These memories get particularly sharp when Florence and Edward are about to have sex. Throughout the book, Florence’s memories often flash back to solo trips with her father when she was young, “just the two of them, hiking in the Alps, Sierra Nevada and Pyrenees, and the special treats, the one-night business trips to European cities where she and Geoffrey always stayed in the grandest hotels.” (Note the odd use of his first name, and the absence of Florence’s mother.) Savvier readers than I, like Dave at the Reading Bug, picked up the clues. (Like The Hobbit, On Chesil Beach is the rare film adaptation that takes longer to watch than the book does to read I devoured it in a single afternoon.) So, true to the movie’s vibe, I had my own moment of minor embarrassment when a few minutes’ research revealed that what seemed like a new addition to Florence’s backstory had in fact been part of the narrative the whole time. It seemed a bit psychologically overdetermined to me I preferred the book’s ambiguity, or the possibility that Florence was simply asexual.īut it had been years since I read the book, and when I read, I tend to read more for speed than for detail. Suddenly, her total aversion to sex has a clear explanation.Īt the moment, this struck me as a dramatic departure from the novel, which to my memory had no sexual-abuse subplot. Except this time, there’s something new - her father undressing behind her, as young Florence cowers in the foreground. As the couple is embarking on their pivotal, terrible wedding-night sex, we flash back to one of Florence’s childhood trips on her father’s boat, which we’ve seen before. But there are shorter ones too, which come in brief flashes, and there’s one near the end that sticks out. (McEwan wrote the script.) Instead, it’s told in a series of flashbacks, often in long scenes detailing the early days of Florence and Edward’s relationship. The movie mostly sticks faithfully to the book’s omniscient narrative, as faithfully as a movie can without resorting to voice-over narration.
It’s Britain in the early ’60s, which means that, as Ian McEwan’s opening puts it, Florence (played in the movie by Saoirse Ronan) and Edward ( Dunkirk’s Billy Howle) 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.” Edward’s unreconstructed ideas about sex mean he cannot conceive of a world in which he’s not entitled to his wife’s body Florence’s strangled emotions mean she cannot express her lack of desire until it’s far too late. This post contains spoilers for On Chesil Beach, both the book and the movie.Īs both the book and the film versions of On Chesil Beach remind us, the pair of doomed lovers at the center of the tale are each a product of their times.
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