joys of knowing what happened in the end. (…) The style of the book may seem plain: there is no recourse to the use of cadence for effect, and there are no elaborate sentences or pyrotechnics of any sort. We are, after all, in England, where words mean what they say. So numerous are the images of stability and continuity in these years of peace and prosperity, that the reader takes them for granted. The sheer skill in holding tone, and playing with it, is hidden much of the time. The novel is a pure comedy, but it is told from the point of view of the two protagonists who do not think it is funny at all, and this is managed without making either of them seem tedious." - Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books
"On Chesil Beach is a linguistic balancing act, each sentence delicately positioning itself both by historical co-ordinates -- an early-Sixties world of Austin 35s and wireless news bulletins -- and by more private reference points -- the separate anxieties and assumptions of the young bride and groom. McEwan, as Atonement demonstrated, is at his best with this finely tuned historical pastiche. The period detail allows him some virtuosic touches (…..) McEwan's forensic account of the warring couple's partialities (…) is perfectly constructed, but fails to throw off the feel of a private technical exercise. In a novel so reliant on bias and conviction, a little more authorly engagement would be welcome." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman
"(A) small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses none of those earlier books’ emotional wisdom, narrative scope or lovely specificity of detail. (…) (H)e’s given us a smarmy portrait of two incomprehensible and unlikable people." - Michiko Kautani, The New York Times
"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
"There is a fairy-tale quality to the book, in that everything that follows seems inevitable. The minute currents of tension that change a conversation and a life are so crucial to McEwan's method that it would be unfair to give away every last turn in his narrative. Towards the end, when fates have been sealed, it seems to Edward 'that an explanation of his existence would take up a minute, less than half a page'. Such is the deft compression of McEwan's art here that, in his hands, such a formulation does not seem far from the truth." - Tim Adams, The Observer
"Communication failure is at the center of his tale, and he evokes it with heartbreaking eloquence." - Kyle Smith, People
"But after On Chesil Beach climaxes, the masterfully modulated denouement fast-forwards through the decades to come to our present day -- and prods us to consider what this book really is." - Ed Park, Salon
"Every detail in On Chesil Beach tells the reader that the new age has not yet dawned (…..) Some may call this book a novella, because it is a mere 30,000 words long, but it is in fact a fully realized novel, more than worthy of the grander appellation. Not only is it full of meaningful, organically significant details, but its narrative ebbs and flows in a way that demonstrates the most masterly narrative control. The story unfolds in a perfect manner, withholding now and then for effect, even omitting sometimes, with the result that On Chesil Beach is not only a wonderful read but also perhaps that rarest of things: a perfect novel." - Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle
"The finest passages in On Chesil Beach are the tremulous vacillations experienced by the couple, a sad mixture of stage-fright, clumsy slapstick and tender awkwardness. In the bleak aftermath, the emotional pendulum swings between pity and fury, embarrassment and apology, with each partner's self-doubts and aggrieved resentments interlocking and interchanging. It might, in a way, have been a rather good short story. On Chesil Beach, however, manages to feel too thin and too long simultaneously. (...) The concentration on the consequences of their unfortunate first night seems bizarrely disproportionate, a feeling exacerbated by McEwan's sometimes slapdash plotting elsewhere. (...)On Chesil Beach leaves the reader, like its two confused, disgusted and recriminating characters, utterly unfulfilled." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
"As it turns out, McEwan’s concern for his characters’ individual humanity and his interest in the larger historical movement end up being somewhat at odds; they refuse, in the end, to embody sociological analysis. Liberation, in this novel, happens somewhere else. But that can only be to the benefit of the humanity of this small but interesting novel. I like it much more than McEwan’s last six novels, at least. (…) The novel is saved by an honest familiarity with individual psychology, and by the fact that it is, really, all about sex, which McEwan certainly does understand. The larger movements of history, however, enter into these lives in ways which are all too much like the novel that Professor Peter Hennessy might write about the period." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator
"Clean of sprawl and clutter -- not a word, incident or image seems slackly placed -- the book never hardens into the schematic. Where McEwan’s earliest handlings of one of his dominant themes -- attempts to attain and sustain loving partnerships -- often seemed diagrams of male and female stereotypes, everything here is alive with human complexity. (…) Subtle, witty, rueful and sometimes heartrending, On Chesil Beach coalesces these perceptions into a novel that is a master feat of concentration in both senses of the word." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"McEwan exposes the rationalisations and self-deceptions we all succumb to in situations of great emotional uncertainty, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another. In doing so, the book takes us deeper into two people's lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see." - Mark Mordue, Sydney Morning Herald
"Writing in the third person, McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous. (…) It's a pleasure to watch McEwan fleshing out his characters, expertly shifting chronology and point of view around as he prepares for the coming bedroom scene and its aftermath. (…) Part of the problem might be that McEwan's use of suspense makes you forget that startling revelations aren't the point, that his writing is strongest in its texture and detail and masterly narrative set-pieces." - Christopher Tayler, The Telegraph
"Because this is a slight book, it would be unfair to detail the unfolding of this evening any further. Suffice it to say that the tiny tragedy of one wedding night -- which has large-scale implications -- is heartbreaking, understandable from both parties' perspectives, and sickeningly unnecessary." - Lionel Shriver, The Telegraph
"For the reader, the ending of On Chesil Beach comes too soon. Its devastating concluding passage, in which we glimpse the future that flows from the events of the honeymoon night, feels almost like the sketch of a larger novel of which this is merely the first section. Still, the experience of finishing a novel with regret is not so frequent that one should complain of it. Better to say with gratitude that McEwan’s latest fiction is full of richness: of serious thought about the nature of love and human relationships, informed by a poetic sensibility and expressed in prose whose lyricism never errs on the side of self-indulgence." - Jane Shilling, The Times
"A new book by him has long been an event. This new book, though, On Chesil Beach, is more than an event. It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly. (…) The novel has felicities which ensure, rather than embellish, the humanity of its treatment of the lovers' predicament. (…) Ian McEwan is serious, but not solemn, in his unfolding of this predicament, and of surrounding disorders." - Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement
"This slim novel -- a novella, really -- works as a parable of failed empathy. (…) This backward-looking stance, this assumption that the couple may have prospered had they been born a few years later, risks a charge of smugness. It carries more than a whiff of author knows best. The chapters detailing their respective childhoods and schooling sometimes have the same tone, a too-assured intimation that their pasts neatly account for their present difficulties. But such criticisms fall away when McEwan returns to the wedding night itself, scrupulously describing the mordant, melancholy comedy of it, the tragedy it gives rise to." - Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice
"(B)reathtaking (…..) (I)t is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest -- innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected -- and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"So reich der schmale Roman an Beobachtungen, an Geschichten, an Beschreibungen gerade der immer wieder abstoppenden sexuellen Begegnungen der beiden ist (selten wurde ein Zungenkuss derart zum Abgewöhnen ausgenüchtert geschildert), so eng sind sie geführt. Wenn man diesem Schachtelalbtraum von einer Geschichte etwas vorwerfen kann, dann ist es -- neben der Kleinigkeit, dass McEwan sich im Epilog auf den psychologisch uninteressanteren Edward konzentriert -- ausgerechnet seine Meisterschaft: dass bis ins letzte Bild alles stimmt, dass noch die kleinste Subgeschichte ein Ziel hat, dass kaum Dunkelheiten bleiben. Wie ein wiedergefundenes Meisterwerk des Fin de siècle liest sich Am Strand" - Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt
"In seinem neuen Roman Am Strand nun überkreuzen sich diese sonst so genau kalkulierten Pläne, es geraten Literatur und Zeitdiagnose ordentlich durcheinander -- was vielleicht der Grund ist für das seltsam leblose und, schlimmer noch bei dem Thema, lustlose Scheitern dieses Sexromans vor dem Zeitalter des Sex." - Georg Dietz, Die Zeit
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
On Chesil Beach centres around the wedding night of Edward and Florence, and McEwan gets right to the point in his 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. But it is never easy. McEwan describes that wedding night in painful, exacting detail, from the meal they have in their room all the way through to the bitter end on the beach. He pulls back to fill in background -- their families and upbringing, their circumstances, their relationship -- but then always zooms back in to the wedding night. And you just know it's not going to go well. The time is 1962, and Edward and Florence are perhaps even worse equipped than most to deal with sexual difficulty than most of their contemporaries. They're deeply in love, but the physical has proved problematic during their courtship. Over the months Edward made some headway, but it never came easy, and Florence doesn't really take to much physical intimacy -- his tongue in her mouth when they, kiss for example. She has vague ideas of what to expect now, and she's dreading it:
Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.
Indeed:
being touched "down there" by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on the eye. Yes, Florence's attitude is pathological; worse yet, she hasn't made it entirely clear to Edward how she feels about this act they're supposed to engage in. Edward has some sense of Florence's qualms, but he's so over-excited about finally getting this far that he doesn't pay enough attention. The exquisitely awkward dance they do as Florence tries to maneuver herself around the inevitable is wonderfully captured by McEwan, from both their vantage points. Marvellously, it comes even worse than expected, as Edward contributes to the mess with his own sexual difficulties (let's just say that his decision to lay off gratifying himself in the days before the wedding looks like it left him more precariously bottled-up than is healthy). Instead of awkward consummation what we get is sexual disaster.
McEwan doesn't let it end there; indeed, what's decisive is how they handle this mess they've gotten themselves into. That's what what interests McEwan, and that's where their real failure lies. They finally get some of the words out into the open, as they finally try discuss sex, but they're not very good at that either -- hardly surprising, given that they've never had a go at talking about it to anyone, on top of the terrible pas-de-deux they were just part of. Both partners' pasts contribute to the situation. Edward is used to living if not a lie then at least a very warped truth, having been brought up to treat his mother as if everything she did was normal when, in fact, little is, as she's been unhinged since an accident that left her in a coma for a week when he was a young boy. His father finally tells him about the accident that left her brain-damaged when he is fourteen, news that's not really news but still changes everything. "What I've said changes absolutely nothing", his father insists -- but then that's part of the problem. As before: "the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed", and that's pretty much how they go on.
As for Florence, being a late bloomer is hardly explanation enough for her pathological feelings about sex. McEwan doesn't come right out and say it, but there are strong hints that a childhood trauma involving her father is at the root of it. Certainly, there's something off about that father-daughter relationship; even dense Edward notices that. (It's almost a shame that McEwan had to go that far; surely the unsettling weirdness of sex to a sheltered child of the times might have been enough to get him nearly as far.)
On Chesil Beach is a period-piece, McEwan focussing very hard on that time before the so-called sexual-revolution. It's not nostalgic, but he is trying to capture an era and he's very explicit about it, constantly reminding the reader of this different time (down to noting that: "This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine" when discussing their meal). It's not just the sexual mores and understanding that he wants to highlight, either: it's also very much a novel about family circumstances, opportunities, and, ultimately, class. Edward is the exception among his classmates in going on to university -- choosing London over Oxford, too, in a minor rebellion. Florence's parents are an academic (her mother) and a successful businessman; complicating the picture is the fact that Edward is hired by her father, his first real job.
Florence is a gifted and ambitious violinist, torn between the different opportunities she has; Edward has little understanding (or true appreciation) of what she does, her classical music remaining all Greek to him. They're very different people, yet McEwan convincingly presents them as in love -- the one constant, that, however, becomes yet another complicating factor.
After the wedding night McEwan also offers an extended coda, of afterwards. He focusses almost entirely on Edward here, describing the changes he undergoes and what becomes of him. It allows McEwan to make his final points -- of realising that a bit of patience, a bit of dialogue, and the power of their love would have been enough, that awkward moments can be handled if they're tackled head-on -- but leaves too much open about Florence (including the question of whether she ever got over her sex-problems).
There's been some discussion of whether On Chesil Beach is a novel or a novella. The small American edition stretches the book out to just over 200 pages -- and has A Novel printed on the cover -- but it's less a matter of length than scope, and On Chesil Beach's failing is that it remains a mere novella even while McEwan suggests (but doesn't follow through on) much larger ambitions. McEwan packs events and character-description into it, but he doesn't dare really move beyond the small story of the wedding night. It's like the notes are here for a larger novel, but everything is like the coda, background to the essential tale, but so much of it that it constantly suggests there should be more.
