GatesyRead

  Ian McEwan’s micro novel On Chesil Beach deserves at least a micro review. It is July 1962, and Edward and Florence are on their honeymoon. More precisely, it is their wedding night, and the clock is ticking. Edward has been holding out for this moment throughout the year of their engagement. With typical irony, McEwan writes that ‘Edward’s single most important contribution to the wedding arrangement was to refrain, for over a week’. During this time, he has been ‘chaste with himself,’ since he wishes to be ‘in top form for his bride’ (p.20). That is one side of the matter. Whether it is the expected restraint of the times, ignorance, fear or asexuality, Florence is rather the opposite, dreading Edward’s touch as a wifely duty she would rather not perform at all. There are five chapters in this short novel, and it isn’t until the end of Chapter Three that the near consummation sees Florence fleeing the room and sprinting out into the darkness, down to Chesil Beach where she hides u

The title ‘Sorry for Your Troubles’ suggests something Irish, and indeed it seems as though Richard Ford wishes the reader to follow him over the seas and back (though I, for one, feel he is strongest when the work is grounded among ordinary men and women of the United States). While I'd rather avoid sounding like a critic who likes the old stuff, the rough-and-ready nature of various strugglers in Rock Springs is hard to beat. Here there are lawyers and successful retirees (though, of course, troubles don’t stop with a solid safety-net, and lonely hearts are everywhere).  The first of the stories takes place in New Orleans. A middle-aged, married man Sandy McGuiness is out with business associates when he spies a slender woman in a brown dress, who returns his gaze with something like recognition. Ford switches to the past – thirty-five years earlier, when Sandy and Barbara (the slender woman in a brown dress) traveled together to Iceland. They’d bunked down in a rustic fishing h