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A brilliant book, but such a sad one; it would be unfair not to say so up front. Ian McEwan is a master at dissecting emotions. Every page of this wonderfully-crafted novel gave me the uncanny feeling of living within the skins of the two main characters, Edward and Florence, just married as the book opens. When they fall in love, nurture ambitions, experience happiness, I feel these things too. But when happiness eludes them, the pain is unbearable, not least because the author never lets us forget by how small a margin their happiness was missed.

In his last major novel, Saturday, McEwan pulled back from the multi-decade scope of Atonement , its predecessor, choosing to confine himself to the events of a single day. Here, the essential action occupies a mere three hours, described in a book which is itself unusually compact, a mere novella of only 200 delicate pages. In an opening that is surely a homage to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," the new husband and wife sit in a hotel room within sound of the sea on England's South coast. They eat a mediocre meal in one room; in the next, their bed stands waiting. They love each other, there is never any doubt about that, but they are inexperienced and secretly afraid. The book tells how they came to that moment, and what becomes of their love and fears as they move from one room into the other.

I have not known McEwan to write before in such detail about sex, but his writing is never prurient. Every detail serves to illustrate the psychological intercourse between these two talented and caring young people. On this particular night, as in a high-stakes game, their honeymoon bed becomes the board upon which all the other pieces of their relationship must be played. By going back to the early 1960s, that dark hour just before the dawn of the sexual revolution, McEwan performs the remarkable feat of undoing the modern liberation of sex from marriage and returning to a mindset in which marriage was not only a contract for sex, but sex might also be a prime reason for marriage.

But not the only reason. The focus on the bedroom also makes you consider all the other qualities that these two bring to their marriage, and before long you feel that you know them very well. [Exceptionally well in my case, since I was also born in Britain in the same year (1940), and share qualities with each of them; readers might take this into account when weighing the objectivity of my reactions.] Edward is a bright young man from the country who has recently achieved a first-class academic degree. Florence comes from a more socially sophisticated family, though she herself is naive in most things. The one exception is her calling as a violinist; here as in Saturday, McEwan is extraordinary in his use of music; the sections describing Florence's quartet playing are right up there with Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, my touchstone for sensitive writing about musicians. So both are bright, both are talented, both feel the stirring of new possibilities, but there are big differences between them, socially and culturally (Edward, for example, is into rock), and they each want different things. But the most heartbreaking things in this book are not their differences, but how often and how close they come to making new connections; just an inch more, a moment longer, and everything might be all right�. Almost.

But McEwan does not end the story in the bedroom or on the beach below. Much as in Atonement, though in only a few pages, he adds an epilogue continuing the story forward several decades. At the time, I felt it was too brief to settle all the emotions stirred up by the preceding pages, but now as I write, several hours after closing the book, I begin to see its rightness and appreciate its consolation.

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I saw the movie last night. With one exception, though, I will have to put my comments as a spoiler, for those who haven't already read the book. (view spoiler)[The photography was excellent, especially in evoking the loneliness of that pebble beach. The sense of period was uncanny, not just in visual details but also practical ones. It’s in the book too, but seeing the unspeakable awfulness of that honeymoon dinner—melon slice with glacé cherry, and overcooked roast beef with mixed veg—slammed me with repellent recognition. The leads, Billy Hawle and Saoirse Ronan, were both good, if just a smidgen too old. But also—and this is what matters—too present. The scene in the hotel bedroom soon became excruciating to watch as the camera returned to it again and again. Not that it was inappropriate or in any way pornographic. But the reader manages his own balance between the psychological damage to these two young people and the clumsy physical act in which it is played out. The cinemagoer has to accept the director's balance, and loses a dimension as a result.

The screenplay was by McEwan himself. I would need to go back to check, but my impression is that, in contrast to the usual approach of trimmming a novel to make a movie, the author has taken his own trim novella and expanded it. I certainly learned a lot more of the back-story than I recall from the book; I am not sure it was all relevant, however. Edward's family was certainly colorful, but the knowledge did not help me understand his honeymoon problems any better. Although still only hinted at, the relationship between Florence and her father seemed much more significant than anything I had picked up the book. As a result, in terms of the baggage that each brings to the marriage, the focus shifts almost entirely to Florence, as the victim of specific trauma in addition to the general repressed atmosphere of the time. Given her difficulties with physical sex, I don't understand why McEwan plunged her straight away into an apparently successful marriage with somebody else; how did that work any better? Indeed, the filling out of the later lives of the characters is weaker than the rest of this generally strong movie. (hide spoiler)]

One thing I wholeheartedly admired was the music. In the book, we know that Florence is a violinist, and we see her with her quartet in concert at the end. But we cannot hear her. Not only does the film contain several scenes of her rehearsing or playing, but her music is there in the sound-track throughout: chamber music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, all beautifully matching the emotional temperature, and music by others as well. My first reaction on coming home was to pull out one of the featured pieces and play it through with my wife, also a violinist. Through music, if not always in words or pictures, I felt I could live inside Florence, and experience something vital in her that transcended her problems. Is it any wonder that Edward seemed a little ordinary by comparison?