Successful in large part, the book nevertheless falls short of its larger ambitions, as McEwan chose a middle-ground that isn't entirely satisfying. Neither a compact novella nor a full-blown novel
On Chesil Beach is a very good book, but not entirely satisfying. Still, well worth reading.
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Friday, January 16, 2009
Some critical Reviews of "On Chesil Beach"....
A Talented Wordcrafter Describes an Improbable Honeymoon, July 6, 2007
By
Donald Mitchell "a Practical Optimist" (Boston) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) If you are easily seduced by beautiful sentences, you'll feel On Chesil Beach is a five-star book. If you love exploring inner dialogue, you'll be even more pleased with this book. If, however, you like your stories to be compelling because of their relevance and interest to your own life, you'll wonder why in the world Mr. McEwan chose to write about this particular problem of poor communications in the context of 1962. As you delve deeper into the book, you'll be even more puzzled by the book's pivotal event and the characters' reactions to it. The short book (neither novella nor full novel) is organized in five parts that seem much like the acts in a Greek tragedy. The opening scene shows a couple dining in their room at an inn. "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." The second act describes how they met. The third act takes place in their bedroom in the inn. The fourth act describes their courtship. The fifth act takes place on the beach and in their lives afterward as they attempt and fail to communicate. Mr. McEwan does a good job of capturing your attention through exploring the couple's growing tension as they move toward the consummation of their marriage. But past that point, the story seemed like a punctured balloon to me: My interest was gone. I suspect that reaction is because I didn't feel close to either character; they are more there to entertain me than to lead me into experiencing the story like the characters do. Clearly, the story would have worked much better for me if focused around a more universal trial in marriage, such as handling both sets of parents during the birth of a first child. I also thought that Mr. McEwen played the role of the Greek chorus too often . . . telling us what was going on rather than letting us see and hear the action. The fourth part seems clearly out of place; it should have preceded the third part. Unless you are drawn to beautiful sentences and images, I suggest you skip this book . . . it's a misdirected storytelling foray by a talented writer that is eminently avoidable.
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What might have been, July 4, 2007
By
Ann Nigel James (Menemsha, Martha's Vineyard, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As an Ian McEwan virgin, I was eagerly anticipating my tryst with this book--but it turned out to be as disappointing and unsatisfying as Edward's and Florence's wedding night (well, maybe not quite). McEwan does not merely ignore, but actually reverses, the wise "show, don't tell" advice about fiction writing. In his expository chapters about Edward's and Florence's backgrounds and courtship, he doesn't let us see much of them interacting and conversing with each other and their families; instead of fleshing them out in these sections, he gives us their inner thoughts, a panoply of geographical place names that won't mean much to readers outside the U.K. and a list of gourmet vegetables that Edward tastes for the first time at his future in-laws' dinner table: courgettes, aubergines and mangetouts. Conversely, in the play-by-play account of the wedding-night bedroom activities, McEwan "shows" each frame of the encounter with exhaustive, sometimes clinical detail. In this area, less is often more, and although it requires greater effort to write about physical intimacy with subtlety and allusion, it can still evoke the same intense reaction in the reader--without getting the sheets so messy. Do we really need words like "perineum" and the focus on the lone pubic hair that has escaped from Florence's knickers? Since I've already given away my copy of "On Chesil Beach," I can't use exact quotes here, but suffice it to say that the description of Edward's sticky, gummy ejaculate adhering to Florence's knees and chin is over the top--almost as if the author is trying to turn off the reader as well as Florence. The story could have ended effectively and poignantly after the couple's hopeless, near-tragic postcoital verbal battle on the beach, perhaps with a few closing thoughts from the author on the sadness and might-have-been-ness of it all. But instead, there is an anticlimactic final chapter consisting of what sound like afterthoughts, hurriedly recounting Edward's meanderings over the next 40 years. Somewhat mystifyingly, McEwan does not mention Florence's personal life after the traumatic wedding night, although he has paid equal attention to both characters until this last chapter. He does, however, offer an oblique but important clue. In a recent review of "On Chesil Beach," Christopher Hitchens concludes dismissively--and erroneously--that "Florence, a classically trained violinist, devotes the remainder of her life to a rather spinsterish role in a string quartet." Not at all. In an admiring newspaper review of a triumphant performance by that string quartet at Wigmore Hall in Oxford, the fictional reviewer singles out the exceptional playing of the first violinist, who is Florence. "She is obviously in love," writes this critic (to the best of my recollection), "not only with the music and with Mozart, but with life itself." Surely McEwan is implying that Florence, unlike Edward, has ultimately found fulfillment and happiness.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Could something please happen..., July 27, 2007
By
J. Mills "adventure seeker" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) Although I felt that this book was well-written, my attention span was challenged. The book was long on detail and short on action. Simply, it was antclimactic...
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Not My Cuppa, July 13, 2007
By
David Schweizer "Almawood" (Kansas, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) The author is dead on in his description of sexual frustration, I'll hand him that. One does indeed feel as though one knew these people, because what he is describing in the end is the fear of sexual contact. These days such experiences are rare, because by the time they are married, most people have been around the block. But fifty years ago in the world McEwan describes, sex came for the first time on honeymoon night. If the couple can be described as naive, it is only in this one area; otherwise they are sophisticated, if not jaded. The bride is having a hard time accepting French kissing, and fears she may vomit if he probes too deeply. He is afraid he may experience ecstasy before she's ready. This is described in excruciating detail. In fact, the details pile up until one is taking the bride's side: This sex business is an ordeal. The couple is a nervous wreck. The reader finds oneself wondering how the modern age ever was born with this sort of Victorian repression pressing so heavily. This all sounds very 19th century but the author is right to locate this so very late in the 20th century. We may never be free of it. These deeply disturbed individuals need help - not just sexual counseling but probing psychoanalysis and possibly shock treatment. In this sense the book is a revelation - what in God's name was done to these decent people in their childhood to make them so sick? We believe them to be permanently scarred. McEwan no doubt accomplishes what he set out to achieve, but I wonder if it was worth the trouble.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Love means never having to say..., August 9, 2007
By
JoAnne Goldberg (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I'm sorry, but what else can you say about a 22-year-old wife who ran away? And who took almost 200 pages to do so, leaving her drooling groom and an untold number of readers on a beach filled with literary quicksand, struggling to find a likeable character or a redeeming bit of plot? As I finished this book, I found myself humming "Where do I begin?" (the theme song from the movie version of Love Story). The similarities between that book and Chesil include length (both books barely squeak past 200 pages) and an ill-fated romance marked by different socioeconomic backgrounds and music. But Edward and Florence are no Oliver and Jenny, and anyone who sheds tears at the end of Chesil is probably mourning the loss of $22 (even the $13.20 amazon price seems steep.) I admire spare, chiseled prose, but McEwan's stiff, unyielding dialog feels wooden rather than trenchant. The book reads like a period piece, a stylized sitting room drama from the turn of the last century. Was Florence molested by her repulsive father? Possibly. But McEwan does his best to depict Edward as a pretty unappetizing boyfriend/husband. Was Edward's inability to sense his bride's emotional state a result of his growing up with a brain-damaged mother in a pigsty of a house? Does it matter? (I have to admit that the description of the mess was probably my favorite part of this otherwise unappealing book.) Though the story describes their courtship, the relationship has so little sizzle that it's hard to understand how the two of them managed to work up the energy to go through with a wedding. After dragging us through the beach spat (their first and only fight? and even that lacked spirit), McEwan decides to take the easy way out. So much for enduring love. While I can accept the premise for most of the book--the stilted, boring couple, the unpleasant parents, the wedding night jitters--a lifelong estrangement defies all experience and common sense. My impression was that McEwan was as tired of these colorless whiners as I was. Finally, the big question: how did this book ever get published? That's a rhetorical question, of course. If anyone else had written this book and managed to get it into the hands of a publisher, he would have been told "nice treatment--shows a lot of promise--bring it back when you're finished." But when you're Ian "Booker Prize" McEwan, editors may be a little too kind. As Ian himself might say, the result can be downright nauseous.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
The ickiness of intimacy, July 27, 2007
By
Julee Rudolf "book snob" (Oak Harbor, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As the novella (miniscule font in a small dimensioned book) begins, Florence and Edward are "young [22 years old], educated, and both virgins," newlyweds on their wedding night contemplating the evening's objective: consummation. But considering his prenuptial preparation and nature--prone to making spontaneous relationship decisions in the throes of passion, hers--uptight in the ways of intimacy, what transpires is no surprise. The couple's progress is interrupted at opportune moments for flashbacks into their pasts: a bit on their upbringings, family members, meeting, and courtship. Alternate chapters cover the wedding night. Its final dozen pages fast-forward four decades beyond the honeymoon. On the night in question, she naively suffers from a failure to understand; he just plain misunderstands. Readers, sexually squeamish or not, may also suffer when reading the minutiae of their intimacy, which is, at times, just plain too much information. Better: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Clearly in the minority, June 18, 2007
By
Alexander G. Hoffman (Toronto) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I fully realize that as I am writing this, I am outnumbered 18-1 in the reviews of this book. Frankly, I absolutly loathed it. Florence and Edward don't, for a second, feel like actual human beings. I never saw any indication of why these two were "in love" or why they would ever have gotten to the point of being married. Edward is married to a woman who pretty much recoils at intimacy and who has made it clear she doesn't want his tongue in her mouth and yet while kissing her, seems to believe she is going to...well...take him in her mouth? Florence suggests, on her wedding night, that she and Edward would be fine as long as he goes out and makes love to other women? Any of this is realistic? The ending just caps it off. It sounds like a guy with a failed life, "talking an ex pretty" believing that it would have worked only "if". I never got the characters, never cared about them, certainly didn't see any reason they were together and just didn't enjoy it.
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Not to be compared to Atonement, March 31, 2008
By
anonymous "mrw" (CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) This is a very short, very pointless novella in my opinion. It is in no way comparable to Atonement. The prose is in McEwan's usual excellent style, but I was left with the feeling, "Is that all?"
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Bittersweet tale, ultimately trite, December 18, 2008
By
Cecil Bothwell "Author of Pure Bunkum" (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) Ian McEwan set himself the writerly task of composing a novel whose entire action takes place in just a few hours and succeeded. However, along the way he failed to help the reader much care about the young couple whose lives turn on a dime on their honeymoon night. The characters are so two-dimensional that their cataclysm fails the believability test. No one THAT much in love could behave THAT stupidly. McEwan is handy with a phrase, however vacuous the result. If you are fond of TV drama, this may just be your ticket, but life is short and there are more good books to read than you will ever have time to open.
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Not as good as his previous works, July 14, 2008
By
Barbara Johnson "Avid Reader" (Baker City, OR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) I have enjoyed this author for years, but Chesil Beach didn't live up to his previous works.
By
Donald Mitchell "a Practical Optimist" (Boston) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) If you are easily seduced by beautiful sentences, you'll feel On Chesil Beach is a five-star book. If you love exploring inner dialogue, you'll be even more pleased with this book. If, however, you like your stories to be compelling because of their relevance and interest to your own life, you'll wonder why in the world Mr. McEwan chose to write about this particular problem of poor communications in the context of 1962. As you delve deeper into the book, you'll be even more puzzled by the book's pivotal event and the characters' reactions to it. The short book (neither novella nor full novel) is organized in five parts that seem much like the acts in a Greek tragedy. The opening scene shows a couple dining in their room at an inn. "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." The second act describes how they met. The third act takes place in their bedroom in the inn. The fourth act describes their courtship. The fifth act takes place on the beach and in their lives afterward as they attempt and fail to communicate. Mr. McEwan does a good job of capturing your attention through exploring the couple's growing tension as they move toward the consummation of their marriage. But past that point, the story seemed like a punctured balloon to me: My interest was gone. I suspect that reaction is because I didn't feel close to either character; they are more there to entertain me than to lead me into experiencing the story like the characters do. Clearly, the story would have worked much better for me if focused around a more universal trial in marriage, such as handling both sets of parents during the birth of a first child. I also thought that Mr. McEwen played the role of the Greek chorus too often . . . telling us what was going on rather than letting us see and hear the action. The fourth part seems clearly out of place; it should have preceded the third part. Unless you are drawn to beautiful sentences and images, I suggest you skip this book . . . it's a misdirected storytelling foray by a talented writer that is eminently avoidable.
