They'll stone you when you're trying to be so goodOn Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan's new short book about one couple's wedding night, is getting plenty of attention these days: For one thing, this admiring review in The Economist. For another thing, McEwan was recently threatened with a fine of £2,000 if he didn't return a handful of pebbles to Chesil Beach, "a 22-mile natural wonder where storms grade the stones by size," on the Dorset coastline. McEwan had admitted the theft during a radio interview and was promptly excoriated by conservationists with nothing better to do. He has returned the stones.

Meanwhile, some people recognize that it's McEwan who's the national treasure. Matthew d'Ancona has a great profile of McEwan in the current (London) Spectator:

McEwan’s last book, Saturday, was explicitly influenced by Bellow, and in many ways a homage to the American master. But his new and eleventh novel, On Chesil Beach (a short masterwork), explores different terrain. Set in 1962, it takes as its narrative focus the wedding night of a virginal couple, Edward and Florence, at a hotel on the Dorset coast, and, more specifically, their first, disastrous sexual encounter.

The choice of year, McEwan readily concedes, is no accident, chosen because Britain was then on the cusp of a revolution in sexual mores, social norms and pop music. As Larkin famously wrote: ‘Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me) —/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP.’

In the novel, Edward is already entranced by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and first meets Florence at a CND meeting in Oxford. They have premonitions of what is to come, the tremors beneath their feet. But, as with Larkin, the transformation does not come quite in time for their wedding night.