The issue with translating the novel’s narrative style is that cinema relies on dialogue. Watching this scene in the cinema, I longed for McEwan’s intricate descriptions of the pairs’ internal torment. The ever wonderful Saoirse Ronan (Florence) and the adequate Billy Howle can only sell so much with their eyes and expressions. Whereas in the film, they appear to have a sincere argument about money as the subtext is too subtle to be implied. So money would have to do as the subject”. As McEwan puts it in the novel, “ did not know how to describe these thoughts to him.
One moment in particular: the couple enter a completely incidental argument about money while they continue to repress their real thoughts and desires. We gain access to what the characters are thinking, while they say something completely different. Without going into plot, McEwan writes a heart-breaking scene. The clearest example of this is the final exchange on the beach. “This is is how the entire course of life can be changed - by doing nothing.” - Ian McEwan The reader is given a unique insight into truth versus facade. As McEwan himself put it, “This is how the entire course of life can be changed - by doing nothing”. The lack of speech - and action - is what drives the story. Any dialogue is a substitute for repressed thought as they are left mute by their inherited sensibilities. The style of delivery is centred around what is not said what the characters think but cannot express. There is actually very little dialogue between the two characters for most of the novel the story is woven through third-person accounts of each characters’ interior monologues, seamlessly moving between the two.
The reader is immediately in on the inside, a silent middle-man who is granted an all-access account of this couple’s backstory. “They were young, educated, and both virgins”, we are told in the first line. Through precisely timed memory-flashbacks and interior monologues we are presented with two complex and insecure characters, who both hold extremely personal secrets they are terrified of having discovered.įrom the outset McEwan gives a frank and intimate insight into the couple. The main action of On Chesil Beach takes place over just a few hours, one early evening in July 1962 on the wedding day of Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting.
On Chesil Beach (2018) is a prime example of how problems of channeling one medium to the other are perhaps insurmountable for character-based stories such as this 2007 novella. I went to see the recent adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach because I thought, ‘Wow, they’re going to adapt that? How will that work?!’ The answer is, it didn’t. How much can you say with a look? (On Chesil Beach, 2018)
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