The Magazine

Unconsummation

The sexual battleground before the Revolution.

Aug 20, 2007, Vol. 12, No. 46 • By MICHAEL WEISS
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On Chesil Beach

A Novel

by Ian McEwan

Talese, 208 pp., $22

If the male pursuit of sex suffers from a fatal impatience, I wonder how many women have actually been persuaded by Andrew Marvell's more farsighted and minatory argument:

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song: then worms shall try

That long preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust . . .

Edward Mayhew, the protagonist of this burnished gem of a novel, has just been wed, in an England a few years shy of the sexual revolution, to Florence Ponting, a beautiful and cultured girl he met at a rally for nuclear disarmament. (The metaphysical poets never had the benefit of looming atomic armageddon to hasten their progress in the bedroom.) Man and wife are 23- and 22-year-old virgins, respectively, and despite the obvious associations with a prim and puritanical era about to be undone by the 1960s, theirs is not really a struggle against that coy mistress, time, but rather Florence's nonexistent libido. Her own echoing song, courtesy of her classical musical talent, is used as a mental distraction from the conjugal duty, which Edward eagerly yet anxiously anticipates. Indeed, his bride would like to preserve her virginity forever, or at least have it "lost" as quickly and perfunctorily as possible, with scarce encore performances.

This is a dilemma no poet in any age should ever have to face, which makes it especially satisfying that Ian McEwan's masterful prose is put to the task of describing an unconsummated marriage that's only a couple of hours old and already a complete failure. Here is how Florence thinks of sex:

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