Gripping from the word go (Enduring Love - Ian McEwan)

Member Name: fromage

Product:	Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
Date:	26/05/01 (659 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great plot, great characters, meaningful.

Disadvantages: None that I can think of

I picked up ‘Enduring Love’ having intended for a while to read one of McEwan’s books. I had fairly high expectations. I have heard McEwan’s writing commended often, and the back of the Vintage edition is covered with words of fulsome praise. I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed.

The story is that of a middle aged popular science writer, Joe Rose, who suffers the obsessive attention of a young Christian man, Jed Parry, who it turns out is a sufferer of a ‘clinical variant of de Clérambault’s syndrome’. ‘De Clérambault’s syndrome’, for those of us living outside the world of professional psychology, is a kind of irrational love, or ‘erotomania’ which leads people to behave in classic ‘stalker’ fashion. As the book is set before anti-stalking legislation was enacted, Joe’s predicament is ignored by the police. His wife, unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation, is frightened by what she sees as his paranoia, and their relationship starts to fall apart. Increasingly Joe is left with no-one to turn to, and ultimately has to take matters into his own hands.

I will my add voice to the unanimous acclaim that has been given to the book’s first chapter. It is brilliant. McEwan’s use of language is tremendous throughout the book, but it is his use of pace and contrast that allows him to portray this opening drama with such force. From a picnic on a sunny day to a life or death struggle with the elements, the author plays with the transformation of the scene, building expectation, then digressing, pushing the drama on, then pausing to let the tension mount. By the time this first drama is resolved, the reader is captivated.

Thereafter the standard of writing continues high. As Jed’s obsession unfolds we feel something of the claustrophobia of Joe’s besieged state. Our sympathy for Joe is so strong at this stage of t
he book that the reader is inclined to condemn those who fail to help him, particularly Clarissa, his wife. McEwan sees the danger, and so switches the perspective from Joe to Clarissa for a chapter, allowing us to understand her ensuing doubt. The device works perfectly, preserving Clarissa for us as a believable character and injecting the hint of a suspicion that maybe Jed Parry’s obsessive behaviour is actually only going on in Joe’s head.

The middle section of the novel is the intellectual core of the work. It is here, by contrasting Joe’s calm, scientific atheism with Jed’s passionate belief, that McEwan weaves into the story the argument of science against religion, pure reason against raw emotion. Jed, having read all of Joe’s scientific articles writes to him, condemning his refutation of the existence of God:

“I imagined you telling me in your cold way that God and His Only Son were just characters, like James Bond or Hamlet. Or that you yourself could make life in a laboratory flask given a handful of chemicals and a few million years. It’s not only that you deny there’s a God – you want to take His place. Pride like this can destroy you.”

Always a fascinating topic, it is added greater interest by taking further the idea that Joe is in fact imagining Jed’s obsession in a subconscious effort to reconcile the logical and emotional sides of his character. McEwan, again through Clarissa’s voice, muddies the water by telling us that Joe’s handwriting and Jed’s are similar, by pointing out that Clarissa has never seen Jed. Even the similarity of their names seems designed to heighten the suspicion.

In the closing stages the novel dips for a time into melodrama. The quality of the prose doesn’t flag, the characters continue to be well realised, and there are touches of humour to enjoy. But with the return of the plot to the fore, the deb
ate and the mystery that so enlivened the middle of the work are temporarily left behind, and I for one was sorry to see them go, even for a short while.

Thankfully, McEwan does not abandon them entirely, they are revisited when the author offers us his conclusion. This he does through Clarissa, again, who in a letter to Joe points out that the cause of the near breakdown of their relationship was not Jed Parry alone. By trying to combat Jed’s emotion only with his reason, by setting himself up as, if you like, an opposite force to Jed’s emotional delusion, Joe brought himself, and the one he loved to the brink of disaster. And that is the message that the book has to offer. Reason and emotion should co-exist, and also science and religion, because all of these things are natural components of humanity.

Having read ‘Enduring Love’ I shall be seeking out others of McEwan’s works. While it is a book with a philosophy and a message, this is not just a sermon from the author with the bare bones of a plot. The unfolding story never fails to grip the reader, there is not a word of dialogue that sounds out of place, there is not a character or an emotion any less than wholly convincing. All in all, it is an engrossing work, beautifully constructed, which I recommend highly.

Summary: