There Ain't No Cure

For the Honeymoon Blues

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese, $22)

England, 1962.

Florence and Edward, both virgins, go to Chesil Beach for their honeymoon.

Florence, a violinist, loves Edward but dreads the very thought of his touch, let alone the looming threat of wedding night groin grinding.

Edward, a history scholar, eagerly awaits connubial relations with Florence, though he's plagued by a case of performance anxiety -particularly the fear that his gun will fire before the games begin.

Intimacy and shame are on a collision course, resulting in a singularly humiliating moment that will change their lives forever.

The plot of On Chesil Beach couldn't be simpler, and at 203 pages it's much easier to get through than McEwan's previous two novels - the intricately structured Saturday and Atonement. Despite it's tiny physical stature it ranks among McEwan's best books. The story is gripping from the opening sentence to the heartrending final passage, and the prose is fluid, beautiful, intelligent and extremely accessible. It doesn't hurt that Florence and Edward feel far more raw and real than the snooty characters in McEwan's last novel, the overrated Saturday.

McEwan won the prestigious Booker Prize (now known as the Man Booker Prize) in 1998 for the terse novel Amsterdam, and it will be interesting to see how this equally worthy lightweight (in the literal sense) fares when the committee announces the 2007 nominees in August.