Alaska Employment Law

Perhaps known best for his novel Atonement (2001), Ian McKewan, a wonderful writer, won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam (1998), though most critics consider that award to be sort of a “make-up” prize for not getting the Booker even earlier in his career. His latest is On Chesil Beach (2007), a horribly sad little story about the wedding night, and what preceded it and what followed it, of Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, a young, just married English couple dutifully honeymooning in Dorset. Set in a summer evening in 1962 – a perfectly dreadful time, really, a time belonging more to the ‘50s than the ‘60s – On Chesil Beach explores the couple’s perceptions of each other over the course of this signal night. These turn out to be misperceptions of each other, informed in some measure by their own family histories: Edward’s father is a teacher and his mother is brain-damaged; Florence’s father is a rich industrialist, her mother a bloodless Oxford philosophy lecturer. The ability, one might say the casuistry, of the lovers as each projects onto his beloved the traits he wishes to see, is both plausible and frightening. In the end, Florence sees a way out of their dilemma, yet Edward cannot accept her idea. Years later, he realizes how he may have been wrong. He sees the cost of his certainty.

While it starts out as a Cold War thriller, The Innocent (1990) is, in its own way, as much of a romantic horror story as Chesil Beach. It’s 1955 or so, and Leonard Marnham, an English Post Office engineer, arrives in occupied Berlin to help with a joint CIA/MI6 espionage project that involves constructing a secret tunnel from the American sector to a location under the Russian sector of the city, there to tap into the underground telephone cable that runs from Berlin to the Soviet High Command. McKewan expertly recreates the paranoia of those times, in part by showing us the tension of life above-ground in each of the occupied sectors of the city. One night, Leonard goes out drinking with a couple of Americans from this secret project, and in a vast and wretched hotel lounge he meets a divorced German woman, Maria Eckdorf, who at 30 is five years older than Leonard. Like Edward Mayhew in Chesil Beach, Leonard is a virgin when our story begins, but he falls hard for Maria and they commence a passionate love affair, which in turn worries his American supervisors that he will spill the beans about the tunnel. In the midst of their affair, Leonard makes a terrible miscalculation, and he and Maria have a falling out. When they meet again some weeks later, Maria’s German ex-husband Otto, a drunken veteran of WW2, has confronted her and beaten her. It is at this point the book shifts gears rather violently, as Leonard cannot avoid dealing with Otto, a vicious, unhappy man. What transpires next is almost black comedy, but you can’t put The Innocent down – the story is horrible and compelling. At the end of the book, Marnham must try, years later, to understand what happened – just as Edward Mayhew must do in Chesil Beach. Ian McKewan will be a treat for you to read if you have not discovered him already.