On Chesil Beach is a book I've been meaning to read for a long time, because it got such great reviews. Now they've made a movie of it, which is not getting great reviews. So I decided to load it onto my Kindle and read it. It's well-written and filled with insight, etc. But it just left me totally uninvolved. Silly characters making a mountain out of a molehill...what have I missed? After suffering through all the extended flashbacks which went on and on and ON, but weren't all that illuminating.... Ahh...maybe just not my kind of book.
Happens occasionally. After seeing The Talented Mr. Ripley, and then reading the book, I came to the conclusion that it was one of those rare moments where the film was better than the book. I understood the motives of the characters in the film. In the book, it was hard to appreciate the "fabulousness" of the rich set of Dickie Greenleaf and Marge Sherwood. They weren't enviable. They were rather dreary and and frankly thick, in the British sense of the word. I understood why Tom Ripley might want their money, but not the way he was trying to slip into their lives. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to associate with them.
You could say that about almost any famous character, too: Batman is just childish, running around in a Halloween costume; Dr Lecter has no manners, making that slurping sound in front of a lady. They should get a life, too, and a proper job. Etc. Literary fiction is more about the craft of writing.
Oh, yes. I normally like literary writing, which is why it was on my 'list' of books to read. However, I felt the characters' 'dilemma' (lack of sexual experience on a wedding night leading to the End of Everything) was not all that engaging OR universal, and the overreaction felt silly. I mean, most people our parents' age (the age of the characters in the book) who were sexually inexperienced and did the 'wait till the wedding night' thing got over it. In fact, I can't think of any who didn't. We're all here today as proof of that. Geez-o. My other complaint about the book (I have no idea how this was handled in the movie, which I've not seen) is the excessive use of flashbacks to illuminate ...what, exactly? Not much, it turns out. After the first three or four of them, my reaction was 'oh, not AGAIN' when another long flashback began. Again, I felt the effect was overblown and melodramatic. Possibly the writer's intention was to make us witness how some people can—and do—make mountains out of molehills and lead very blinkered, fastidious lives, and put on facades, and struggle to be honest with each other, yadda yadda yadda. In short, maybe this is some folk's idea of great writing. It did win a lot of attention. It was probably a worthy book in its own way. But it disappointed me. Any story that leaves me not giving a monkeys about the characters or what happens to them is disappointing.
