On Chesil Beach, the film

It is 2007. An American bookseller and filmmaker spends the day with McEwan in London. Directed by Doug Biro ("Herbie Hancock: Possibilities") and shot over four days in England and the United States, the 30-minute film includes interviews with McEwan in London, on-location footage from Chesil Beach, an original soundtrack, commentary from peers and critics, and more. By film's end, a press kerfuffle has been averted, Kafka has come up in conversation twice, and the natural balance of England's beaches has been restored.

Get a glimpse of the film here.

 

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From the pages of The Atlantic: Christopher Hitchens reviews On Chesil Beach

Think of England Ian McEwan’s new novella evokes his homeland’s natural beauty and the straitened sexual manners of the early 1960s.

A recent article in the London Sunday Times made the matter-of-fact statement that Ian McEwan had emerged in Britain as “our national writer.” I at once understood the justice of this opinion, but without at first being able to say what commanded my assent. A reading of McEwan’s latest novella allows one to be fractionally less vague. The “national” character of this literary fragment is to be found in its simultaneous evocations of time and place, which allow the reader—at any rate the reader of a certain age who is of English provenance—to locate himself with satisfaction in an identifiable geography at a given date.

 

Continue reading From the pages of The Atlantic: Christopher Hitchens reviews On Chesil Beach...

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Recently declared Britain’s “national writer” by The Times of London, Ian McEwan must also be counted on the short list of the world’s greatest writers of our time. In Chesil Beach, his new novella, McEwan tells the story of an ill-starred wedding night on England’s Dorset coast in 1962. In the very first line we learn that Florence and Edward, an aspiring concert musician and historian respectively, “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.” Never has so momentous, and cataclysmic, a tale been told around an incident of premature ejaculation. As lurid as that sounds—and McEwan’s description of the couple’s nonconsummation is almost forensic in its clinical detail—this is a beautifully told tale that, despite its brevity, brilliantly captures a moment in time; it touches on universal themes of innocence, desire, and fate, and on the enduring consequences of human decisions made in moments of duress.