On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

This is my second taste of McEwan's writing after Atonement.

A short and arresting read, I finished it in 5 hours tops. (spaced between a week though meh)

On Chesil Beach is a relatively new work, published in 2007.
I think it may be one of the most current books I've read actually.
I started the book expecting to take in deeeep, philosophical angles to the story, because a particular review at the back-page of the cover mentioned Milan Kundera.
Not forgetting also the dreamy-looking book cover which further inspired such a perspective.

But no.
On Chesil Beach is strikingly unambiguous in narrating the story of Edward and Florence - newly-weds who have to face their private fears of the wedding night to come - and it does so in a way so honest, it calls for commendation on the writer's part. The reader is thus equipped with rich and necessary details of the characters' lives which in turn create the interesting depth in our cognizance of them.

The only qualm I had with this brilliant piece was its ending.
Reading from the last chapter onwards, I was fairly certain of the characters' fates - I'd replayed in my mind the tragic but so beautiful ending of lovers Robbie & Cecilia and thought "maybe".
But this was not exactly the reason why I finished the novel a tad unconvinced.
(Possibly spoiler ahead!)
After a huge chunk of the novel devoted to explaining so much, everything ended abruptly with a less-than-satisfactory "This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing."
Of course, when I flesh it out this way, I've come to realise that herein lies a great measure of subjectivity in  the acceptance of such an ending.
There has to be more than this that's led to this turn of events I thought...

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing. On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back." 

Or perhaps, there wasn't.
And I am wrong.
Neither philosophy nor speculation, and certainly not apathy, could save.
Doing nothing was something that required no explanation, it was just that - pride.
It's like The Butterfly Effect: that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world - and so it is, and so it is.

(Hold on a second, wasn't the whole mess in Atonement because of Briony's pride as well? Damn right it was)