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What might have been, July 4, 2007
By
Ann Nigel James (Menemsha, Martha's Vineyard, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As an Ian McEwan virgin, I was eagerly anticipating my tryst with this book--but it turned out to be as disappointing and unsatisfying as Edward's and Florence's wedding night (well, maybe not quite). McEwan does not merely ignore, but actually reverses, the wise "show, don't tell" advice about fiction writing. In his expository chapters about Edward's and Florence's backgrounds and courtship, he doesn't let us see much of them interacting and conversing with each other and their families; instead of fleshing them out in these sections, he gives us their inner thoughts, a panoply of geographical place names that won't mean much to readers outside the U.K. and a list of gourmet vegetables that Edward tastes for the first time at his future in-laws' dinner table: courgettes, aubergines and mangetouts. Conversely, in the play-by-play account of the wedding-night bedroom activities, McEwan "shows" each frame of the encounter with exhaustive, sometimes clinical detail. In this area, less is often more, and although it requires greater effort to write about physical intimacy with subtlety and allusion, it can still evoke the same intense reaction in the reader--without getting the sheets so messy. Do we really need words like "perineum" and the focus on the lone pubic hair that has escaped from Florence's knickers? Since I've already given away my copy of "On Chesil Beach," I can't use exact quotes here, but suffice it to say that the description of Edward's sticky, gummy ejaculate adhering to Florence's knees and chin is over the top--almost as if the author is trying to turn off the reader as well as Florence. The story could have ended effectively and poignantly after the couple's hopeless, near-tragic postcoital verbal battle on the beach, perhaps with a few closing thoughts from the author on the sadness and might-have-been-ness of it all. But instead, there is an anticlimactic final chapter consisting of what sound like afterthoughts, hurriedly recounting Edward's meanderings over the next 40 years. Somewhat mystifyingly, McEwan does not mention Florence's personal life after the traumatic wedding night, although he has paid equal attention to both characters until this last chapter. He does, however, offer an oblique but important clue. In a recent review of "On Chesil Beach," Christopher Hitchens concludes dismissively--and erroneously--that "Florence, a classically trained violinist, devotes the remainder of her life to a rather spinsterish role in a string quartet." Not at all. In an admiring newspaper review of a triumphant performance by that string quartet at Wigmore Hall in Oxford, the fictional reviewer singles out the exceptional playing of the first violinist, who is Florence. "She is obviously in love," writes this critic (to the best of my recollection), "not only with the music and with Mozart, but with life itself." Surely McEwan is implying that Florence, unlike Edward, has ultimately found fulfillment and happiness.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Could something please happen..., July 27, 2007
By
J. Mills "adventure seeker" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) Although I felt that this book was well-written, my attention span was challenged. The book was long on detail and short on action. Simply, it was antclimactic...
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Not My Cuppa, July 13, 2007
By
David Schweizer "Almawood" (Kansas, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) The author is dead on in his description of sexual frustration, I'll hand him that. One does indeed feel as though one knew these people, because what he is describing in the end is the fear of sexual contact. These days such experiences are rare, because by the time they are married, most people have been around the block. But fifty years ago in the world McEwan describes, sex came for the first time on honeymoon night. If the couple can be described as naive, it is only in this one area; otherwise they are sophisticated, if not jaded. The bride is having a hard time accepting French kissing, and fears she may vomit if he probes too deeply. He is afraid he may experience ecstasy before she's ready. This is described in excruciating detail. In fact, the details pile up until one is taking the bride's side: This sex business is an ordeal. The couple is a nervous wreck. The reader finds oneself wondering how the modern age ever was born with this sort of Victorian repression pressing so heavily. This all sounds very 19th century but the author is right to locate this so very late in the 20th century. We may never be free of it. These deeply disturbed individuals need help - not just sexual counseling but probing psychoanalysis and possibly shock treatment. In this sense the book is a revelation - what in God's name was done to these decent people in their childhood to make them so sick? We believe them to be permanently scarred. McEwan no doubt accomplishes what he set out to achieve, but I wonder if it was worth the trouble.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Love means never having to say..., August 9, 2007
By
JoAnne Goldberg (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I'm sorry, but what else can you say about a 22-year-old wife who ran away? And who took almost 200 pages to do so, leaving her drooling groom and an untold number of readers on a beach filled with literary quicksand, struggling to find a likeable character or a redeeming bit of plot? As I finished this book, I found myself humming "Where do I begin?" (the theme song from the movie version of Love Story). The similarities between that book and Chesil include length (both books barely squeak past 200 pages) and an ill-fated romance marked by different socioeconomic backgrounds and music. But Edward and Florence are no Oliver and Jenny, and anyone who sheds tears at the end of Chesil is probably mourning the loss of $22 (even the $13.20 amazon price seems steep.) I admire spare, chiseled prose, but McEwan's stiff, unyielding dialog feels wooden rather than trenchant. The book reads like a period piece, a stylized sitting room drama from the turn of the last century. Was Florence molested by her repulsive father? Possibly. But McEwan does his best to depict Edward as a pretty unappetizing boyfriend/husband. Was Edward's inability to sense his bride's emotional state a result of his growing up with a brain-damaged mother in a pigsty of a house? Does it matter? (I have to admit that the description of the mess was probably my favorite part of this otherwise unappealing book.) Though the story describes their courtship, the relationship has so little sizzle that it's hard to understand how the two of them managed to work up the energy to go through with a wedding. After dragging us through the beach spat (their first and only fight? and even that lacked spirit), McEwan decides to take the easy way out. So much for enduring love. While I can accept the premise for most of the book--the stilted, boring couple, the unpleasant parents, the wedding night jitters--a lifelong estrangement defies all experience and common sense. My impression was that McEwan was as tired of these colorless whiners as I was. Finally, the big question: how did this book ever get published? That's a rhetorical question, of course. If anyone else had written this book and managed to get it into the hands of a publisher, he would have been told "nice treatment--shows a lot of promise--bring it back when you're finished." But when you're Ian "Booker Prize" McEwan, editors may be a little too kind. As Ian himself might say, the result can be downright nauseous.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
The ickiness of intimacy, July 27, 2007
By
Julee Rudolf "book snob" (Oak Harbor, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As the novella (miniscule font in a small dimensioned book) begins, Florence and Edward are "young [22 years old], educated, and both virgins," newlyweds on their wedding night contemplating the evening's objective: consummation. But considering his prenuptial preparation and nature--prone to making spontaneous relationship decisions in the throes of passion, hers--uptight in the ways of intimacy, what transpires is no surprise. The couple's progress is interrupted at opportune moments for flashbacks into their pasts: a bit on their upbringings, family members, meeting, and courtship. Alternate chapters cover the wedding night. Its final dozen pages fast-forward four decades beyond the honeymoon. On the night in question, she naively suffers from a failure to understand; he just plain misunderstands. Readers, sexually squeamish or not, may also suffer when reading the minutiae of their intimacy, which is, at times, just plain too much information. Better: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Clearly in the minority, June 18, 2007
By
Alexander G. Hoffman (Toronto) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I fully realize that as I am writing this, I am outnumbered 18-1 in the reviews of this book. Frankly, I absolutly loathed it. Florence and Edward don't, for a second, feel like actual human beings. I never saw any indication of why these two were "in love" or why they would ever have gotten to the point of being married. Edward is married to a woman who pretty much recoils at intimacy and who has made it clear she doesn't want his tongue in her mouth and yet while kissing her, seems to believe she is going to...well...take him in her mouth? Florence suggests, on her wedding night, that she and Edward would be fine as long as he goes out and makes love to other women? Any of this is realistic? The ending just caps it off. It sounds like a guy with a failed life, "talking an ex pretty" believing that it would have worked only "if". I never got the characters, never cared about them, certainly didn't see any reason they were together and just didn't enjoy it.
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Not to be compared to Atonement, March 31, 2008
By
anonymous "mrw" (CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) This is a very short, very pointless novella in my opinion. It is in no way comparable to Atonement. The prose is in McEwan's usual excellent style, but I was left with the feeling, "Is that all?"
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Bittersweet tale, ultimately trite, December 18, 2008
By
Cecil Bothwell "Author of Pure Bunkum" (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) Ian McEwan set himself the writerly task of composing a novel whose entire action takes place in just a few hours and succeeded. However, along the way he failed to help the reader much care about the young couple whose lives turn on a dime on their honeymoon night. The characters are so two-dimensional that their cataclysm fails the believability test. No one THAT much in love could behave THAT stupidly. McEwan is handy with a phrase, however vacuous the result. If you are fond of TV drama, this may just be your ticket, but life is short and there are more good books to read than you will ever have time to open.
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Not as good as his previous works, July 14, 2008
By
Barbara Johnson "Avid Reader" (Baker City, OR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) I have enjoyed this author for years, but Chesil Beach didn't live up to his previous works.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Book Reviews - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
There are several reviews worth reading by clicking on the following contact:
Book Reviews - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Book Reviews - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Review of Grasshopper by K. Kimbrough
by Kay Kimbrough
GRASSHOPPER
Barbara Vine
Harmony Books, New York, 2000, $25.00.
Clodagh Brown is nineteen when she goes to London to attend a technical college and recover from a depression caused by a tragic accident for which she feels responsible. She lives in a basement flat provided by her mother's cousin and his wife. Unable to ride the London subway because of claustrophobia, she takes the bus to school on the days she does not skip classes altogether to investigate the architecture of London, which fascinates her. On one occasion she is directed to an underpass because of a blocked-off crime scene, and she collapses in terror while trying to reach the end of the tunnel.
Rescued by a young eccentric, Michael Silverman, known as Silver because of his almost white hair, Clodagh begins her adventure that leads to the complications of the plot. Silver is living an experiment in goodness, consciously accepting anyone into his life and into his flat on the top floor of his parents' house in spite of criminal records or character defects. With the confidence of youth, he expects to do good to anyone who needs him, although he does prevent evil when it is happening in his presence. Clodagh recognizes that she has been longing for "goodness" for a long time, so she is attracted to Silver immediately.
She does have some doubts about Silver's generosity at times, for he seems to have no regard for his money, inherited from his grandmother, that is enough to live on, but not a grand fortune. Unable to suppress her strong pragmatic bent, she quarrels with him about this carelessness.
While carrying out his experiment in goodness, Silver has learned to enjoy climbing on the roofs of London with his friend Wim for pleasure, excitement, challenge and escape from life on the ground level. Clodagh is already in love with climbing, a practice which had led to her friend's death and her exile to London. These young people are like children climbing trees, towers, mountains or castle walls. They are still immature, enjoying spying through windows, getting away with something they shouldn't do.
Although there are several mysteries presented to throw the reader off the tract, the central plot stems from this practice of going on the roofs. An adopted mixed-race child has been abducted by his parents because the social service has decided the adoption is bad for him. He should go to a mixed-race couple, no matter how happy he is. Spotting the family, who have frequently appeared in newspapers and are in hiding in a neighboring flat, Silver and Clodagh determine to help them. Their efforts lead to the conclusion, highly improbable but no stranger than real life, solving one of the novel's mysteries.
Along the way, the two young people fall in love and discover that their powers of doing good are limited by the very people they try to help, leading Clodagh to wonder about whether one should consider the kind of people in need of help before getting involved with them. They encounter true evil, dishonesty, greed and indifference in one character after another. They are innocent, inexperienced and trusting, learning about the disguises people create and the lies they tell themselves to get their way in painful steps toward wisdom.
Writing the Wexford mysteries as Ruth Rendell or psychological thrillers as Barbara Vine, the author always has a sermon to deliver without preaching or being obvious. The treatment of children by parents is one of her typical subjects; evil people have had some form of abuse as children in her books. Sometimes the abuse is neglect, sometimes physical battering and sometimes extreme indulgence, but there is always an explanation for human behavior.
