I meet Ian McEwan for lunch at Elena’s L’Etoile near his Fitzrovia home. He is greeted like a member of the family, and he tells me with relish that the restaurant features in The Dean’s December by one of his literary heroes, Saul Bellow.
McEwan’s last book, Saturday, was explicitly influenced by Bellow, and in many ways a homage to the American master. But his new and eleventh novel, On Chesil Beach (a short masterwork), explores different terrain. Set in 1962, it takes as its narrative focus the wedding night of a virginal couple, Edward and Florence, at a hotel on the Dorset coast, and, more specifically, their first, disastrous sexual encounter.
The choice of year, McEwan readily concedes, is no accident, chosen because Britain was then on the cusp of a revolution in sexual mores, social norms and pop music. As Larkin famously wrote: ‘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.’
In the novel, Edward is already entranced by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and first meets Florence at a CND meeting in Oxford. They have premonitions of what is to come, the tremors beneath their feet. But, as with Larkin, the transformation does not come quite in time for their wedding night.
‘And what stood in their way?’ McEwan writes. ‘Their personalities and their pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all.’
The novelist, who is 58, has the sparkling eyes, gentle manner and easy smile of a compact magus. Remembering this line from the book, he chuckles over his duck starter: ‘It is meant to be a little joke.
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