McEwan’s fiction has recurrently been concerned with the question of time and human actions appropriate to it, often representing temporal transgressions as perverse regressions and childish misrecognitions. On Chesil Beach takes that concern with appropriate timing literally, concretizing it in the novel’s very structure as well as plot. The novel’s “climax” — the protagonist’s ejaculatio praecox on his wedding night—disrupts the conventional expectations of the wedding night–a corporeal enactment of intimacy gone wrong through bad timing– and too abruptly turns the characters’ lives in separate directions. But unlike conventional narrative, this precocious climax occurs midway in the novel, leaving a psychic remainder that unwinds in an extended denouement, but one that traces only the male character’s post-wedding night fate, and sustains the ironic detachment of the narrative voice.