A botched illegal abortion and a child who should have been taken from sick parents cause the tragedy in this novel. Other issues surface, such as the unfairness of the class system and the increasing materialism of culture. There is one bright spot: the cleaning woman Clodagh befriends lives a contented and meaningful life. On the other hand, the successful actress who loses her husband to another woman is miserable, regretting the amount of money she spent to provide her husband with a lovely home more than she regrets the loss of him.
GRASSHOPPER opens slowly; nothing much happens for the first one hundred pages. It takes patience to get into the story. Unlike some of Vine's other books, it ends almost too quickly, leaving one story, that of Liv, unfinished. It is well worth reading, however, for its understanding of the growing-up process, its array of characters and the varieties of human dramas they perform. The character of Clodagh is created with restraint. She grows up in the book, becoming good herself without leaving behind her practical self and her refreshing honesty.
GRASSHOPPER
Barbara Vine
Harmony Books, New York, 2000, $25.00.
Clodagh Brown is nineteen when she goes to London to attend a technical college and recover from a depression caused by a tragic accident for which she feels responsible. She lives in a basement flat provided by her mother's cousin and his wife. Unable to ride the London subway because of claustrophobia, she takes the bus to school on the days she does not skip classes altogether to investigate the architecture of London, which fascinates her. On one occasion she is directed to an underpass because of a blocked-off crime scene, and she collapses in terror while trying to reach the end of the tunnel.
Rescued by a young eccentric, Michael Silverman, known as Silver because of his almost white hair, Clodagh begins her adventure that leads to the complications of the plot. Silver is living an experiment in goodness, consciously accepting anyone into his life and into his flat on the top floor of his parents' house in spite of criminal records or character defects. With the confidence of youth, he expects to do good to anyone who needs him, although he does prevent evil when it is happening in his presence. Clodagh recognizes that she has been longing for "goodness" for a long time, so she is attracted to Silver immediately.
She does have some doubts about Silver's generosity at times, for he seems to have no regard for his money, inherited from his grandmother, that is enough to live on, but not a grand fortune. Unable to suppress her strong pragmatic bent, she quarrels with him about this carelessness.
While carrying out his experiment in goodness, Silver has learned to enjoy climbing on the roofs of London with his friend Wim for pleasure, excitement, challenge and escape from life on the ground level. Clodagh is already in love with climbing, a practice which had led to her friend's death and her exile to London. These young people are like children climbing trees, towers, mountains or castle walls. They are still immature, enjoying spying through windows, getting away with something they shouldn't do.
Although there are several mysteries presented to throw the reader off the tract, the central plot stems from this practice of going on the roofs. An adopted mixed-race child has been abducted by his parents because the social service has decided the adoption is bad for him. He should go to a mixed-race couple, no matter how happy he is. Spotting the family, who have frequently appeared in newspapers and are in hiding in a neighboring flat, Silver and Clodagh determine to help them. Their efforts lead to the conclusion, highly improbable but no stranger than real life, solving one of the novel's mysteries.
Along the way, the two young people fall in love and discover that their powers of doing good are limited by the very people they try to help, leading Clodagh to wonder about whether one should consider the kind of people in need of help before getting involved with them. They encounter true evil, dishonesty, greed and indifference in one character after another. They are innocent, inexperienced and trusting, learning about the disguises people create and the lies they tell themselves to get their way in painful steps toward wisdom.
Writing the Wexford mysteries as Ruth Rendell or psychological thrillers as Barbara Vine, the author always has a sermon to deliver without preaching or being obvious. The treatment of children by parents is one of her typical subjects; evil people have had some form of abuse as children in her books. Sometimes the abuse is neglect, sometimes physical battering and sometimes extreme indulgence, but there is always an explanation for human behavior.
A botched illegal abortion and a child who should have been taken from sick parents cause the tragedy in this novel. Other issues surface, such as the unfairness of the class system and the increasing materialism of culture. There is one bright spot: the cleaning woman Clodagh befriends lives a contented and meaningful life. On the other hand, the successful actress who loses her husband to another woman is miserable, regretting the amount of money she spent to provide her husband with a lovely home more than she regrets the loss of him.
GRASSHOPPER opens slowly; nothing much happens for the first one hundred pages. It takes patience to get into the story. Unlike some of Vine's other books, it ends almost too quickly, leaving one story, that of Liv, unfinished. It is well worth reading, however, for its understanding of the growing-up process, its array of characters and the varieties of human dramas they perform. The character of Clodagh is created with restraint. She grows up in the book, becoming good herself without leaving behind her practical self and her refreshing honesty.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Review of the film "The Last king of Scotland"
Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) wasn’t looking to change the world.
He just wanted an excuse to keep him from spending the rest of his life in Scotland, in medical practice with his father. So a spin of the globe leads the young doctor to service in a small village in Uganda.
Garrigan arrives in Uganda as the people are celebrating the coup that brought Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) to power. When the new president visits the village where Garrigan works, Amin’s vibrant personality instantly wins the young doctor—and the rest of the village—over. After Amin’s speech, the president is injured in an accident, and Garrigan is called upon to treat his hand—and the encounter leads him to amazing new opportunities. First, he’s offered a position as the president’s personal physician—and before long, he’s one of Amin’s most trusted advisors, often attending meetings and making decisions in the president’s absence.
For a while, Garrigan enjoys his good fortune—rejecting requests from the British government officials in Uganda for details about Amin’s policies and plans for the country. But as the president becomes more paranoid and impulsive—and as members of Amin’s staff begin to mysteriously disappear—Garrigan begins to realize that the allegations against Amin could very well be true. He starts looking for a way to get out of Uganda alive—but Amin has no intention of letting him go.
Based on the novel by Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland offers an interesting (albeit fictional) look at Idi Amin’s regime. Whitaker is enchanting as the infamous leader—and he makes it easy to see why, initially, so many people saw his rise to power as a positive thing. He’s charismatic and fun-loving and personable—exactly the kind of guy whom everyone wants to be around. Keep in mind, though, that if you’re looking for a historically-accurate overview of Amin’s rule, you’ll be disappointed—because that’s not the point of the movie. It’s not a documentary. Instead, it’s a glimpse of history, as seen from the perspective of a fictional character.
Since the film’s focus is on Garrigan, the blissfully unaware young doctor (who was loosely based on Bob Astles, a British soldier who became one of Amin’s top advisors), you’ll see what Garrigan sees—that is, very little. You’ll discover the grim reality of the situation gradually—just as Garrigan does. Though it doesn’t give you the whole story, it gives you all of Garrigan’s story. And though its conclusion is somewhat abrupt, The Last King of Scotland tells a captivating story about a fascinating historical figure—and Whitaker’s show-stealing, Oscar-winning performance alone makes it worth seeing.
President for Life - New York Times
For an excellent review of the book, "The last king of Scotland", please click on the link below:
President for Life - New York Times
President for Life - New York Times
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Here's a consensus of views on Atonement
Review Consensus: Only a few with a few reservations -- but most are very, very impressed.
From the Reviews:
"The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there's nothing McEwan can't do. (…) We're each of us, McEwan suggests, composing our lives." - Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor
"A challenging and brilliant work, it rewards careful attention to the writer's art. (…) The careful structuring of the work calls attention to its artifice and reminds us of two alternate assertions about what art does: Keats's Romantic assurance that artistic beauty is truth and Auden's disclaimer that poetry makes nothing happen. This novel shows how such seemingly contradictory statements can both be true at once. Atonement is a most impressive book, one that may indeed be McEwan's finest achievement." - Edward T. Wheeler, Commonweal
"It is rare for a critic to feel justified in using the word "masterpiece", but Ian McEwan's new book really deserves to be called one. (…) Atonement (…) is a work of astonishing depth and humanity." - The Economist
"Refracting an upper-class nightmare through a war story, McEwan fulfills the conventions he's playing with, and that very play -- in contrast to so much fashionable pomo cleverness -- leads to genuine heartbreak." - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly
"Avec des pages d'une subtilité époustouflante: spéléologue de nos abîmes intérieurs, McEwan nous offre une magistrale autopsie de la fragilité humaine, au fil d'un roman qui chatoie comme de la soie. Et qui brûle d'une lumière noire, lorsqu'il explore les inextricables ténèbres de l'âme." - André Clavel, L'Express
"In Abbitte widmet sich Ian McEwan seinen alten, den großen Themen -- Liebe und Trennung, Unschuld und Selbsterkenntnis, dem Verstreichen von Zeit --, und er tut dies souveräner, sprachmächtiger und fesselnder denn je." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"If Atonement tells an engrossing story, supremely well, it also meditates, from start to end, on story-telling and its pitfalls. (…) McEwan has never written into, and out of, literary history so brazenly before." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
"Suffice to say, any initial hesitancy about style -- any fear that, for once, McEwan may not be not in control of his material -- all play their part in his larger purpose. On the one hand, McEwan seems to be retrospectively inserting his name into the pantheon of British novelists of the 1930s and 1940s. But he is also, of course, doing more than this" - Geoff Dyer, The Guardian
"All this is at the same time an allegory of art and its moral contradictions. (…) (I)t is not hard to read this novel as McEwan's own atonement for a lucrative lifetime of magnificent professional lying. I haven't yet read Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang that beat this novel to the Booker Prize. But it must be stupendous." - Terry Eagleton, The Lancet
"Ian McEwan's new novel (…) strikes me as easily his finest (…..) McEwan's skill has here developed to the point where it gives disquiet as well as pleasure. (…) It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief." - Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
"Il n'est pas sûr qu'Expiation soit, comme on l'a dit, le livre le plus abouti de Ian McEwan. Des longueurs (les scènes de guerre), l'artifice final (le roman dans le roman) peuvent justifier qu'on continue de lui préférer l'étonnant thriller psychologique qu'était Délire d'amour. Mais, pour la première fois, McEwan s'aventure sur les terrains intimes de la nostalgie, du souvenir, de l'extrême fragilité des liens entre les êtres." - Florence Noiville, Le Monde
"Abbitte gehört zu den seltenen Romanen, die so makellos komponiert sind, dass man sie kaum aus der Hand legt, bevor nicht die letzte Seite umgeblättert ist. Über weite Strecken ist er geradezu ein Roman comme il faut. (…) Daran wird auch wenig ändern, dass ihm -- typisch McEwan -- wieder einmal eine Kleinigkeit gründlich missraten ist. "London 1999", der knapp dreissigseitige Schlussteil, hat das Zeug, als einer der verunglücktesten Romanschlüsse in die englische Literaturhistorie einzugehen." - Uwe Pralle, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
"(C)ertainly his finest and most complex novel. (…) Atonement is both a criticism of fiction and a defense of fiction; a criticism of its shaping and exclusive torque, and a defense of its ideal democratic generosity to all. A criticism of fiction's misuse; and a defense of an ideal." - James Wood, The New Republic
"On one level, it is manifestly high-calibre stuff: cool, perceptive, serious and vibrant with surprises. (…) So it is probably silly to waste time pointing out that the most glaring aspects of the book are its weaknesses and omissions. As usual, McEwan has contrived a good story; but he seems weirdly reluctant to tell it." - Robert Winder, New Statesman
"(T)his book, McEwan's grandest and most ambitious yet, is much more than the story of a single act of atonement. (…) It isn't, in fact, until you get to the surprising coda of this ravishingly written book that you begin to see the beauty of McEwan's design -- and the meaning of his title. (…) (T)rust me, Atonement's postmodern surprise ending is the perfect close to a book that explores, with beauty and rigor, the power of art and the limits of forgiveness. Briony Tallis may need to atone, but Ian McEwan has nothing to apologize for." - Daniel Mendelsohn, New York.
