[.ca] Enduring Love (ISBN 0099276585)

From Amazon.com:
Joe Rose has planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States. To complete the picture, there's even a "helium balloon drifting dreamily across the wooded valley." But as Joe and Clarissa watch the balloon touch down, their idyll comes to an abrupt end. The pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope, while the only passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump down. As the wind whips into action, Joe and four other men rush to secure the basket. Mother Nature, however, isn't feeling very maternal. "A mighty fist socked the balloon in two rapid blows, one-two, the second more vicious than the first," and at once the rescuers are airborne. Joe manages to drop to the ground, as do most of his companions, but one man is lifted sky-high, only to fall to his death. In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. (In one of the novel's many ironies, the balloon eventually lands safely, the boy unscathed.) But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa. Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye.

Enduring Fixation:
This story of madness and fixation will keep you awake nights - and not just because it's hard to put down. Freelance writer Joe Rose and his wife Clarissa are in the wrong place at the wrong time. While enjoying a romantic picnic in the English countryside, they witness a tragic accident, a ballooning trip that goes horribly wrong. Joe and other passersby rush to the rescue, but the men bungle the operation and one of them, John Logan, dies as a result. This would already be a lot of action in most books but in Ian McEwan's dark and surprising world it's just the starting point. One of the other rescuers, an intensely religious young man named Jed Parry, has in an instant become obsessed with Joe. At first it seems unwelcome but harmless, and no one takes it too seriously. Not the police, and not Clarissa. Parry follows Joe around, waits outside his house, writes him lengthy love letters: the situation becomes more and more disruptive of Joe's everyday life, yet Clarissa reacts unsympathetically, seeming to feel that Joe has blown the inconvenience out of proportion. Joe contacts the police again, but the Inspectors find nothing threatening in someone obsessively promising to love you. Eventually, however, the latent atheism in Joe's published writings seems to push Parry over the brink - and what happens after that brings to mind the well-worn phrase "I love you to death". McEwan has written a book that is superb on several levels. One of its central themes has to do with the standard for determining when one person's behavior is threatening to another. Joe's life is being disrupted, he feels dread every time he looks out the window or checks his mail: Parry's unwelcome actions are clearly causing him anxiety. Yet though he seeks help from the proper authorities, he receives none and so must ultimately take matters into his own hands. Most disquieting of all, though, is the story's plausibility. Just as consumers can be tricked into buying a defective product by its pretty packaging, the mere façade of sanity is easily bought into. All too often dangerous individuals are left loose in society by those too apathetic to stop them. Jed Parry, a slight young man who speaks of love and conversion... Who'd have believed he could be so dangerous? Subtle psychopaths abound in our society, walk among us every day undetected, and that's precisely what makes them so dangerous. The obviously deranged are more easily guarded against; it's the quietly psychotic we need to worry about. This is a book about which one can truly say "It could happen to you."

Contemporary Masterpiece:
One one level, at least, McEwan descends to that of the ordinary: the mere plebian. This is the first book of his I have read where one of the main characters isn't a busom buddy or lover or former lover of some exhaltingly talented and ambitious MP or cabinet minister. The routine, even mundane middle-class existence represented chiefly by Joycean literature is often underappreciated. Joe's rational(?) narration is very everyman. The detailing of the balloon accident is exquisite and presents the role of fate and happen-chance in tragedy. ... Also, the hypothetical argument presented on pages 170-171 alone makes this worth reading. In my opinion this is the best McEwan novel I have read and one of the very best novels I've read that is set in the present day. Maybe the best. This is only my second 5 Star book.

Intelligent Homo-erotic Thriller:
The author is Ian McEwan. Distinguished English writer, and known for his intelligent, compelling works like The Cement Garden, The Child in Time (winner of the Whitbread Prize), Amsterdam (Booker Prize), and the highly praised Atonement. (Of course, you might say, with all those book-titles under his belt, what can possibly go wrong with this one) ENDURING LOVE, the author's nineth novel, is the story of Joe Rose, disciple of scientific rationalism ("You're so rational sometimes you're like a child"), who becomes an object of desire (devotion according to the New York Times, 25.01.98) of a mad, "Jesus freak", Jed Parry. Parry's personal belief that there's something between them- an unspoken love "as strong as steel cable"- is so powerful, so convincing that it is threatening the stability of Rose's relationship with his partner, Clarissa. The fruits of Parry's obsession is so terrifying that sometimes I, as the reader, wonders whether such an expression of desire is possible. Could it be that Rose is just imagining things? (Apparently not, and Rose gave us a name for this kind of obsession, de Clerambault's syndrome. NOTE: I suggest that you finish the book first before investigating the nature of this mental illness) There are times when you need to be patient with this book. Discussions ranging from Einstein to Keats to the Shroud of Turin will surely turn off some readers. Furthermore, don't expect shocking, melo-dramatic scenes in this novel. The intensity of McEwan's narration is so controlled and subtle that one might find it frustrating. Nevertheless, ENDURING LOVE is an intelligent, compelling thriller. A fine novel that deserves to be read. McEwan should be congratulated for creating this novel.

