🟥 On Chesil Beach (2007) Review - British Man's Verbal Diarrhea | Book Waffle

   

On Chesil Beach (2007) written by Ian McEwan

You know in school when your English teacher told you that your essay had to be 1,000 words long, but you'd said all you wanted to say in the first 300 so you had to fill? That's what this book is. Padded and pretentious. Brit Lit at its most indulgent.

The story is as follows: two newlywed virgins are going at it and one of them decides they don't like it.

That's it. That's the entire fucking thing, no joke.

Okay, that's technically not the whole thing. There's some background scenes that I don't care about. And some future scenes that I leave me scratching my head because *spoiler* the one that doesn't like sex ends up successful and the one that likes sex ends up a loner for the rest of their life.

Like... okay???

What are we trying to say here?

This should have been 10k words at most. Yet Mr. McEwan has managed to wring it for many times that, evolving it like a Pokémon from short story to novella all the way to short novel. 

I'm not mad. I'm impressed, really. Impressed at Mr. McEwan's talent for digressing over and over and over again with unnecessary anecdotes and asides. Impressed and bored. Mostly bored.

There is an interesting story in there somewhere, and I can see it. I can see great characters and an emotional writing style, and I stuck through all the chaff specifically because I saw that potential. Mr. McEwan is a skilled writer, that much is clear. But the potential I saw was never realized. Because, damn, there is just so much fluff and sod to dig through.

I could see this working as an experimental piece. Or as an exercise to see how exhaustively someone can milk a topic for all it's worth. But as a stand alone work? A published work? Heck no.

🟥 Rating: 3/10