"Atonement will make you happy in at least three ways: It offers a love story, a war story and a story about stories, and so hits the heart, the guts and the brain. It’s Ian McEwan’s best novel (…..) Atonement is the work of a novelist at peak power; we may hope for more to come." - Adam Begley, The New York Observer
"(I)f it's plot, suspense and a Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousnesses you want, then McEwan is your man and Atonement your novel. It is his most complete and compassionate work to date." - Tom Shone, The New York Times Book Review
"The writing is conspicuously good (…) it works an authentic spell." - John Updike, The New Yorker
"(I)mpressive, engrossing, deep and surprising (…..) Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now." - Hermione Lee, The Observer
"Ian McEwan's latest novel is a dark, sleek trap of a book. (…) Lying is, after all, what Atonement is about as much as it is about guilt, penitence or, for that matter, art." - Laura Miller, Salon
"(F)lat-out brilliant (…..) McEwan's writing is lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense." - David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle
"Whether Briony’s conscience can ever be clear, and, more important, whether McEwan’s purpose can be adequately served by such a device, is open to question. That these are troubling matters is certainly well established. The ending, however, is too lenient. (…) Here his suave attempts to establish morbid feelings as inspiration for a life’s work -- and for that work to be crowned with success -- are unconvincing." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator
"It might almost be a novel by Elizabeth Bowen. (...) Both sections are immeasurably the most powerful that McEwan, already a master of narrative suspense and horror, has ever written. (...) Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book. Unshowy symmetries and patterns underlie its emotional force and psychological compulsion." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"So much for the virtues of the imagination. But McEwan is crafty. Even as he shows us the damages of story-telling, he demonstrates its beguilements on every page." - Richard Lacayo, Time
"Even by his exacting standards his latest novel is extraordinary. His trademark sentences of sustained eloquence and delicacy, which have sometimes over-rationalised the evocation of emotion, strike a deeper resonance in Atonement." - Russell Celyn Jones, The Times
"My only regret is that because he uses rapid editing and time shifts, too many of the dilemmas and tensions that are established in the first half of the book are left unresolved. (…) Still, the first part of the book is magically readable and never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart." - Jason Cowley, The Times
"McEwan continues to describe, with characteristic limpidity, the house and the dynamics of its inhabitants. His patience is doubly effective, for it generates not only an authentic environment in which the tragedy can eventually unfurl, but also an ever-burgeoning sense of menace. It would devastate the novel's effect to reveal what does in fact occur. (…) Probably the most impressive aspect to Atonement, however, is the precision with which it examines its own novelistic mechanisms." - Robert McFarland , Times Literary Supplement
"Whether it is indeed a masterpiece -- as upon first reading I am inclined to think it is -- can be determined only as time permits it to take its place in the vast body of English literature. Certainly it is the finest book yet by a writer of prodigious skills and, at this point in his career, equally prodigious accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"Ian McEwan hat einen Roman über die Literatur geschrieben, der gleichzeitig ein Roman über den Menschen ist. Gleichzeitig -- darin liegt die Kunst. Kein Buch, in dem neben diversen Figuren auch einige literaturtheoretische Überlegungen vorkommen, sondern ein Buch, das nach der Moral des Schreibens fragt und Schreiben, also Imaginieren, als besonders heikle Form sittlichen Handelns betrachtet." - Evelyn Finger, Die Zeit
From the Reviews:
"The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there's nothing McEwan can't do. (…) We're each of us, McEwan suggests, composing our lives." - Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor
"A challenging and brilliant work, it rewards careful attention to the writer's art. (…) The careful structuring of the work calls attention to its artifice and reminds us of two alternate assertions about what art does: Keats's Romantic assurance that artistic beauty is truth and Auden's disclaimer that poetry makes nothing happen. This novel shows how such seemingly contradictory statements can both be true at once. Atonement is a most impressive book, one that may indeed be McEwan's finest achievement." - Edward T. Wheeler, Commonweal
"It is rare for a critic to feel justified in using the word "masterpiece", but Ian McEwan's new book really deserves to be called one. (…) Atonement (…) is a work of astonishing depth and humanity." - The Economist
"Refracting an upper-class nightmare through a war story, McEwan fulfills the conventions he's playing with, and that very play -- in contrast to so much fashionable pomo cleverness -- leads to genuine heartbreak." - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly
"Avec des pages d'une subtilité époustouflante: spéléologue de nos abîmes intérieurs, McEwan nous offre une magistrale autopsie de la fragilité humaine, au fil d'un roman qui chatoie comme de la soie. Et qui brûle d'une lumière noire, lorsqu'il explore les inextricables ténèbres de l'âme." - André Clavel, L'Express
"In Abbitte widmet sich Ian McEwan seinen alten, den großen Themen -- Liebe und Trennung, Unschuld und Selbsterkenntnis, dem Verstreichen von Zeit --, und er tut dies souveräner, sprachmächtiger und fesselnder denn je." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"If Atonement tells an engrossing story, supremely well, it also meditates, from start to end, on story-telling and its pitfalls. (…) McEwan has never written into, and out of, literary history so brazenly before." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
"Suffice to say, any initial hesitancy about style -- any fear that, for once, McEwan may not be not in control of his material -- all play their part in his larger purpose. On the one hand, McEwan seems to be retrospectively inserting his name into the pantheon of British novelists of the 1930s and 1940s. But he is also, of course, doing more than this" - Geoff Dyer, The Guardian
"All this is at the same time an allegory of art and its moral contradictions. (…) (I)t is not hard to read this novel as McEwan's own atonement for a lucrative lifetime of magnificent professional lying. I haven't yet read Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang that beat this novel to the Booker Prize. But it must be stupendous." - Terry Eagleton, The Lancet
"Ian McEwan's new novel (…) strikes me as easily his finest (…..) McEwan's skill has here developed to the point where it gives disquiet as well as pleasure. (…) It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief." - Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
"Il n'est pas sûr qu'Expiation soit, comme on l'a dit, le livre le plus abouti de Ian McEwan. Des longueurs (les scènes de guerre), l'artifice final (le roman dans le roman) peuvent justifier qu'on continue de lui préférer l'étonnant thriller psychologique qu'était Délire d'amour. Mais, pour la première fois, McEwan s'aventure sur les terrains intimes de la nostalgie, du souvenir, de l'extrême fragilité des liens entre les êtres." - Florence Noiville, Le Monde
"Abbitte gehört zu den seltenen Romanen, die so makellos komponiert sind, dass man sie kaum aus der Hand legt, bevor nicht die letzte Seite umgeblättert ist. Über weite Strecken ist er geradezu ein Roman comme il faut. (…) Daran wird auch wenig ändern, dass ihm -- typisch McEwan -- wieder einmal eine Kleinigkeit gründlich missraten ist. "London 1999", der knapp dreissigseitige Schlussteil, hat das Zeug, als einer der verunglücktesten Romanschlüsse in die englische Literaturhistorie einzugehen." - Uwe Pralle, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
"(C)ertainly his finest and most complex novel. (…) Atonement is both a criticism of fiction and a defense of fiction; a criticism of its shaping and exclusive torque, and a defense of its ideal democratic generosity to all. A criticism of fiction's misuse; and a defense of an ideal." - James Wood, The New Republic
"On one level, it is manifestly high-calibre stuff: cool, perceptive, serious and vibrant with surprises. (…) So it is probably silly to waste time pointing out that the most glaring aspects of the book are its weaknesses and omissions. As usual, McEwan has contrived a good story; but he seems weirdly reluctant to tell it." - Robert Winder, New Statesman
"(T)his book, McEwan's grandest and most ambitious yet, is much more than the story of a single act of atonement. (…) It isn't, in fact, until you get to the surprising coda of this ravishingly written book that you begin to see the beauty of McEwan's design -- and the meaning of his title. (…) (T)rust me, Atonement's postmodern surprise ending is the perfect close to a book that explores, with beauty and rigor, the power of art and the limits of forgiveness. Briony Tallis may need to atone, but Ian McEwan has nothing to apologize for." - Daniel Mendelsohn, New York.
"Atonement will make you happy in at least three ways: It offers a love story, a war story and a story about stories, and so hits the heart, the guts and the brain. It’s Ian McEwan’s best novel (…..) Atonement is the work of a novelist at peak power; we may hope for more to come." - Adam Begley, The New York Observer
"(I)f it's plot, suspense and a Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousnesses you want, then McEwan is your man and Atonement your novel. It is his most complete and compassionate work to date." - Tom Shone, The New York Times Book Review
"The writing is conspicuously good (…) it works an authentic spell." - John Updike, The New Yorker
"(I)mpressive, engrossing, deep and surprising (…..) Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now." - Hermione Lee, The Observer
"Ian McEwan's latest novel is a dark, sleek trap of a book. (…) Lying is, after all, what Atonement is about as much as it is about guilt, penitence or, for that matter, art." - Laura Miller, Salon
"(F)lat-out brilliant (…..) McEwan's writing is lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense." - David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle
"Whether Briony’s conscience can ever be clear, and, more important, whether McEwan’s purpose can be adequately served by such a device, is open to question. That these are troubling matters is certainly well established. The ending, however, is too lenient. (…) Here his suave attempts to establish morbid feelings as inspiration for a life’s work -- and for that work to be crowned with success -- are unconvincing." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator
"It might almost be a novel by Elizabeth Bowen. (...) Both sections are immeasurably the most powerful that McEwan, already a master of narrative suspense and horror, has ever written. (...) Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book. Unshowy symmetries and patterns underlie its emotional force and psychological compulsion." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"So much for the virtues of the imagination. But McEwan is crafty. Even as he shows us the damages of story-telling, he demonstrates its beguilements on every page." - Richard Lacayo, Time
"Even by his exacting standards his latest novel is extraordinary. His trademark sentences of sustained eloquence and delicacy, which have sometimes over-rationalised the evocation of emotion, strike a deeper resonance in Atonement." - Russell Celyn Jones, The Times
"My only regret is that because he uses rapid editing and time shifts, too many of the dilemmas and tensions that are established in the first half of the book are left unresolved. (…) Still, the first part of the book is magically readable and never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart." - Jason Cowley, The Times
"McEwan continues to describe, with characteristic limpidity, the house and the dynamics of its inhabitants. His patience is doubly effective, for it generates not only an authentic environment in which the tragedy can eventually unfurl, but also an ever-burgeoning sense of menace. It would devastate the novel's effect to reveal what does in fact occur. (…) Probably the most impressive aspect to Atonement, however, is the precision with which it examines its own novelistic mechanisms." - Robert McFarland , Times Literary Supplement
"Whether it is indeed a masterpiece -- as upon first reading I am inclined to think it is -- can be determined only as time permits it to take its place in the vast body of English literature. Certainly it is the finest book yet by a writer of prodigious skills and, at this point in his career, equally prodigious accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"Ian McEwan hat einen Roman über die Literatur geschrieben, der gleichzeitig ein Roman über den Menschen ist. Gleichzeitig -- darin liegt die Kunst. Kein Buch, in dem neben diversen Figuren auch einige literaturtheoretische Überlegungen vorkommen, sondern ein Buch, das nach der Moral des Schreibens fragt und Schreiben, also Imaginieren, als besonders heikle Form sittlichen Handelns betrachtet." - Evelyn Finger, Die Zeit
Review of Atonement ~ Tom Shone
Ian McEwan's stony-titled new novel, ''Atonement,'' opens with a scene of pastoral bliss. It is 1935, an English summer is in full swing and parallelograms of morning light are making their way across the floor of the Tallis family's country house, where everyone is busy preparing for the return of Leon, the oldest son. This is exciting news for his younger sister, Briony, who is putting on a production of her new play. It's not such good news for her older sister, Cecilia, who will have to face her childhood friend, Robbie, whom she spent most of her time at Cambridge pointedly ignoring, and secretly falling in love with. So far, then, ''Atonement'' would seem to have very little to atone for, unless you were to count an above-average chance of being made into a Merchant-Ivory film.
This in itself should be enough to have hardened McEwan fans anxiously flicking back to check that it is indeed his name on the dust jacket. Just a few novels ago, McEwan was offering useful tips on how best to saw through a human thigh bone (remove the trousers first), and his last novel, ''Amsterdam,'' which won the 1998 Booker Prize, ended with a mutual euthanasia pact. Try getting that past Emma Thompson's agent. Yet here is McEwan, at the helm of what looks suspiciously like the sort of English novel -- irises in full bloom, young lovers following suit -- that English novelists stopped writing more than 30 years ago.
