On Chesil Beach

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My first Ian McEwan - Rated
What an interesting read! As many of the reviews have said before, McEwan has handled this sensitive situation with a fantastic amount of understanding from both parties of the main characters points of view. A beautiful piece of writing but also an opportunity to relate this to our lives.

Leaden - the emperor has no clothes on - Rated
I'm sorry but I think this is a terrible book. The characters are poorly drawn, the prose is clunking and the sex scenes are risible. Ian McEwan belongs to that school of writers who obviously believe they write LITERATURE and that this can largely be achieved by writing in enormous and mind-numbing detail about some things, while skimming through others. I don't understand the telescoping of the rest of the male protagonist's life into the last few pages, for example. It comes across as amateurish.

Jewel of a book - Rated
This is the best book I have read since "Birdsong"- a wonderful evocations of love, emotion, uptightness, duty, sex, and post war England.
A jewel of a book.

Absorbing but bizarre.. - Rated
I am a great fan of Ian McEwan so lit upon this when I saw it. I knew to expect something that would make me think, he doesn't ever write predictable novels but this was a bit strange. I was hooked and had to read to the end to find out what happened. I did feel that the end was a bit anti-climatic but the writing is of the usual standard you would expect.
Read this, it is a very short quick read just don't expect to fall in love with the two main characters or expect to be left with a happy feeling at the end!

Sublime prose, everything else is missing - Rated
The one excellent feature of this book is that the author is capable of delivering prose of exceptional power, sublime elegance, impeccable style. His words take you through a poetic journey through landscapes and feelings.

The plot is non-existent. The characters have sexual issues to which hardly anyone above 15 years of age can relate to in today's real world. The reader expects an interesting, fascinating explanation to why the female character has such psychological problems (was she raped as a child? Is there a skeleton in the cupboard? Is she or her father guilty for his mother having been disabled?), but no. There is no twist in the plot, there is no revelation, there is nothing except the obvious unraveling of events in an impossibly predictable way.

Two thirds of the book consist of flashbacks about the earlier lives of the two main characters, which have the near-magical property of adding nothing to the story. Do not expect that your time spent reading about these people's childhoods and younger years will enlighten your understanding of what is going on in the main plot, because it won't. Those chapters exist only to fill enough pages for the book to be published as a novel, and for the author to show off how good he is at putting adjectives together.

Even after the climax, when the author flies forward forty years to tell us what happened to the male character, there is nothing interesting being told. There is no surprise, nothing at the end of those forty years justifying the time spent to read about them. He walks into the woods and thinks about what could have been if he had behaved differently. So what? Hardly worth telling us the story of this guy's life if that is the most enlightening conclusion.

One final warning: this book has no dialogue: I could estimate less than 20 lines of it from page 1 until five pages before the end. Whilst I do accept that the "Show, don't tell" rule might be slightly simplistic, its negation on such a grand scale makes for some exceptionally boring reading.