On Chesil Beach

I finished reading Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach two nights ago, a short, beautifully constructed novel with the resonance of a Philip Larkin poem.  The plot is not intricate, but the manner of its telling is, without being unnatural.  The past seems to take its rightful place in a movement toward an outcome in the present, the "present" being almost fifty years ago (the same general time period as the setting of Mad Men), the past reaching no more than two decades beyond that.  In the past, we are given both a development of character, and information about what might have shaped it, that information never conclusively tied to the characters' fates, which play out here to their sad end. Psychobiography is possible, even encouraged, but never necessary, for an evaluation of the protagonists' moral qualities and failures.  I liked this book very much.