Gradually, though, a familiar disquiet begins to settle over the novel like dust. There's that date for a start, four years distant from the onset of the war, but still a little too close for comfort. Then there's the arrival of Leon's friend, Paul Marshall, a Quilty-like bore whose gaze lingers on the Tallis girls just that fraction of a second too long. Then there's the small matter of Briony. Or perhaps not so small; at 13, Briony stands on the threshold of adolescence, with all its itchy self-dramatizing instincts and glamorous mood swings. Contemplating the loss of a favorite dress, ''Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead.''
Such fantasies seem harmless enough, and another novelist might have mined them for their charm alone, but McEwan has always had an eye on the darker veins that course through children's imaginations. His recent book for children, ''The Daydreamer,'' had a nice Roald Dahl-like streak of malice to it, and his adult fiction has always heeded the close alliance between creative and destructive impulses. When Briony's plans for her play are derailed, her dramatic instincts look to feed elsewhere, and they find scandalized sustenance in glimpsed intimacies between Robbie and Cecilia. Before the night is out, a crime will be committed, a lie told and a little girl who thought herself the heroine of her own drama will find herself playing the villain in someone else's. So much for the soft bloom of innocence.
It would be shame to divulge exactly what happens on that night -- one of the great things about McEwan is how much faith he has in the urgings of plot. His books have a natural 45-degree tilt, leaning forward, through a fog of mounting unease, toward claret-dark revelation. Interestingly, what stays with you afterward is the unease, not the revelation. Rereading his novel ''Black Dogs'' recently, I remembered that the climax involved some dogs -- black ones, as I recall -- but couldn't remember what it was the mutts got up to. This is not an insult; on the contrary, McEwan seems instinctively to have found a perfect fictional equivalent for the ways and workings of trauma -- for its blind spots and sneaky obliquities.
The events of that night, for instance, account for only half the plot of ''Atonement'': the rest is reaction, ripple, repair. When the action reopens a few years later, Robbie is dodging German shells in France, Cecilia is praying for his safe return and Briony, now estranged from the both of them and working as a nurse, is busy piecing together soldiers in a London hospital: ''Here and there one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other, revealing its fatty layers, and little obtrusions like miniature bunches of red grapes forced up from the fissure.''
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Tom Shone is a film critic for The Daily Telegraph of London.
This in itself should be enough to have hardened McEwan fans anxiously flicking back to check that it is indeed his name on the dust jacket. Just a few novels ago, McEwan was offering useful tips on how best to saw through a human thigh bone (remove the trousers first), and his last novel, ''Amsterdam,'' which won the 1998 Booker Prize, ended with a mutual euthanasia pact. Try getting that past Emma Thompson's agent. Yet here is McEwan, at the helm of what looks suspiciously like the sort of English novel -- irises in full bloom, young lovers following suit -- that English novelists stopped writing more than 30 years ago.
Gradually, though, a familiar disquiet begins to settle over the novel like dust. There's that date for a start, four years distant from the onset of the war, but still a little too close for comfort. Then there's the arrival of Leon's friend, Paul Marshall, a Quilty-like bore whose gaze lingers on the Tallis girls just that fraction of a second too long. Then there's the small matter of Briony. Or perhaps not so small; at 13, Briony stands on the threshold of adolescence, with all its itchy self-dramatizing instincts and glamorous mood swings. Contemplating the loss of a favorite dress, ''Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead.''
Such fantasies seem harmless enough, and another novelist might have mined them for their charm alone, but McEwan has always had an eye on the darker veins that course through children's imaginations. His recent book for children, ''The Daydreamer,'' had a nice Roald Dahl-like streak of malice to it, and his adult fiction has always heeded the close alliance between creative and destructive impulses. When Briony's plans for her play are derailed, her dramatic instincts look to feed elsewhere, and they find scandalized sustenance in glimpsed intimacies between Robbie and Cecilia. Before the night is out, a crime will be committed, a lie told and a little girl who thought herself the heroine of her own drama will find herself playing the villain in someone else's. So much for the soft bloom of innocence.
It would be shame to divulge exactly what happens on that night -- one of the great things about McEwan is how much faith he has in the urgings of plot. His books have a natural 45-degree tilt, leaning forward, through a fog of mounting unease, toward claret-dark revelation. Interestingly, what stays with you afterward is the unease, not the revelation. Rereading his novel ''Black Dogs'' recently, I remembered that the climax involved some dogs -- black ones, as I recall -- but couldn't remember what it was the mutts got up to. This is not an insult; on the contrary, McEwan seems instinctively to have found a perfect fictional equivalent for the ways and workings of trauma -- for its blind spots and sneaky obliquities.
The events of that night, for instance, account for only half the plot of ''Atonement'': the rest is reaction, ripple, repair. When the action reopens a few years later, Robbie is dodging German shells in France, Cecilia is praying for his safe return and Briony, now estranged from the both of them and working as a nurse, is busy piecing together soldiers in a London hospital: ''Here and there one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other, revealing its fatty layers, and little obtrusions like miniature bunches of red grapes forced up from the fissure.''
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Tom Shone is a film critic for The Daily Telegraph of London.
Frank Kermode on Ian McEwan.....Atonement......
Point of View
Frank Kermode
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Minor resemblances between this novel by Ian McEwan and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew have already been noticed and are of some interest. James left a quite full record of the development of his story, which described modern divorce and adultery from the point of view of a young girl. It had its roots in Solomon’s offer to satisfy rival maternal claimants by cutting the disputed child in half, but it grew far more complicated in the years between the first notebook entry on this topic and the completion of the novel about ‘the partagé child’. First there was a plan for a 10,000-word story, which, in prospect, set delightful technical problems: about ‘the question of time’ – ‘the little secrets in regard to the expression of duration’ – and about the need to use the ‘scenic method’. In the notebooks James prays that he not be tempted to ‘slacken my deep observance of this strong and beneficent method – this intensely structural, intensely hinged and jointed preliminary frame’. Only when the frame was built was he ready to start what he called the ‘doing’.
Ian McEwan’s new novel, which strikes me as easily his finest, has a frame that is properly hinged and jointed and apt for the conduct of the ‘march of action’, which James described as ‘the only thing that really, for me at least, will produire L’OEUVRE’. Not quite how McEwan would put it, perhaps, but still the substance of his method, especially if one adds a keen technical interest in another Jamesian obsession, the point of view. His central character is a 13-year-old girl called Briony, already a maker of stories and plays, and so already a writer of fictions that have only their own kind of truth and are dependent on fantasies which readers are invited to share, with whatever measure of scepticism or credulity they can muster.
Briony is the daughter of an important civil servant who has a grand though ugly country house. The year is 1935 and, since a war is threatening, he has exhausting responsibilities in Whitehall. Along with other more genial preoccupations, his London duties keep him off the scene, even on the special occasion during which the story begins. On the hot summer’s day of this celebration, Briony, in one of those strange moments that chance or fate delivers into the hands of the novelist, or more specifically into Ian McEwan’s, happens to see her elder sister, Cecilia, just down from Girton, take off her outer clothes and jump into a fountain – this in the presence of Robbie Turner, the son of the family’s faithful cleaning lady, who has also been sent, at the expense of the girls’ father, to Cambridge. Robbie did well there, but has now decided to start again and qualify as a doctor – one who ‘would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial of the inevitable’: much as if he had decided to be a novelist. However, the monstrous patterns of fate begin to involve him now, at the fountain, before he can even start a medical career. The episode at the fountain changes his plan, as it changes everything.
McEwan’s readers will remember other random and decisive changes of this kind, violent or subtle interruptions of everyday time and behaviour, intrusions of dream-like horror, like the snatching of the three-year-old girl in The Child in Time or the rogue balloon in Enduring Love. The trick works less well, I think, in the more recent Amsterdam, with its slightly ostentatious symmetries, its carefully laid clues concerning euthanasia and crooked Dutch doctors – these give the book structure, but the ‘doing’ is less interesting. The failure of the composer’s final symphony, after we have heard so much about the process of composition, might uncharitably be seen as an allegory of the novel it occurs in. There is, however, a finely written scene in which the composer, hiking in the Lakes, declines to help a woman walker when she is violently assaulted; this nasty bit of reality is interfering with the musical thought he had come to work out, and he decides that the music comes first, as his story might to a novelist.
The fountain scene in this new book has as much force, and has also that touch of the grotesque which is one of this author’s special talents. Cecilia has been half-playfully disputing with Robbie the right to fill a valuable vase with water from the fountain. He wants to do it for her. Their little struggle proves more serious than it should have been; as they wrestle for the vase two triangular pieces break off its lip and fall into the fountain. (Triangles, by the way, form a minor leitmotif for readers to puzzle over.) Robbie prepares to plunge in and recover the pieces; but Cecilia gets her clothes off and plunges first. The wounded vase will later meet an even worse fate, and this premonitory damage echoes what happens to other fragile objects highly valued but easily ruined, such as Cecilia’s virginity, and indeed life itself.
A numerous company is preparing for dinner when Briony, happening to go into the library, finds Robbie and Cecilia violently engaged in the act of sex. Robbie had written Cecilia a harmless letter, but accidentally sent in its place a coarse little meditation on his lust for her, and specifically, the message insists, for her cunt. The letter had been delivered to Cecilia by the hand of Briony, who, being a writer, naturally had a look at it. It was this letter that turned Cecilia on and, when circulated, turned everybody else off.
Meanwhile some young cousins, derelict because of a divorce, were staying with the family, and at the awful dinner that evening the unhappy nine-year-old twin boy cousins, one with a triangular piece missing from his ear, ran away. During the search for them their sister, Lola, a bit older than Briony, is sexually assaulted, and despite the darkness Briony thinks she is able to identify the assailant as the lustful Robbie. Hence his imprisonment. He is released to the Army, and, in a deeply researched and imagined episode, takes part in the Dunkirk evacuation. A point of interest here is that Robbie and his associates, heading for the coast with a demoralised remnant of the BEF, are surprised to see brisk, disciplined Guards regiments going in the opposite direction, presumably to serve as a doomed rearguard. Here as elsewhere we are left to wonder who picked up this point and put it into the story. Did it, in fact, happen? Who will vouch for its truth? Has the author a patriotic weakness for the Guards? It’s a small point, but it raises the sort of question that comes up over and over again in this novel. By way of ambiguous answer the narrative, when it ends, is signed ‘B.T.’, Briony’s initials.
Briony’s play, The Trials of Arabella, written for the house party, but for various reasons not then performed, was the fantasy of a very young writer enchanted by the idea that she could in a few pages create a world complete with terrors and climaxes, and a necessary sort of knowingness. The entire novel is a grown-up version of this achievement, a conflict or coalescence of truth and fantasy, a novelist’s treatment of what is fantasised as fact. Briony is the novelist, living, as her mother is said to have perceived (or the author, or Briony, says she had perceived), in ‘an intact inner world of which the writing was no more than the visible surface’. We merely have to trust somebody to be telling something like the truth. In the scene where Robbie and Cecilia make love in a corner of the darkened library (a key scene, terribly difficult for anybody to write) Briony, entering, sees her sister’s ‘terrified eyes’ over Robbie’s shoulder. Who is saying she is terrified? Who is saying Cecilia ‘struggled free’ of her heavy partner? Surely she was carried away by lust and henceforth became Robbie’s devoted lover? We can only suppose that Briony, writing at the very end of the complex affair, is imagining what she would have made of the scene at 13. She must have read the scene wrongly, for we learn that the lovers were actually ‘in a state of tranquil joy’ as they ‘confronted the momentous change they had achieved’. At this moment Cecilia is overwhelmed by the beauty of a face she had taken for granted all her life. Can she also have had terrified eyes? Or could Briony have taken for terror an expression that meant something quite different?
