In an interview on Family Stories

Let’s go onto your next choice, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. In this, the newly married couple, Edward and Florence, don’t last long enough to create a family.

What I love in this book is not even the main plot, though I like that too. What I really love, the family that is so fascinating to me, is his [Edward’s] family. The mother goes crazy, and her husband and children all accommodate it and live around it. I love that little world in the novel.

Yes, when he reaches a certain age he’s told she’s crazy, and it all makes sense to him. But before that, he didn’t even realise anything was wrong because they all acted as if everything was normal.

I love that. Also, even if we’re not crazy we all identify a little bit with the way the mother has these gusts of enthusiasm when she’s going to cook a big dinner or has piles of sheets to iron. She still has these images of what’s possible in her life and she’ll have these gusts, and yet they all know that it won’t really happen.

Does the story hold together for you – that the couple really love each other, but they mess it up on that wedding night and so go their separate ways? I’m pretty convinced life doesn’t happen like that. Normally it takes more than one night to really mess things up.

I agree with you, but I also don’t agree with you. When I was in high school I had a job at an ice cream store. There was a boy there who I liked, and at one point he asked me out to a concert. I was very excited, I hadn’t gone on any dates yet. We were moving to a new house, so I gave him my phone number and I got dressed and got ready, but he never arrived. He didn’t know where I lived, and he never called. I waited and waited and he never called. Finally, at eight or nine o’clock, it was clear I’d been stood up and I went to the ice cream store, just to hang out. He showed up later too, and seemed quite miffed. I didn’t understand, but it turned out that our phone hadn’t been connected yet. So I guess he had called and it rang and rang, and no one had answered.

Oddly, we never got beyond that. You’d think that I could have told him, we would have laughed, we would have gone again and everything would have been great – but that didn’t happen. But we were 16. I think it’s the kind of misunderstanding that makes a lot of sense when you’re 16. If we had been adults … But I’m not sure it was meant to be just a misunderstanding in On Chesil Beach. I think it was meant to be a deeper incompatibility which is glanced at.

In an interview on Love in Literature

Moving onto On Chesil Beach. Will you set the scene please?

This short novel is set in July 1962, when Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting are just married. It’s about the first night of their marriage, on honeymoon in a Georgian hotel next to Chesil beach on the coast of Britain. The book describes their courtship and how they got to this point, then the crucial scene is what happens on their wedding night. Edward climaxes much too soon in his excitement, and somehow they don’t get over this.

Because they hadn’t slept together before – this being one year before sexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin. But is it simply this disastrous shag that splits them apart, or do you feel there was something else lurking under the surface?

I think it’s a unique conglomeration of circumstances. Florence has quite a deep fear of sex – she almost can’t bear to be touched by anyone – while Edward is really looking forward to total sexual abandon. It’s obvious to the reader that this is not going to happen, because they’re so completely different in their feelings about sex. And their lack of communication causes this unbearable tragedy. It does seem to me a uniquely English tragedy and very much of that time, just before sexual liberation. Ten years later they probably would have been able to deal with it. This book is a great warning for not holding back on sex before marriage.

Do you think that it works describing sex in books?

Well, there’s a lot of bad sex in books. On Chesil Beach takes the biscuit for one of the most awful sex scenes in literature.

There’s an annual Bad Sex in Fiction award by the Literary Review.

But I think sex can also be brilliantly evoked in fiction. Often, the less graphically it is described the more enjoyable it is to read. There’s a lot to be said for sex in books, because you can learn from people writing about it. When you are a teenager it’s a great way to discover about sex.

Even better than from the Internet?

Exactly! I also think, as an adult reading about sex, it’s interesting to identify with the different emotions that other people are feeling. So sex can be a really useful tool – for want of a better word – in literature.

Have you ever recommended erotic fiction?

Yes I have, to people who aren’t getting enough sex and need to find some kind of outlet. And also to people who are stuck in a dull relationship and need to spice it up. I’ve recommended books like The Bride Stripped Bare by Nikki Gemmell – which goes into immense graphic detail about a journey of sexual discovery. I’ve even recommended the Marquis de Sade a couple of times, to get people more aware of sex in literature.

What would you recommend to a sexaholic?

Quite a good one for sex addicts is Lady: My Life as a Bitch by Melvin Burgess. It’s about a 17 year old girl who by some stroke of chance is turned into a bitch – as in, a dog. She’s got sex on the brain before she becomes a bitch – a dog – but once she is she has lots of sex with other dogs. It’s quite shocking and hilarious. She has a great time, but it’s an interesting exploration of what it’s like to constantly have sex on the brain. It won’t necessarily put a sex addict off, but it will show you your bestial side.