A Narrative of Science, Religion and Obsession:
I first read Ian McEwan in 1976. I had just arrived in Ireland for a year of study and picked up an inexpensive Picador paperback edition of his first collection of stories, "First Love, Last Rites." I still have that paperback, its pages dog-eared and fragile, and I re-read it from time-to-time. After that first encounter, I became a McEwan "fan," enraptured by his dark, edgy, disturbing, psychologically obsessive narratives. "Enduring Love", published more than twenty years after that first collection of stories, is different from his earliest writing in the sense that its narrative turns around a more conventional, albeit still psychologically driven and bizarre, set of circumstances. As many reviewers have commented, the first chapter of "Enduring Love" is a compelling page-turner. Joe and Clarissa, long-time lovers, are setting up a picnic under a tree on the edge of a wide expanse of field. Clarissa, a Keats scholar, has just returned from an extended research trip to Rome and the picnic is an occasion for them to celebrate their reunion. In Joe's first person narrative: "The beginning is simple to mark. We were in sunlight under a turkey oak, partly protected from a strong, gusty wind. I was kneeling on the grass with a corkscrew in my hand, and Clarissa was passing me the bottle-a 1987 Daumas Gassac. This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man's shout. We turned and looked across the field and saw the danger." And what was the danger? Joe and Clarissa see a hot air balloon pulling away from the ground, a young boy in the basket of the balloon while an older man, his companion, struggles desperately to hold onto the balloon, to keep it tethered to the ground in the face of gusty winds. Soon, Joe is running across the field to help, along with three other men. It is a moment in time, "the pinprick on the time map," that Joe explores obsessively, examining it, turning it, over and over, trying to understand how such an instant can change an entire life. Joe and the three other men soon catch up to the balloon, the four of them, together with the boy's older companion, struggling to hold the balloon down, to keep it from blowing off with the young boy as scared passenger. It becomes apparent, however, that their efforts are failing, the balloon starting to rise higher, the four men holding on, each of them facing grave physical danger and a powerful moral dilemma. Each must decide whether to continue to hold on, running the risk that if the others do not then he will face near certain death from falling. As Joe later relates, looking back on that moment, "I didn't know, nor have I ever discovered, who let go first. I am not prepared to accept that it was me. What is certain is that if we had not broken ranks, our collective weight would have brought the balloon to earth a few seconds later as the gust subsided." Thus begins "Enduring Love", the first chapter seemingly narrating an event and a moral conundrum that immediately captures the reader, leading him to believe that the rest of the novel will explore how this event affects the lives of Joe and Clarissa and the rest of the book's characters. However, in typical McEwan fashion, the plot takes a much different turn. What begins as a tragic event that elicits moral ponderings veers into a narrative of science, religion and psychological obsession. Joe Rose encounters one of the other would-be rescuers, Jed Parry, while standing in the field after their ill-starred rescue attempt. Parry, an apparently religious fanatic, sees deep meaning in his time-bound encounter with Joe. He becomes obsessed with Joe, stalking him and, eventually, threatening Joe's relationship with Clarissa and Joe's very well-being. Parry suffers from de Clerambault's syndrome, a type of homo-erotic obsession with religious overtones. As the scientific appendix to the novel notes, "this is indeed a most lasting form of love, often terminated only by the death of the patient." "Enduring Love" thus begins by posing a moral dilemma, but soon evolves into a compelling novel of deviant psychological obsession, of conflict between religion and science, and of a deep, introspective examination of how a loving relationship can soon unravel in the face of threats from the outside. It is a thought-provoking novel, albeit one which at times seems somewhat lacking in feeling, the reader (at least this reader) having difficulty identifying with the often clinical coldness of Joe's first person narration. While the tone of Joe's narration may be intentional, McEwan intending to write in a voice that reflects the unfeeling tone of Joe's deep-seated scientific rationalism, the narrative never quite rings true to life. "Enduring Love" is, nonetheless, a fascinating and worthwhile novel that gives the reader much to ponder.

Don't Bother:
Okay, so McEwen has one a few Bookers, but I hated Amsterdam, and I didn't like Enduring Love much better. What do we have here? For a little while there's a bit of Henry Miller/Turn of the Screw-escque "is he legitimately being stalked or is he just crazy" tension. There's a bit of "is our relationship worth fighting for?" There's a bit of the "scientific/rationale" man battling against the man obsessed by God's word. BUT.... the reader really doesn't care. None of the characters are likeable or able to catch your interest. We never really believe that the couple fighting to stay together should bother. And the Godly obsessed stalker? This is your key character, no? The one that really gives your book the edge? He's a shadow. He isn't explored in enough depth to give his obsession it's edge. Thank God this book was short.