Balloon With Ballast (Enduring Love - Ian McEwan)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
Date:	17/03/02 (646 review reads)
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What is a rhetorical question? It’s a question to which the answer is self-evident, obvious, clear. An example? Have you read all the books standing on your bookshelves? Another one: have you bought new books nevertheless?

I’d like to propose to change the cat ‘Where do you buy your books?’ into ‘Where do you get your books from?’, one answer could be: from my own overcrowded bookshelves!

That’s what happened to me before my last hols. I was browsing through my ‘unreads’ and chanced on Enduring Love. Ian McEwan, wasn’t that the Amsterdam chappie two of my dooyoo friends disagree so heartily about?

Why I bought the book is not a rhetorical question, but an unanswerable one. It must have been on Camden Lock market three years ago; I didn’t know the name of the author then, that’s for sure, and the cover of the pocketbook is one of the ugliest I’ve ever seen.

At the bottom is a dark brown stripe of 3,5 cm into which the name of the author is written in white letters and the title of the book in pink(!) ones. The remaining space of the cover has the colour of dirty yellow, or what in my idiolect (my personal use of the language) is called chicken shit (can’t find the asterisk on my key-board!). On this off-putting background is the drawing of a balloon in black pencil, the upper half of which can also be seen as a huge eye with the apple turned heavenwards.

It’s creepy which is a good thing as far as it is an introduction to the theme, but isn’t the art of cover design to introduce the theme, but in an attractive way which sells? Well, what am I saying here, everything speaks against buying that book, but buy it I did. So it was maybe the ugliness which did it.

The opening scene is brilliant, very gripping. Joe Rose, a middle aged, scientific journalist, is having a picnic on a field with his girlfriend Clarissa when sudd
enly a balloon accident occurs. - A balloon pilot sees it as his duty to inform the internet readers that “Balloons do not fly in the condition he (McEwan) describes. Conditions he describes do not occur. Balloon pilots do none of the things he describes.” Ah, well, we’re in the world of fiction here, aren’t we? But it’s a bit embarrassing nevertheless as throughout the book McEwan conveys the feeling that he’s done his homework and researched his background material, too much so even. More of that later.

Joe and some other men run to the balloon and try to help. One of the would-be rescuers is a certain Jed Parry who instantly becomes obsessed with him; he’s a fundamentalist religious fanatic who wants to save the atheistic Joe. When he asks him to say a prayer with him (there has been a fatality), Joe finds it a bit odd, but thinks nothing much of it, he doesn’t know yet that Perry won’t let go of him, will cling to him like a leech and nearly ruin his whole life.

The novel is told in the first person perspective from Joe’s point of view (with the exception of one chapter told by Clarissa), I must say that the portrayal of a stalker and what he can do to someone’s/everyone’s life gives me the creeps. We read a lot about people stalking celebrities these days, but never have I found a profound analysis in a newspaper report. The condition which McEwan describes is, apparently, a real one. De Clerambault’s Syndrome was named after the French doctor who first identified the disorder when he treated a woman who was convinced that George V (whom she had never met) was in love with her.

The description of the relationship Joe - Jed would make for a good read. The title uses the word ‘love’; what is so alarming about Jed’s disease is that his doings are so close to ordinary infatuation and romantic attachment.

But McEwan is not content wit
h this story or doesn’t trust it to be substantial enough; he interweaves two subplots, one about the widow of the balloon pilot killed in the accident and the troubled relationship of Joe and Clarissa. I could bear with that, what really gets me is the vast amount of scientific information. Now that I know McEwan hasn’t got the balloon thingy correct, can I believe him when it comes to the other subjects he deals with?

Joe Rose could have any profession, McEwan has made him a science journalist, solely, in my opinion, to be able to cram as much highbrow intellectual stuff into the novel as possible. - I found this sentence scribbled on a piece of stationery from the hotel on Tenerife where I had read the book during my Christmas hols.

Before writing the op, I had a look at what google had collected on Enduring Love, but when I saw 1740 entries, I decided not to go into that, just some clicks at random. Luck led me to a critique by Cressida Conolly (does anyone know her?) who wrote “...I’d like to call for an immediate, worldwide moratorium on novelists reading works on science. Like oceans plundered of whales, science books have become over-fished by voracious, imaginative writers. You can’t pick up a novel these days without being bombarded by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, or the latest theories on Darwinism. Popular science now occupies ample shelf-room in every bookshop and a prominent place in best-seller lists. Novelists should tell us stories, not recite particle physics. I’m all in favour of the novel of ideas, but at least let the ideas be the author’s own. An author’s individuality is drowned in this sea of science. Much as I enjoyed Enduring Love, I missed Ian McEwan.”

I wouldn’t be afraid to voice my opinion if nobody shared it, it’s nice, though, to see that I’m not alone.

Last, but not least: the novel is at times not a smooth read,
it occasionally lacks what I’ve detected in Alan Isler (see op), a born storyteller who can combine information (yes, why not?) and enjoyment, the one can’t be separated from the other. No matter what he decides to tell us we follow him willingly. With Enduring Love we notice the construction and hear it creaking so-to-speak. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s literary biggie (1749-1832) said in one of his plays: “We sense the intention and we’re annoyed.”

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