For contrivances such as these the novelist could be forgiven a Jamesian note of self-congratulation and self-encouragement, usually, in the Master’s case, expressed in French: voyons, voyons, mon bon! Let us see what I, and later what they, can make of this treatment. When Briony comes to the rescue of her cousin Lola the explanation of what happened is not Lola’s but Briony’s: ‘It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.’ Her positive identification of the rapist is not explicitly endorsed by Lola; we are even allowed to suspect that this flirtatious child knew perfectly well the attacker wasn’t Robbie, that it was really a friend of Briony’s brother, down there only for a visit but destined to play a heavy part in the sequel. But the less willing Lola was to admit the truth the greater Briony’s confidence in her own story, whose impact on reality was so disastrous to Robbie. Her version of the truth was reinforced by that letter and the terrible word it contained. And the girl persisted in it beyond the point where her testimony could be revoked.
To write about the virtuosities of the later pages – what happens to Lola and her assailant, whether Cecilia and Robbie get together, what became of the grand ugly house – would be to deprive readers of satisfactions to which they are entitled; but it leaves the reviewer in a quandary. To discuss the ‘doing’ properly it would be essential to allude to the whole book. It might reasonably be revealed that both Cecilia and Briony, now estranged because of the success of the younger girl’s evidence against Robbie, serve in the war as nurses (again the enviable specificities, the sometimes apparently absurd hospital discipline, the drawing on reserves of endurance, the hideous and hopeless wounds).
The title of the book seems to suggest that Briony will do something by way of atonement, but nothing quite fitting that description seems to occur. The problem, we finally learn, and as might have been expected, was this: ‘how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. No atonement for God, or novelists . . .’
These words occur in the epilogue, as I call it, a final chapter dated ‘London, 1999’. Briony now, as again one might have expected, has behind her a successful career as a novelist. At 77 she is suffering from a succession of tiny strokes, and her memory, she is told, is likely to fail progressively. Like Ian McEwan, she has recently been working in the library of the Imperial War Museum. Her book is finished, like Ian McEwan’s, and it has apparently exactly the same story. There follow reports of a series of quite implausible encounters. ‘If I really cared so much about facts,’ she writes, ‘I should have written a different kind of book.’ And she wishes she could write a happy conclusion, all well and lovers alive and reunited – ‘it’s not impossible.’ In fact she has already written it and we have already read it and probably believed it.
McEwan’s skill has here developed to the point where it gives disquiet as well as pleasure. Perhaps to be disquieting has always been his ambition; the first stories were in various ways startling. By now he is such a virtuoso that one is tempted to imagine that the best readers of this book might be Henry James and Ford Madox Ford. It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief.
For example, we are told that Briony, while still a wartime nurse, sent a novella called Two Figures by a Fountain to Horizon. It was not accepted, but the editor, Cyril Connolly (or anyway someone who signs himself simply as ‘C.C.’), wrote her a letter running to over a thousand words, with favourable comment on sentences we have already admired. The implication is that the present novel is an expansion of that early work. We can even spot changes from novella to novel (for example, Cecilia goes ‘fully dressed’ into the fountain) and might attribute the improvements to C.C.’s kindly advice. He wonders if the young author ‘doesn’t owe a little too much to the techniques of Mrs Woolf’. The novella, he claims, lacks the interest of forward movement, ‘an underlying pull of simple narrative’. He thinks the vase should not have been Ming (too expensive to take out of doors; perhaps Sèvres or Nymphenburg?) The Bernini fountain she mentions is not in the Piazza Navona but in the Piazza Barberini (the error is corrected in the novel). He complains that Briony’s story ends with the damp patch left beside the fountain when Robbie and Cecilia have gone. (It is still there in the longer version but it is there only a beginning.) Elizabeth Bowen, it seems, read the novella with interest, but thought it cloying, except when it echoed Dusty Answer. The author is invited to drop by at the office for a glass of wine whenever she has the time. Had she, by the way, a sister at Girton six or seven years ago? Given her hospital address, is she a doctor or an invalid?
In the first place parody, this brilliant invention does quite a lot of what James called structural work. It is funny because although it sounds rather like him, Connolly would never have written such a letter; it lives, like the book as a whole, on that borderline between fantasy and fact that is indeed the territory of fiction. McEwan has examined this territory with intelligent and creative attention, and it could probably be said that no contemporary of his has shown such passionate dedication to the art of the novel.
Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Retripotent · B. S. Johnson
Who has the gall? · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
No Tricks · Raymond Carver
Maximum Assistance from Good Cooking, Good Clothes, Good Drink · Auden’s Shakespeare
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
Here she is · Zadie Smith
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
Our Muddy Vesture · Frank Kermode watches Pacino’s Merchant of Venice
Frank Kermode
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Minor resemblances between this novel by Ian McEwan and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew have already been noticed and are of some interest. James left a quite full record of the development of his story, which described modern divorce and adultery from the point of view of a young girl. It had its roots in Solomon’s offer to satisfy rival maternal claimants by cutting the disputed child in half, but it grew far more complicated in the years between the first notebook entry on this topic and the completion of the novel about ‘the partagé child’. First there was a plan for a 10,000-word story, which, in prospect, set delightful technical problems: about ‘the question of time’ – ‘the little secrets in regard to the expression of duration’ – and about the need to use the ‘scenic method’. In the notebooks James prays that he not be tempted to ‘slacken my deep observance of this strong and beneficent method – this intensely structural, intensely hinged and jointed preliminary frame’. Only when the frame was built was he ready to start what he called the ‘doing’.
Ian McEwan’s new novel, which strikes me as easily his finest, has a frame that is properly hinged and jointed and apt for the conduct of the ‘march of action’, which James described as ‘the only thing that really, for me at least, will produire L’OEUVRE’. Not quite how McEwan would put it, perhaps, but still the substance of his method, especially if one adds a keen technical interest in another Jamesian obsession, the point of view. His central character is a 13-year-old girl called Briony, already a maker of stories and plays, and so already a writer of fictions that have only their own kind of truth and are dependent on fantasies which readers are invited to share, with whatever measure of scepticism or credulity they can muster.
Briony is the daughter of an important civil servant who has a grand though ugly country house. The year is 1935 and, since a war is threatening, he has exhausting responsibilities in Whitehall. Along with other more genial preoccupations, his London duties keep him off the scene, even on the special occasion during which the story begins. On the hot summer’s day of this celebration, Briony, in one of those strange moments that chance or fate delivers into the hands of the novelist, or more specifically into Ian McEwan’s, happens to see her elder sister, Cecilia, just down from Girton, take off her outer clothes and jump into a fountain – this in the presence of Robbie Turner, the son of the family’s faithful cleaning lady, who has also been sent, at the expense of the girls’ father, to Cambridge. Robbie did well there, but has now decided to start again and qualify as a doctor – one who ‘would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial of the inevitable’: much as if he had decided to be a novelist. However, the monstrous patterns of fate begin to involve him now, at the fountain, before he can even start a medical career. The episode at the fountain changes his plan, as it changes everything.
McEwan’s readers will remember other random and decisive changes of this kind, violent or subtle interruptions of everyday time and behaviour, intrusions of dream-like horror, like the snatching of the three-year-old girl in The Child in Time or the rogue balloon in Enduring Love. The trick works less well, I think, in the more recent Amsterdam, with its slightly ostentatious symmetries, its carefully laid clues concerning euthanasia and crooked Dutch doctors – these give the book structure, but the ‘doing’ is less interesting. The failure of the composer’s final symphony, after we have heard so much about the process of composition, might uncharitably be seen as an allegory of the novel it occurs in. There is, however, a finely written scene in which the composer, hiking in the Lakes, declines to help a woman walker when she is violently assaulted; this nasty bit of reality is interfering with the musical thought he had come to work out, and he decides that the music comes first, as his story might to a novelist.
The fountain scene in this new book has as much force, and has also that touch of the grotesque which is one of this author’s special talents. Cecilia has been half-playfully disputing with Robbie the right to fill a valuable vase with water from the fountain. He wants to do it for her. Their little struggle proves more serious than it should have been; as they wrestle for the vase two triangular pieces break off its lip and fall into the fountain. (Triangles, by the way, form a minor leitmotif for readers to puzzle over.) Robbie prepares to plunge in and recover the pieces; but Cecilia gets her clothes off and plunges first. The wounded vase will later meet an even worse fate, and this premonitory damage echoes what happens to other fragile objects highly valued but easily ruined, such as Cecilia’s virginity, and indeed life itself.
A numerous company is preparing for dinner when Briony, happening to go into the library, finds Robbie and Cecilia violently engaged in the act of sex. Robbie had written Cecilia a harmless letter, but accidentally sent in its place a coarse little meditation on his lust for her, and specifically, the message insists, for her cunt. The letter had been delivered to Cecilia by the hand of Briony, who, being a writer, naturally had a look at it. It was this letter that turned Cecilia on and, when circulated, turned everybody else off.
Meanwhile some young cousins, derelict because of a divorce, were staying with the family, and at the awful dinner that evening the unhappy nine-year-old twin boy cousins, one with a triangular piece missing from his ear, ran away. During the search for them their sister, Lola, a bit older than Briony, is sexually assaulted, and despite the darkness Briony thinks she is able to identify the assailant as the lustful Robbie. Hence his imprisonment. He is released to the Army, and, in a deeply researched and imagined episode, takes part in the Dunkirk evacuation. A point of interest here is that Robbie and his associates, heading for the coast with a demoralised remnant of the BEF, are surprised to see brisk, disciplined Guards regiments going in the opposite direction, presumably to serve as a doomed rearguard. Here as elsewhere we are left to wonder who picked up this point and put it into the story. Did it, in fact, happen? Who will vouch for its truth? Has the author a patriotic weakness for the Guards? It’s a small point, but it raises the sort of question that comes up over and over again in this novel. By way of ambiguous answer the narrative, when it ends, is signed ‘B.T.’, Briony’s initials.
Briony’s play, The Trials of Arabella, written for the house party, but for various reasons not then performed, was the fantasy of a very young writer enchanted by the idea that she could in a few pages create a world complete with terrors and climaxes, and a necessary sort of knowingness. The entire novel is a grown-up version of this achievement, a conflict or coalescence of truth and fantasy, a novelist’s treatment of what is fantasised as fact. Briony is the novelist, living, as her mother is said to have perceived (or the author, or Briony, says she had perceived), in ‘an intact inner world of which the writing was no more than the visible surface’. We merely have to trust somebody to be telling something like the truth. In the scene where Robbie and Cecilia make love in a corner of the darkened library (a key scene, terribly difficult for anybody to write) Briony, entering, sees her sister’s ‘terrified eyes’ over Robbie’s shoulder. Who is saying she is terrified? Who is saying Cecilia ‘struggled free’ of her heavy partner? Surely she was carried away by lust and henceforth became Robbie’s devoted lover? We can only suppose that Briony, writing at the very end of the complex affair, is imagining what she would have made of the scene at 13. She must have read the scene wrongly, for we learn that the lovers were actually ‘in a state of tranquil joy’ as they ‘confronted the momentous change they had achieved’. At this moment Cecilia is overwhelmed by the beauty of a face she had taken for granted all her life. Can she also have had terrified eyes? Or could Briony have taken for terror an expression that meant something quite different?
For contrivances such as these the novelist could be forgiven a Jamesian note of self-congratulation and self-encouragement, usually, in the Master’s case, expressed in French: voyons, voyons, mon bon! Let us see what I, and later what they, can make of this treatment. When Briony comes to the rescue of her cousin Lola the explanation of what happened is not Lola’s but Briony’s: ‘It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.’ Her positive identification of the rapist is not explicitly endorsed by Lola; we are even allowed to suspect that this flirtatious child knew perfectly well the attacker wasn’t Robbie, that it was really a friend of Briony’s brother, down there only for a visit but destined to play a heavy part in the sequel. But the less willing Lola was to admit the truth the greater Briony’s confidence in her own story, whose impact on reality was so disastrous to Robbie. Her version of the truth was reinforced by that letter and the terrible word it contained. And the girl persisted in it beyond the point where her testimony could be revoked.
To write about the virtuosities of the later pages – what happens to Lola and her assailant, whether Cecilia and Robbie get together, what became of the grand ugly house – would be to deprive readers of satisfactions to which they are entitled; but it leaves the reviewer in a quandary. To discuss the ‘doing’ properly it would be essential to allude to the whole book. It might reasonably be revealed that both Cecilia and Briony, now estranged because of the success of the younger girl’s evidence against Robbie, serve in the war as nurses (again the enviable specificities, the sometimes apparently absurd hospital discipline, the drawing on reserves of endurance, the hideous and hopeless wounds).
