Many of us know people who'll ' anything that walks.' For the most part those are reprehensible people, worthy to be loathed. There is more involved in wanting to have sex with someone than just the base physical desire. Looking at the passages now, I think I have read too much into them, but I wonder if they are there to for this purpose? Leaving them aside, there does seem to be a lot of writing to indicate that Florence could be asexual, I wonder if this was intended by McEwan?Įxcept for the tiny detail that it's usually not. Whatever the 'shameful secret locked in musty confinement' is, whose smell seems to erupt into the room later in the evening, it is not fully disclosed.' If there is another source of her shame, we realise that Florence will never be able to enunciate it. She was usually sick many times on the crossing, and of no use to her father as a sailor, and that surely was the source of her shame.' It was late in the evening, and her father was moving about the dim cramped cabin, undressing, like Edward now. She was twelve years old, lying still like this, waiting, shivering in the narrow bunk with polished mahogany sides. It was the smell of the sea that summoned it. While everything is going so horribly wrong for Florence's wedding night, something comes rising up from her childhood: 'Here came the past, anyway, the indistinct past. We have to follow their trail through glancing references and metaphors, and our desire to understand what her sense of shame stems from is never sated.

Since this is a time in which sexual difficulties could not be referred to, McEwan never lays those secrets on the table. 'I also found one of the reviews, this is from Natasha Walter's review in the Guardian 31st Marchįlorence's family secrets are much less easily pinned down. She would do all this, then loathe herself for it later'.

But sometimes, in a surge of protective feeling and guilty love, she would come up behind him where he sat and entwine her arms around his neck and kiss the top of his head and nuzzle him, liking his clean scent.

They never talked about those trips, He had never asked her again, and she was glad. He used to take her out with him, and several times, when she was twelve and thirteen, they crossed all the way to Carteret, near Cherbourg. She hated hearing his enthusiastic reports about the boat, the ridiculousy names Sugar Plum, which he kept down in Poole Harbour. There were times when she found him physically repellent and she could hardly bear the sight of him - his gleaming baldness, his tiny white hands. 'As often happened when she had been away, her father aroused in her conflicting emotions.

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