Can you believe that people were once like this? That they did not know how to communicate about their feelings and their desires? How, you might ask, is it possible that such people as these "English" of the "early 1960s" once roamed the earth, speaking of love, yet terrified of lust, or busily lusting but unable to connect the world of lust to the world of simple communication?

I know. I am being too elliptical, but children are also listening. Really, children, you should not be reading this review or this book.

In On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan meditates on the cultural context in which these pathologies of communicative incapacity and un-desire are situated (early 1960s, England). He makes the story of a meeting between ignorant undesire and ignorant lust into little microcosm that stands in for the stale beating heart of its time and place. It's all so very English, and in fact I was reminded of nothing so much as Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which in its way wrestles with what seems to be the very same uptight Englishness.

McEwan's approach to sex, bad sex, sex that takes forever to happen, and then happens in a way that pleases no one, is almost clinical. We observe the inner thoughts and cautious advances and retreats in hyper-slow motion. It is all very interesting. Perhaps in some ways it resembles many people's first encounter with sexuality. Unfortunately, in the world of Chesil Beach, the first time was intended to be the last person.

Me, I just wanted to shake the two protagonists and fix them all up with some good talk therapy. So did McEwan, I would wager, as he allows in the end that the two protagonists were just a few unspoken sentences from sorting out their troubles and going on to a happy life together. The world changing potential of unvoiced thoughts is in itself perhaps the true theme here. But for the smallest conversational gesture, but for a withheld angry outburst, these lives (and how many others?) might have taken completely different paths.

Here's the sociological reality that I see. This marriage took place before the code of virginity, with its expectations of innocence on the wedding night, had dissolved, but just as a larger culture of freedom beckoned and family coercive power weakened. There was no coercive family to hold the couple together after the culturally imposed ignorance and innocence led to an unpleasant experience. It was, already in the early 1960s, possible to simply walk away. Earlier there would have been no walking. Later there would have been less ignorance (either of the clinical kind, or of the interpersonal kind). But here, at this moment the code of virginal innocence was still in place, but the social structures that would hold a relationship together when the emotional effects of sexual ignorance would be experienced... those were melting away. I found McEwan's novella an enjoyable report, or an act of imagination, from that moment of cultural transition.