The point the ad-makers want us to understand is that choosing this car, or even just knowing how good it is, shows such a degree of good taste and judgement that maturity in other serious matters, like choosing a mate for life, can be taken for granted.

It’s a pity for them that no one remembers the make of car, but everyone remembers the exchange between the two characters. That’s because we all recognise that this is the basis of most people’s decision to marry a particular person rather than another.

They’re reasonably clean, we assure ourselves, sane, presentable, intelligent and laugh at our jokes. Best of all, they only live round the corner and it would be too terrible to let them go. That’s usually enough. The rest, the success or otherwise of a possible lifetime together, is down to sheer luck.

The young newly-married couple in Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach’, Florence and Edward, don’t even have that much going for them. They meet by chance one day in 1961, a year before their marriage, and are led by their immaturity, their unrealistic hopes for life in general, their wishful ideas of each other and, most of all, by the culture which had reared and shape them, to take this momentous step.

The ‘onstage’ part of the novel (or novella; it’s 166 pages) deals with their disastrous wedding-night, and the rest (very skilfully interwoven) with their separate lives up to their meeting and the time after their separation.

I wouldn’t have called myself a big McEwan fan until I read this but I’m fairly well converted by it. Especially entertaining and deft is the way the central action is moved in and out of the spotlight and the accuracy of the social observations, particularly regarding youngsters who were neither children nor adults.

McEwan constantly reminds us that the authorial voice is looking back from the present:

This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine

being a typically ironic example. And then a few pages later:

This was still the era – it would end later in that famous decade – when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure. Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth....

A big point is being indicated here. In an age when an almost religious significance is assigned to personal autonomy, individualism and, especially, the desirability of choice, the notion of ‘arranged’ marriages seems to many people exotic and slightly distasteful. But surely, all marriages are arranged, McEwan is suggesting, by cultural, psychological and social forces largely beyond the individual’s knowledge or control.

In one way, the couple escape an enduring tragedy by effectively ending their marriage on this first night. But how wonderfully different the following decades could have developed, it is hinted, if on that night the right language had been learnt and understood by either or both of them. Just as every lasting relationship is the result of an infinite number of tiny threads of circumstance coming together at just the right moment, so whole other possible lives could be randomly extinguished by chances equally slight and contingent.

There is a superb image in the first chapter, which is recalled again at the end of the book:

…..thousands of years of pounding storms had sifted and graded the sizes of pebbles along the eighteen miles of beach, with the bigger stones at the eastern end. The legend was that local fishermen landing at night knew exactly they were by the grade of shingle.

Now, if what’s being said here is that no one should marry anyone else who’s too far away on the beach, either east or west, then I think I’m inclined to agree. In one of my comedy routines I recount the problems of a man marrying a woman who is 1.8 social classes above him (‘….not 2….no one can do 2.’) It is not a happy experience for either of them.

And while I’m pushing my own stuff, he’s a few very apposite lines from my story ‘New Departures’

Their marriage had been the usual catastrophe: each of them had married the person they thought the other was, or should have been. Then each had tried to become the person they thought the other had thought they had married. So that the couple everyone knew as Cathy-and-Tim were really pretend- Cathy and pretend-Tim. Then the pretend-people tried to adjust to what they thought the other pretend-person expected and/or wanted. So each of them became a pretend-pretend-person.

It isn’t easy living in a story-within-a-story-within-a-story.

Laurence Inman was born in Birmingham. Did Philosophy at University. Should really have done English, since all of his waking hours (and many of his un-waking ones) he was obsessed with Literature, but you needed Latin O Level in those days, which he didn't have.. Taught English for 25 years (Manchester, London, Leicester, Exeter, Germany, Bahrain, Singapore) until an eye-complaint forced him to retire. Since then he has written plays, short stories, poetry (printed and performed) published cartoons, done loads of stand-up comedy and straight acting, appeared in the film ‘Sex Lives Of The Potato Men’ with Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie Crook. Currently writing a novel about a man who sees the murder of total strangers as the only way he can give up his ruinous habits.