magus of Fitzrovia in his prime, The

Spectator, The, Apr 7, 2007 by d'Ancona, Matthew

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. They can just tower over you and trap you, all those things, and yet somehow we do keep clear in our head a very powerful fiction of free will. The first few notes I wrote for this novel were all about the tone of the narration and the words were something like "forgiving" and "a little wry". I wanted somebody who has already seen it, seen the whole story to its end and has forgiven everyone. It was no one's fault. Edward and Florence are of their time, and they are not armed for getting themselves out of this mess.' As the sexual débâcle unfolds, and Florence dashes out on to the elemental stretch of shingle, some of the first readers of the novel have anticipated an outburst of savagery -- the literary terrors associated with McEwan's early short stories and novellas. 'A lot of people did say they expected Edward to pick up a rock and dash her head off with it, which would have been rather crass, ' he says, a little ruefully.

If anything, however, the repression of the primal as the lovers confront one another is more unsettling than its violent release would have been. We learn that Edward, the upright, bookish son of a schoolmaster, has previously discovered 'a spontaneous, decisive self' in fist-fighting.

Florence's horror of sex, meanwhile, has roots much darker than mere social conformity -- abuse by her father, hinted at by McEwan but never spelt out, and all the more troubling for that. 'There was another element, ' he writes, 'far worse in its way and quite beyond her control, summoning memories she had long ago decided were not really hers.' For Florence, liberation and self-control are discovered in her creation of a string quartet, and the redemptive power of music is at the heart of On Chesil Beach. In an earlier novel, The Child in Time, a bereft mother discovers hope in Schubert's String Quintet in C major. In McEwan's new book, it is Mozart's String Quartet in D major that suffuses the story as a reminder of the sublime.

'I have written a lot about music, ' he says. 'I am just finishing an opera with Michael Berkeley and it is very exciting to collaborate. We live reasonably near the Wigmore Hall and we can walk there. In fact the last thing that really made a huge impression on me, hearing it again, was the Schubert Octet. I did write a story in the early Seventies about a string quartet but I've lost it, I can't find it anywhere.' The opera will receive its premiere in June 2008, and then tour the country. 'It is a chamber opera, but Michael has scored it in such a way that it is 14 musicians, 15 musicians, but it can be easily turned into a Beethoven style, medium-sized classic orchestra. So he has made an allowance for that if we want to do it in a grander way, and I think there is going to be a performance in Switzerland with a big orchestra, and maybe also Sydney.' He enthuses about a production of The Barber of Seville he has just seen. 'My sons [by his first marriage] have no interest in classical music, and I have laid it on them at various times. How can they go through life not knowing the things that we might take for granted? I suppose the pleasure is so intense that it does make one, whether one is a believer or not, thrilled to be alive.