Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach is conspicuous in its brevity. It has the air of a quickly written novella, an act of catharsis to exorcise some thematic threads between novels. Sadly one is left with a feeling that more could have been made of this scenario and the characters, and concerning the profound central premise: can love be consummated without sex? Can love be fully realised without a passionate physical dimension? McEwan places this novel at the cultural crossroads of the early 1960s, just before embedded social notions of sex and marriage were to be violently uprooted. As ever, McEwan takes time to breathe life into his characters, using the basic premise as a jumping off point for exploring their personal histories. He is a modern master at tapping into the private fears, expectations and indignations between men and women, explored more fully in his previous novels. His words fly off the page without seeming facile; thought-provoking without being stylistically ostentatious. However, one is left at the end - which I will try not to spoil here - with a rushed, unfinished feeling. It might have been better if McEwan left the ending more open and ambiguous, than to hurriedly conclude as he has done. In fact I often feel slightly let down by the way McEwan ends his novels, ending as they normally do in bloody denouement - undermining the tighter and more considered preceding passages. Here the ending is not so prosaic, but the reader is still left wanting more. One other criticism is some of the authorial intrusions into the narrative. It is a slightly cheap way to set a sense of time and place to say 'this was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine'. According to the characters? It seems unlikely. It is asides like this that corrupt the tangible sense of Britain lived through the characters themselves, trapped by their failure to communicate, and by things left unsaid by society at large. If we are to suspend our disbelief, we need the author to be a less obvious presence, not giving us a nod and a wink over his laptop in the 21st century. Otherwise this is a very readable, sometimes moving book, that is probably best read in the course of one afternoon.