Fiction:Ian McEwan loves the pivotal moment, the incident, the event which alters everything that follows and throws into relief everything which came before.
Think of practically any of his books and you will almost certainly recall the relevant crisis, whether it's the ballooning accident in Enduring Love, the rape in Atonement, the coming together of two cars in Saturday, a walk in the countryside in Black Dogs or a trip to the supermarket in The Child In Time. If they surprise and unsettle the reader, they usually derail or destroy the characters involved.
On Chesil Beach, McEwan's tenth novel, has just such a moment at its heart, the difference this time being that there is no surprise. From the first sentence we know what it's going to be:
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.
This is a great book about bad sex. It's about sexual fear and emotional timidity and the loyalties we often have to our times rather than to ourselves. It might be difficult, from our 21st-century internet-surfing perspective, bombarded as we are with information about sexual experience and emotional autonomy, to understand how a couple like McEwan's can arrive at such a bewildering juncture. But his writing is good enough to both explore the strangeness and allow us to share with the characters their grim sense of inevitable disaster. This is all too believable, happening as it does in 1962, at the end of the long 1950s, when it was possible still, even in one's most private life - in oneself as it were - to be so completely in thrall to politeness and formality that all else is lost.
Edward and Florence are both aged 22. Edward is a newly graduated history student, the son of a primary school headmaster and an ill mother from a small village in the Chiltern Hills. Florence is also newly graduated, a gifted musician, and the daughter of an Oxford don and a businessman. Their paths cross at a CND meeting in Oxford, and their marriage follows a "brief year" later. We learn about them gradually, as McEwan expertly weaves recollections of their individual and joint histories through an account of the hours of their wedding night. As they sit through an awkward evening meal which neither of them wants, their minds dwell separately on what is to come, the "ordeal" to be played out on the four- poster bed visible through the open bedroom door of their honeymoon suite.
Edward has worries about his ability to persevere, once they get started. Florence has a more fundamental fear, of being unable to control her unwanted feelings of disgust about sex itself. She is terrified, her fear of sex matched only by her fear of disappointing, "betraying", her husband.
McEwan makes no pretence of a contemporaneous telling of the story. We are looking back at this peculiar impasse, and the narrative voice established in that first line looks back with us, asking "why were these lovers in a modern age so timid and innocent?". The distance allows for a great deal of humour to permeate the tension. The moment of crisis, when it comes, is the first such moment in McEwan's fiction which has made me laugh. And it's a mark of how well the author has done the job of bringing Florence and Edward to life that my giggling was immediately replaced by a deep worry at the distinct lack of laughter from either of them. Their tragedy is the extent to which they view what happens to them as tragedy.
Part of the "why" undoubtedly relates to their families and their upbringing, and McEwan writes beautifully about both, delicately adding texture and nuance with a graceful precision. We hear the real story of Edward's mother's illness, and of how the family successfully blends acceptance and denial. We hear of Edward's growing involvement with Florence's family, of the exotic foods he encounters at their table, such as baguettes and aubergines.
McEwan is the kind of author who can say more in a sentence than most can say in a chapter. "Edward", for example, "knew too little about the world to be surprised by his welcome into the Ponting household". It's in sentences such as this that the key to Edward and Florence's predicament lies. McEwan has always been a master of suggestion. Of hints. Of planting half-ideas and notions in the middle of his elegant paragraphs which suggest something distinctly unpleasant that we are not being told. And there is something of that going on here, something within Florence's family that is never fully clarified, a smudge at the side of the story relating to her father and her fear. Of course, we are all products of our times, created by what surrounds us, condemned to play out the game according to the prevailing rules. Perhaps that smudge is an anachronistic interloper from our own times. Perhaps the Ponting family is innocence itself, and we are encumbered with dirty 21st-century minds.
This is a thoughtful book which provokes thought. But more immediately than that, this is a book which, while managing to be very funny, gives us a wonderful and moving portrait of a specific time, and of two of its hostages, and of how to make a mess of love.
Keith Ridgway's most recent novel, Animals, has just been published in paperback by Harper Perennial
On Chesil Beach By Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape, 166 pp, £12.99