This new book ... ‘On Chesil Beach’, is more than an event. It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly.
‘On Chesil Beach’ achieves its overwhelming suspense without recourse to romantic fabulation, to mystery and imagination, or to brilliant tricks and turns. Those readers, however, who notice a difference between this book and some of McEwan’s earlier ones can hardly fail to see that it is richly preceded in them, and may feel that there is no need to talk of a regeneration, secured by a flight from romance. Such talk belongs to the history of McEwan’s engagement with the traditions of Romanticism, an engagement which has come and gone within his works, which has inspired him and which he can’t be due to desert. Meanwhile the new book is at least as good as any he has written.
Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement, 4 April 2007. Full text here.