Back to Blog
On chesil beach author7/5/2023 Having overcome the social gap that divides their families (her father is a wealthy businessman and Oxford academic his father struggles to make ends meet while caring for his brain-damaged mother), the couple embark on their honeymoon at a seaside hotel. It is 1962, and talented violinist Florence has finally married earnest history student Edward. On Chesil Beach is an excellent example of the former.Īs in Atonement, the novella hinges on the power of a single word or action to change – or destroy – an entire life. He is a modern master of the slim volume ( The Cement Garden remains, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of a then-debut author) and longer, virtuosic novels that merge complexity and style ( Atonement). Incredibly, McEwan has proved that he can do both. There is as much skill, if not more, to writing an excellent novella as there is to writing an opus pushing 900 pages. McEwan’s latest offering may not have been good enough to win the Booker – by all accounts, there were at least two other books which were better – but it certainly provided a welcome antidote to all those bloated novels out there. The Prince, A Room of One’s Own and The Great Gatsby are all relatively short works, but no one would argue that their significance is diminished by their page count. The most outrageous claim so far has been that On Chesil Beach “wasn’t long enough” to deserve the Booker. I’ve heard a few people moan about Ian McEwan lately, and I’ve been struggling to fathom why.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |