Paul's review

I'm confused about this. I read this book today, and I don't remember that part. He plays her "Roll Over Beethoven," but it's Chuck Berry's version. I am flipping through the book right now, but I can't find the part you mean.

I really loved this book, and a big part of the reason why is because it seems so careful to me. So I hope you are wrong. You're probably not, though, so if possible, please tell me on which page I'll find this offense.

Page 127: "In return he brought to Oxford from the cottage a selection of records he wanted her to learn to love. She sat dead still and listened patiently with closed eyes and too much concentration to Chuck Berry."

No problem there.

"He played her 'clumsy but honourable' cover versions of Chuck Berry songs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones."

Uh - oh. That's the howler. In 1962 those bad boys hadn't released any of their clumsy but honourable cover versions. If the story was set a year later, in mid-1963 it would still be wrong, the first Beatles cover of Chuck Berry was released in November 63 on their 2nd album. I speak as your standard government-issue ubernerd fanboy fab pop fact checker.

HAH! Well apparently an equally fastidious fanboy got to this before it was published in the US by Doubleday, because this reference is not in my version:

She sat dead still and listened patiently, with closed eyes and too much concentration, to Chuck Berry. He thought she might dislike "Roll Over Beethoven," but she found it hilarious. She tried to find something appreciative to say about each song, but she used words like "bouncy" or "merry" or "heartfelt," and he knew she was simply being kind (p. 155).

I find it really surprising that McEwan would screw something like this up, because it seemed like the whole point of the story was that these people did not yet have access to the Beatles or the Stones. It's especially strange because the book seems so careful and meticulously constructed.... though in retrospect, the part on page 162 when they go see the Sex Pistols seems a little bit odd to me now, too.

This was a book which was soooooooo good about the sheer terror and horror of ignorant sex and then so bad about wrapping up the characters' later lives i.e. elbowing the female for the fairly dull male when it was her I wanted to hear about. Grr. Read any other McEwans?

Oh ps - I didn't know they'd corrected the text - very interesting.

Besides Chesil Beach--Saturday, Black Dogs, Atonement, Amsterdam, Saw the film based on Enduring Love. My reactions to McEwan's work vary. As a contemporary to the characters in CB, I felt their sexual ignorance was way overdone. And agree with you, Paul. I wanted to know how the woman ended up.

R

Hi Ruth - I disagree - we are talking about British kids in the late 50s/early 60s here. Not American ones! To take one amazing difference between American kids and British kids in this period - it wasn't uncommon, I think, for American kids to get their own car at the age of 16 and 17. Whereas in Britain throughout the 50s and 60s it would be almost unheard of unless you were very rich. And cars = sex.

I thought it was so so so perfect that it retreated from the woman's life at the end and didn't let us know how she was doing, even though we obviously wanted to. I wouldn't have felt the sense of their separation and the depth of his loss otherwise. And then when it came back into her head for that instant in the last paragraph -- ooh, chills. Amazing.

Although I enjoyed reading this book, I do not think I understood it. I can see how repression wrecked the wedding night and the whole relationship, but I do NOT understand the girl's sexual dysfunction. If that was supposed to be the result of living in pre-sexual-revolution society, I agree with Ruth: it was unbelievable. I just could not make sense of the girl character at all. And I loathed her. I guess perhaps it's a bit difficult for me to love a book that has only two characters, both unlikable.

I don't really give a damn if I like the characters in a book, as long as I believe them. I am a few years senior to the characters in this book. I still do not believe anyone could have been that ignorant at that time, cars or no cars. Inexperienced yes, ignorant no. Sheesh. VandeVelde wrote his famous book in 1928!

R

I think I'm in Ruth's cohort and of the same opinion. I can give Paul his cars = sex equation, but I cannot accept a loving couple - which they appeared to be before THE NIGHT - not getting over it and laughing together at what geeks they both were back then. Full disclosure: here speaks a California girl who had a reworked Ford model A coupe at 16 (drivers license age then) and married in 1951 to a guy with a yellow Plymouth convertible. How cool was that. Oh, about the sex, deponent sayeth naught.

Still, what I've learned here is that when howlers are discovered in novels they can be fixed before the book is published overseas - I didn't know that.

I don't think her problem had anything to do with the age, I think it had to do with the girl. My understanding of her is that she had deeply embedded psychological issues that would never be resolved without a lot of work. I don't think she wanted them to be resolved. They defined her.

Howler because McEwan was trying to get the time and milieu of this novel absolutely precisely correct. You see the debate about whether the female character would really have been so ignorant - i think McEwan was trying the cement her into her time and place and reveal the depths of ignorance still existing in very particular social/class spaces in a very specific time (1962). The year is significant - remember Philip Larkin's poem

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

As a Californian born in 1979 (at seventeen I would tool around Berkeley an '89 Camry), I found the situation totally believable. This book and its characters made a lot of sense to me. My feeling was that the girl's "issues" and ignorance were not supposed to be wholly produced, but more exacerbated, by the times she was living in. I didn't take the point to be that everyone in the early sixties was this out-of-it about sex, rather that this particular couple was, and because of their social context, they weren't prepared to deal with the situation in a reasonable way.

I loved this book and have been thinking about it since I read it. It's a little weird to me that I liked it so much.... The whole thing felt so vivid, not just the sex part but all the background stuff from their lives, that I feel almost like it happened to me.

Ruth,

I totally agree with your comment in message 6. I couldn't get past the first few pages because of the overdone sexual ignorance. I felt like I was suffocating, with things crawling inside of me.

About his other stuff: I loved Atonement and Amsterdam. Absolutely 100% detested Saturday. Hated Enduring Love. So it's hit or miss for me with this author.

Liked Atonement, loved Saturday, hated Amsterdam.

R

I was thinking of trying another McEwan book because there were things about this one I really liked, but now you people have got me all confused! Can we all agree on Atonement?

Rachel, I would go with Atonement as a starter.

I couldn't get past the first 20 pages of Atonement.

Mark and everyone mentioning Atonement,
I was astonished toward the end when McEwan completely reversed the narrative POV . This doesn't require a SPOILER ALERT because the plot and characters carried the day. So I would say Atonement was the most perfectly realized of his novels for me. So just as Mark alerted me to a subplot in The Echo Maker which I need to discuss over there, pay heed here to the closing chapters.

I haven't read Saturday, though its on my bookshelf. I'm sorry people didn't seem to like it.

I read Atonement, and saw the film. I enjoyed both.

Xysea, Please don't be sorry. If we all liked the same books, this would be a very dull literary world.

I haven't bought On Chesil Beach yet, though I guess I will for the reading list discussion. In the bookstore today they wanted $22.00 for a very short looking book ...

I say if you can't find a used copy, just read it in the store. It's very short!