N.E.G. (19 September 2017). "The temptations and pitfalls of adapting your own novel for the screen". The Economist . Retrieved 18 June 2018. Connelly, Brendan (5 November 2011). "Mike Newell Takes Over On Chesil Beach, Shows Off His Miss Havisham". Bleeding Cool . Retrieved 21 October 2016. I saw the movie last night. With one exception, though, I will have to put my comments as a spoiler, for those who haven't already read the book. The photography was excellent, especially in evoking the loneliness of that pebble beach. The sense of period was uncanny, not just in visual details but also practical ones. It’s in the book too, but seeing the unspeakable awfulness of that honeymoon dinner—melon slice with glacé cherry, and overcooked roast beef with mixed veg—slammed me with repellent recognition. The leads, Billy Hawle and Saoirse Ronan, were both good, if just a smidgen too old. But also—and this is what matters—too present. The scene in the hotel bedroom soon became excruciating to watch as the camera returned to it again and again. Not that it was inappropriate or in any way pornographic. But the reader manages his own balance between the psychological damage to these two young people and the clumsy physical act in which it is played out. The cinemagoer has to accept the director's balance, and loses a dimension as a result. The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].) Feeling quite differently about the prospect of sex, Florence has strong feelings of repugnancy towards physicality. She seeks some guidance in the area, but her only source of information is a marriage manual, which only makes matters worse with terms like “glans” and “penetrate,” the latter suggesting she is like a drawing room that Edward will “enter.” Florence finds that she is nauseated even by the concept of Edward’s tongue in her mouth. Florence still feels bound by the social code of another era.

On Chesil Beach’: Did You Catch Florence’s Backstory? ‘On Chesil Beach’: Did You Catch Florence’s Backstory?

A major theme is destiny, which is perhaps the converse of missed opportunities. “They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny”, yet it was a belief in destiny that prompted Florence to form her quartet, and Florence and Edward inferred the hand of destiny in the extreme improbability of their meeting, plus Edward wants to study and write about how powerful individuals can change destiny. He focusses almost entirely on Edward here, describing the changes he undergoes and what becomes of him. The Israel-Hamas Tunnel War Will Be Like No Other The Israel-Hamas Tunnel War Will Be Like No Other The honeymoon is to take place beside Chesil Beach, in a Georgian hotel. They eat their nuptial supper - melon with glace cherries, slabs of beef with overcooked veg, in their room overlooking the bay - while a pair of waiters, local lads, stands by intrusively. The beach, that unique spit of shingle which runs between the Fleet Lagoon and the Channel, immediately seems emblematic of several things: of this moment of certainty in lives that might never again seem certain; of the path that they have just embarked on together, a path which, like all married couples in love they believe they will be making new; but also of a romance that has taken place between the devil of Middle English rectitude and the deep blue sea of the coming sexual revolution. According to Hitchens, McEwan’s hostility to irrational thinking has “something of the zeal of the convert.” He recalls that McEwan was once on the other side of the divide: “He was teasable as someone who had this slightly mystical view of things. He didn’t believe that the material substrata was the be-all and end-all.” He went on, “Ian has gone from someone who was a little bit promiscuous and flirtatious when it came to Gaia—slightly overawed impressions of the numinous—to someone who has, very sternly and brilliantly, committed himself to the integrities of objectivity, evidence, reason, and investigation.” Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford historian, says, “Ian lived the sixties, with all their fascination with alternatives of various kinds. There’s absolutely no question that this was a personal journey.”It is clinical and understated from the start: “The wedding... had gone well” and the “weather... not perfect but entirely adequate” and continues in the bedroom with detailed descriptions of physical sensations of skin, muscle, and even individual hairs: “stroking... for more than one and a half minutes” (too precise). a b Thomas, Lou (18 May 2018). "Adapting Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach: 'My advice would be don't worry about having sex tonight' ". British Film Institute . Retrieved 23 May 2018. a b Dana Rose Falcone (17 February 2016). "Saoirse Ronan to star in film adaptation of Ian McEwan's on Chesil Beach". Entertainment Weekly . Retrieved 23 August 2016.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan | Waterstones On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan | Waterstones

This deceptively light novella describes the events of Florence and Edward’s disastrous honeymoon night in 1962, interspersed with details of their childhoods and courtship to suggest how those influenced what happened. Music is often important in McEwan's works. Florence and Edward's musical tastes are fundamentally incompatible (though they try), yet for Florence music is her “path to pleasure”, rather than physical intimacy. Fortunately, we don’t live in a time when marriage is the ultimate goal in a young person’s life. There are still pressures and societal expectations that need to be tempered or even stamped out, but we have made advancements in our thinking. Edward and Florence, however, did not have the advantage of more enlightened norms concerning the institution of marriage. Naturally, both then and now, we bring into our relationships the good, the bad, and the ugly. The key is to understanding these things first in ourselves, and then to share them openly with our partners, friends, etc. For some baffling reason, this is often much easier said than done. Finally, the time arrives to consummate the marriage. However, it is rather short-lived as Florence accidentally overstimulates Edward, causing him to ejaculate all over her body before they even have sex. This disgusts Florence on many levels, and she storms out. Edward goes after Florence to discuss what has happened and they have a heated argument. By the end of it, Florence has made it clear that she has no interest in ever having sex. 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 story, and especially the ending, would be implausible nowadays, but fits the characters and the period. On a drizzly afternoon in October, McEwan went to Covent Garden and found his way to a basement theatre. He had come to watch a dress rehearsal of “For You,” an opera by the British composer Michael Berkeley, for which McEwan had written his first libretto. He sat down next to me, and after several minutes leaned over and whispered, “This is possibly the first moment of penile dysfunction in opera.” How does he do this? How does he take two virgins on their wedding night in 1962, put them in one hotel room and create a captivating novel from that one scene? 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

On Chesil Beach Summary | SuperSummary On Chesil Beach Summary | SuperSummary

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). Amis told me that McEwan and he, for all their affinities, have little in common as prose stylists. “I am more surface and he is more undercurrent,” Amis said. “I am very caught up with how words sound and he smooths it out more. He’s more interested than I have ever been in very subtle gradations.” McEwan, when told this, said, “I’m less expansive and musically performative than Martin, but in terms of the pulse of a sentence I care as much as anyone. I like Bach more than I like Wagner, chamber music more than orchestral music. I like a certain kind of terseness into which the occasional image will shine brighter. Style is an extension of personality.” 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. Saturday” was an even more personal statement—a direct assault on the modern novel’s skepticism toward science. There are mathematical equations in “Gravity’s Rainbow,” but Pynchon suggests that they are almost always used for pernicious, occult ends; in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise,” technology creates Airborne Toxic Events and pills that induce delusion. “Saturday” presents technology in a far more sanguine light. The book’s rapturous descriptions of multiblade razors, car stereos, and digital cameras—which strike some readers as blindly consumerist—suggest Perowne’s appreciation of the human ingenuity behind even incremental invention. “Not everything is getting worse,” he admonishes. Postmodern novelists have suggested that the contemporary world is an enveloping mystery, a dark chain of conspiracies. For McEwan, though, we live in a widening cone of light—a time of the decoded genome, the Hubble telescope, the illuminated brain. Such glories might best be appreciated by a novelist with an Augustan spirit.On Chesil Beach study guide contains a biography of Ian McEwan, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. It is a raw and painful book in places, all the more ironic given that it is set in the allegedly “swinging 60s”. There is additional irony in the fact that Florence takes Edward’s cherry – but only at dinner (an image oddly missing from the film).