![]() ![]() Emily Watson plays Florence’s healthy-brained but cruel mother. They’re both great actors, and they’re backed up by some truly outstanding ones: Anne-Marie Duff plays Edward’s brain-damaged mother, whose narrative function is to work up a discourse around Uccello’s Hunt in the Forest, a painting of perfect technical execution and also roiling, deep darkness. Saoirse Ronan is Florence, and Billy Howle plays Edward. It turns out that the decisive moment is underplayed in the movie. But the book’s anticlimax is the hook upon which the whole thing hangs. ![]() In his characteristic style, McEwan goes backwards and forwards through time, rummages through each character’s thoughts, and outlines the social forces that unite and separate them both. ![]() The “real-time” narrative covers a single evening in 1962 in which the couple, who have just married, bumble inexorably toward their first sexual encounter. This is not to say that the book is bad: It’s a slim work of fiction (a novella, really) that focuses on a single relationship, between Edward and Florence. On Chesil Beach is the single most embarrassing thing I have ever read. But as I sat on a local hilltop turning the book’s final pages, all the blood drained from my body and ran, it seemed, into the grass below. I bought it when it was first published in 2007, eager to while away a few hours with the reliable author of Saturday (2005), Enduring Love (1997), and Amsterdam (1998). If you asked me to choose the least adaptable novel of all time, I would pick Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. ![]()
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