Krishna
We have reviewed On Chesil Beach by the same author before.
Somebody described this book as having perhaps the most explosive opening scene in a literary fiction. I think that could be true.
The narrator Joe with four others runs to help when he hears a cry from the middle of a field. Clarissa, his girlfriend and he were having a picnic with drinks when this happened. And there is a ton of repetitive blather about how he did not realize that this will change his life forever.
Skipping all that, we learn that Clarissa returned from abroad and to celebrate her birthday and the reunion, they met in the field. The tragedy was witnessed by him, Clarissa, two farm hands, John Logan and Jed Parry. It is a hot air balloon with the pilot trapped on the ropes and hanging and a ten year old boy standing it in.
In trying to rescue him, they go and press down the basket where the boy sits but a gust of wind threatens to lift off with them. All of them abandon the rescue to save themselves except John Logan, who held on but fell off when the balloon reached a great height in front of their eyes! All are plagued by guilt because if they had hung on a little longer, the wind had died down and all of them would have been saved, including the boy.
The boy lands safely but the event seems to destroy all the others who were there at the place. Clarissa struggles with it, and with her, the narrator too. Parry seems to be deeply affected and either stalks the narrator or the narrator imagines that Parry is stalking him. This is all about the remorse of not taking the right decision to save Logan.
Parry confronts him and declares that they both love each other and refuses to leave him alone. Weird. Jed Parry writes a weird letter of love to Joe. He had left 68 messages and tries to stalk Joe. Clarissa and Joe have a big fight as both needed the other’s support but each was wallowing in their own misery to pay attention to the other.
He seems to be obsessed with Parry and seems too diffident in himself and feels a rift created between him and Clarissa. To the reader, it looks like he has gone off the deep end suddenly. But since everyone else (Clarissa, Parry) also behaves in a loony fashion, he fits right in.
He goes to see the widow of Logan, who is also, like he was, a professor in the university. Seeing her grief, he realizes that only Clarissa matters, no one else. However, Logan’s wife thinks that her husband was having an affair and wants Joe to investigate on her behalf.
His and Clarissa’s relationship continues to deteriorate but reading it, I feel that they are engineering it themselves out of ‘overthinking’. But the story starts to grow on you. Parry’s total obsession with Joe, his anger that Joe is an atheist when so manifestly God is guiding everything that Parry is doing including his conviction that Joe will see the light both in terms of religious devotion and admitting that he, Joe, loves Parry and then leave Clarissa and move in with Parry.
Joe is convinced that he and Clarissa are destined to separate. He goes to the police with the letters from Parry as evidence. The police nearly laughs him off the place.
There is a party given by Jocelyn, Clarissa’s father. He has got a position at the Genetics lab and in the conversation, we the reader learn of the scientist Miescher who discovered the genetic alphabet in genetic material as far back as 1868 and even suspected that it had the ‘code to life’ but could not see its full significance. What a missed chance in science!
Meanwhile, improbably, there is an attempted murder right at the next table including a stabbing and splash of blood, and Parry, who was sitting in disguise at the next table unnoticed so far, jumps up to save the man from being murdered. In the confusion, both the killers (who wore latex masks) and Parry manage to vanish.
Mulishly, Joe insists that the murderers were targeting him and angers literally everyone in Clarissa’s family and the police too. In his eyes, Parry had hired them and was there to personally witness Joe’s death.
The whole story takes a turn towards the end, This being a Ian McEwan book, after reading his excellent Atonement, you do expect a turn. But then the twist is flat, and does not provide the full effect as in the other book mentioned.
There is also a minor twist at the end, that makes you go ‘Ah’. Again, it is not anything of a bombshell. All this together, along with the narrative powers of Ian McEwan lift this up from an also ran to a novel that is worth reading – once.
Not a bad read, but there are a lot of pointless events which takes away from the full enjoyment of the book, so let us say a 5/10
– – Krishna