The title of the book seems to suggest that Briony will do something by way of atonement, but nothing quite fitting that description seems to occur. The problem, we finally learn, and as might have been expected, was this: ‘how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. No atonement for God, or novelists . . .’
These words occur in the epilogue, as I call it, a final chapter dated ‘London, 1999’. Briony now, as again one might have expected, has behind her a successful career as a novelist. At 77 she is suffering from a succession of tiny strokes, and her memory, she is told, is likely to fail progressively. Like Ian McEwan, she has recently been working in the library of the Imperial War Museum. Her book is finished, like Ian McEwan’s, and it has apparently exactly the same story. There follow reports of a series of quite implausible encounters. ‘If I really cared so much about facts,’ she writes, ‘I should have written a different kind of book.’ And she wishes she could write a happy conclusion, all well and lovers alive and reunited – ‘it’s not impossible.’ In fact she has already written it and we have already read it and probably believed it.
McEwan’s skill has here developed to the point where it gives disquiet as well as pleasure. Perhaps to be disquieting has always been his ambition; the first stories were in various ways startling. By now he is such a virtuoso that one is tempted to imagine that the best readers of this book might be Henry James and Ford Madox Ford. It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief.
For example, we are told that Briony, while still a wartime nurse, sent a novella called Two Figures by a Fountain to Horizon. It was not accepted, but the editor, Cyril Connolly (or anyway someone who signs himself simply as ‘C.C.’), wrote her a letter running to over a thousand words, with favourable comment on sentences we have already admired. The implication is that the present novel is an expansion of that early work. We can even spot changes from novella to novel (for example, Cecilia goes ‘fully dressed’ into the fountain) and might attribute the improvements to C.C.’s kindly advice. He wonders if the young author ‘doesn’t owe a little too much to the techniques of Mrs Woolf’. The novella, he claims, lacks the interest of forward movement, ‘an underlying pull of simple narrative’. He thinks the vase should not have been Ming (too expensive to take out of doors; perhaps Sèvres or Nymphenburg?) The Bernini fountain she mentions is not in the Piazza Navona but in the Piazza Barberini (the error is corrected in the novel). He complains that Briony’s story ends with the damp patch left beside the fountain when Robbie and Cecilia have gone. (It is still there in the longer version but it is there only a beginning.) Elizabeth Bowen, it seems, read the novella with interest, but thought it cloying, except when it echoed Dusty Answer. The author is invited to drop by at the office for a glass of wine whenever she has the time. Had she, by the way, a sister at Girton six or seven years ago? Given her hospital address, is she a doctor or an invalid?
In the first place parody, this brilliant invention does quite a lot of what James called structural work. It is funny because although it sounds rather like him, Connolly would never have written such a letter; it lives, like the book as a whole, on that borderline between fantasy and fact that is indeed the territory of fiction. McEwan has examined this territory with intelligent and creative attention, and it could probably be said that no contemporary of his has shown such passionate dedication to the art of the novel.
Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Retripotent · B. S. Johnson
Who has the gall? · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
No Tricks · Raymond Carver
Maximum Assistance from Good Cooking, Good Clothes, Good Drink · Auden’s Shakespeare
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
Here she is · Zadie Smith
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
Our Muddy Vesture · Frank Kermode watches Pacino’s Merchant of Venice
Friday, May 9, 2008
Shriver thinks.........
How harshly do the sins of the son reflect upon the mother?
That’s the contentious question posed by Lionel Shriver’s seventh novel ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin,’ which takes the form of narrator Eva Khatchadourian’s letters to her ex-husband Franklin following a Columbine-style high school massacre perpetrated by their son.
The book has caused quite a stir stateside by dint of it’s undermining of conventional parental stereotypes – Eva is an ambitious and rigorously analytical character who decides to have a child largely out of restlessness rather than any great biological imperative. To her horror – and the reader’s – she finds herself not only failing to form a bond with Kevin, but growing to outright dislike the kid, a problem that only escalates as he gets older.
The novel’s premise is a potent one because it dares to breach a subject that is borderline taboo in societies where children are indulged rather than reared. It’s not that Eva is a bad mother per se, in fact she’s dutiful to the point of pathology, but she just doesn’t enjoy being around her son.
Clearly the author, whose sartorial sense and manner of speech are as precisely observed as her prose, has hit a nerve.
“Despite the fact that it hasn’t been very heavily promoted, the degree that it succeeded has been all word of mouth stuff,” she acknowledges. “There’s clearly some kind of a hunger out there.”
Does she get people thanking her for –
“Being more honest about motherhood? Yeah. Very grateful that somebody has tried to get across what it’s like to raise a child.”
Shriver herself decided at the age of eight that parenting wasn’t for her. Yet her insights into the minutiae of motherhood are pretty impressive.
“Well, I do have an imagination,” she says. “Or rather, I have vivid fears. Ultimately I was still trying to examine my own fears of a potential coldness in me, a selfishness that would exclude extending myself to particular children, because I think children are particular. As a child, I felt like a person with volition rather than a being that was being acted upon from without, and therefore my parents had to contend with me as a real person whom they have not always liked. In writing the book I started getting more sympathetic, less condemnatory, stopped looking at it from a child’s perspective. What I was afraid of for myself, if I were to become a mother, was just… having someone around the house I didn’t want there. A kid is a stranger in the house. You have to get to know him.”
Which may seem obvious, but it’s quite the wake-up call for those who assume having children will solve their own existential crises, or save their marriage.
“They don’t understand that it’s going to try the marriage,” Shriver observes. “I think people bring a completely different expectation to parenthood now. It’s not about your kid going to till your fields, it’s about them giving you a new sense of meaning, that they are going to fill out your life emotionally and reward you with their love, and your life is going to be richer, fuller and more exciting in those senses. And that’s actually expecting a fuck of a lot. And it doesn’t always come across.”
In Kevin’s case, that shock is compounded by his obnoxious nature.
“We’ve all been in the restaurant with this nyah-nyah kid, and you want to kill him,” Shriver says. “And his parents don’t do anything. And that’s where Eva and Franklin divide, because Franklin is completely indulgent and Eva is much more an old style disciplinarian.”
But more than that, as he grows older, Kevin becomes more sullen, disconnected, lacking in empathy and disdainful of humanity in general.
Was his psychological profile assembled from case studies of high school killers?
“Not really. That was just stuff I made up. As a construct, I liked it. And the whole concept of Kevin was really of someone who wasn’t, as you say, seething with fury, but who was just… bored. Bored to the point of disgust with everything. Essentially not interested in being here, and a little resentful of the fact that he was, because nothing about being alive interested him.”
Which is a hallmark of most male adolescents – at least until they become interested in sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.
“You see it all the time, that feigned boredom, I’ve-seen-it-all-before, nothing impresses me, the physical lassitude, clothing dripping off them. What made it an interesting character to write is that it’s usually a phase that kids go through and come out the other side of, but I imparted it all the way back to infancy.”
It’s a chilling notion that, beyond all the sociological and nurture-versus-nature factors, there can be such a thing as a bona fide bad seed, irredeemable from birth.
“I read an interesting article in the New York Times about psychologists who worked with and have written about mass murderers,” Shriver says, “and there’s this movement arguing that we need to bring in ‘evil’ as a clinical diagnosis, that there are single cases they have contended with that so boggle the mind there’s no other word that will do. I’m of two minds about that impulse, but clearly there is this sub-category that they’ve been exposed to that is constantly upsetting them and they need a label for it in order to accommodate it, and probably in order to quarantine those experiences they’ve had from the rest of life because they’re so upsetting. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case in this book, but I guess ultimately I do believe that some people are born irredeemable.”
© Peter Murphy
Reproduced with permission
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.
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© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.
That’s the contentious question posed by Lionel Shriver’s seventh novel ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin,’ which takes the form of narrator Eva Khatchadourian’s letters to her ex-husband Franklin following a Columbine-style high school massacre perpetrated by their son.
The book has caused quite a stir stateside by dint of it’s undermining of conventional parental stereotypes – Eva is an ambitious and rigorously analytical character who decides to have a child largely out of restlessness rather than any great biological imperative. To her horror – and the reader’s – she finds herself not only failing to form a bond with Kevin, but growing to outright dislike the kid, a problem that only escalates as he gets older.
The novel’s premise is a potent one because it dares to breach a subject that is borderline taboo in societies where children are indulged rather than reared. It’s not that Eva is a bad mother per se, in fact she’s dutiful to the point of pathology, but she just doesn’t enjoy being around her son.
Clearly the author, whose sartorial sense and manner of speech are as precisely observed as her prose, has hit a nerve.
“Despite the fact that it hasn’t been very heavily promoted, the degree that it succeeded has been all word of mouth stuff,” she acknowledges. “There’s clearly some kind of a hunger out there.”
Does she get people thanking her for –
“Being more honest about motherhood? Yeah. Very grateful that somebody has tried to get across what it’s like to raise a child.”
Shriver herself decided at the age of eight that parenting wasn’t for her. Yet her insights into the minutiae of motherhood are pretty impressive.
“Well, I do have an imagination,” she says. “Or rather, I have vivid fears. Ultimately I was still trying to examine my own fears of a potential coldness in me, a selfishness that would exclude extending myself to particular children, because I think children are particular. As a child, I felt like a person with volition rather than a being that was being acted upon from without, and therefore my parents had to contend with me as a real person whom they have not always liked. In writing the book I started getting more sympathetic, less condemnatory, stopped looking at it from a child’s perspective. What I was afraid of for myself, if I were to become a mother, was just… having someone around the house I didn’t want there. A kid is a stranger in the house. You have to get to know him.”
Which may seem obvious, but it’s quite the wake-up call for those who assume having children will solve their own existential crises, or save their marriage.
“They don’t understand that it’s going to try the marriage,” Shriver observes. “I think people bring a completely different expectation to parenthood now. It’s not about your kid going to till your fields, it’s about them giving you a new sense of meaning, that they are going to fill out your life emotionally and reward you with their love, and your life is going to be richer, fuller and more exciting in those senses. And that’s actually expecting a fuck of a lot. And it doesn’t always come across.”
In Kevin’s case, that shock is compounded by his obnoxious nature.
“We’ve all been in the restaurant with this nyah-nyah kid, and you want to kill him,” Shriver says. “And his parents don’t do anything. And that’s where Eva and Franklin divide, because Franklin is completely indulgent and Eva is much more an old style disciplinarian.”
But more than that, as he grows older, Kevin becomes more sullen, disconnected, lacking in empathy and disdainful of humanity in general.
Was his psychological profile assembled from case studies of high school killers?
“Not really. That was just stuff I made up. As a construct, I liked it. And the whole concept of Kevin was really of someone who wasn’t, as you say, seething with fury, but who was just… bored. Bored to the point of disgust with everything. Essentially not interested in being here, and a little resentful of the fact that he was, because nothing about being alive interested him.”
Which is a hallmark of most male adolescents – at least until they become interested in sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.
“You see it all the time, that feigned boredom, I’ve-seen-it-all-before, nothing impresses me, the physical lassitude, clothing dripping off them. What made it an interesting character to write is that it’s usually a phase that kids go through and come out the other side of, but I imparted it all the way back to infancy.”
It’s a chilling notion that, beyond all the sociological and nurture-versus-nature factors, there can be such a thing as a bona fide bad seed, irredeemable from birth.
“I read an interesting article in the New York Times about psychologists who worked with and have written about mass murderers,” Shriver says, “and there’s this movement arguing that we need to bring in ‘evil’ as a clinical diagnosis, that there are single cases they have contended with that so boggle the mind there’s no other word that will do. I’m of two minds about that impulse, but clearly there is this sub-category that they’ve been exposed to that is constantly upsetting them and they need a label for it in order to accommodate it, and probably in order to quarantine those experiences they’ve had from the rest of life because they’re so upsetting. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case in this book, but I guess ultimately I do believe that some people are born irredeemable.”
© Peter Murphy
Reproduced with permission
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One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.
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© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.
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