Enduring Love

The usual great writing. Abandoned because the moral, psychological and physical horror are someway too much to stand these days. It will be probably bounce back as a worthwhile read in different times. Recommended all the same, for the fearless and strong of stomach.

The only type of love that endures is that which is not reciprocated.

Unlike most novels whose story rises to a culmination, McEwan uses the big event as an opener. And what an unforgettable opener! The account that follows is a disturbing story of obsession: sinister, ominous, but utterly compelling.

Joe is a frustrated scientist, now reduced to writing popular science journal articles. His thought processes, of rationalizing in the scientific way is eluding him, and the occupational hazard of "popularizing" has taken over. Is Joe an unreliable narrator? There is so much that can be read into the story that the reader is never quite sure of the veracity of Joe's version. The scene where he tries to acquire a means of defence may be dark show more but is pure comedy, that somehow fits with the creepiness factor.

Another excellent, beautifully written tale from McEwan. show less

Every so often Ian McEwan picks up a familiar plot-driven genre and rebuilds it with a slow, dark emotional engine. The Innocent, which was made into a movie I didn't like much, was a spy thriller and a Hitchcock-like can-things-possibly-get-worse murder thing, wrapped around a love story and a painful character study, and shaped by the two meanings of the title (the hero's youthful ignorance, and the way the plot leads him to do worse and worse things without being really guilty of anything); I mostly loved it. Similarly, the story of Enduring Love could have been done as a stalker-of-the-week movie leading up to a big chase scene, and some of its strength comes from how simple the premise is: a man finds that an unpleasant delusional show more stranger is romantically obsessed with him.

Again going in two directions from the title, McEwan writes about what makes love endure, even to the point of psychosis, and how it can dwindle into a thing to be endured, like the narrator's collapsing marriage. How you can care and fear for a guy who's almost more unpleasant than his persecutor (though I'm sure not everyone will) is part of what makes the book impossible to summarize. McEwan also tends to build his characters around some odd area of history or knowledge that he's researched lovingly, and in this case his helpless narrator, a popular science writer, applies the buzzwords of "sociobiology" to his love life, in ways that both satirize and humanize that currently fashionable school of thought -- all while keeping the threat of murder in the air.

And after the "ending" -- where, as we expect, the plot spends itself in a bit of violence, followed by a pastoral recovery -- McEwan does something I've only seen done once before (by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale) and does it awfully well: he retells the whole thing in a few pages from a chilly academic perspective, as a psychiatric case study, removing both the suspense and the empathy while adding some new information that may or may not change how you see the characters. I don't know what to call this device or whether Atwood really invented it, but in both cases it had a delayed punch-in-the-gut effect on me, because the next time you read a case study or historical essay or news report like that, you can't help going through the same process in reverse and imagining the personal depths that were left out of it. show less

After spending several weeks apart, Joe Rose is enthusiastically waiting to see his wife, Clarissa. (Enthusiasm is the most appropriate description, not excitement, as Joe Rose is nothing if not coolly logical.) Clarissa and Joe are a quiet, intellectual couple: Clarissa is a professor who specializes in Keats, while Joe is a disappointed science writer who, despite being reduced to writing what he sees as pseudo-scientific articles, has achieved some success, allowing him to float on and be content. Joe has planned a picnic in the English countryside for their reunion, but they’ve barely opened their bottle of wine when a helium balloon, clearly out of control, comes drifting where they are picnicking.

Joe and four other men grab onto show more the ropes hanging from the basket, but they are lifted clean off the ground, and their notions of heroism vanish as they are raised higher by the wind. All but one of them let go of the ropes; John ’s misguided valor causes his death, and Joe says of witnessing the fall:

We watched him drop. ... No forgiveness, no special dispensation for flesh, or bravery, or kindness. Only ruthless gravity. ... He fell as he had hung, a stiff little black stick. I've never seen such a terrible thing as that falling man.

All the witnesses are left shaken by the incident. Joe repeatedly asks himself, was he the first one to let go? Joe, being logical to a fault, rationalizes his behavior as the natural instinct for self-preservation, but this doesn’t prevent him from feeling waves of guilt at John ’s death. What seems to be the central conflict is now established, but Enduring Love, surprisingly, delves into something else entirely. After John Logan’s fall, Joe exchanges a look with Jed Parry, one of the other failed heroes, and this launches the real catastrophe: Jed falls madly (and i do mean madly, as in the obsessive sense) in love with Joe. Jed is convinced that Joe returns his love (in fact, he believes that Joe was the one to initiate the nonexistent affair) and begins to hang around outside his apartment, leave scores of messages on his answering machine, and write letters extolling the virtue of God’s, and by extension his, love.

Joe, ever the pragmatist, researches and discovers that Jed suffers from a condition called De Clerambault’s Syndrome. Jed’s persistence soon causes Joe to suffer from his own brand of mania, which triggers a rift between him and Clarissa (whom Joe accuses of being unsupportive) and brings about Joe’s old feelings of inadequacy about his profession. The logic Joe depends on cannot save him from Jed’s unwanted and increasingly aggressive affection, so Joe abandons logic altogether and buys a gun from his one-time drug dealer to deal with Jed decisively.

Enduring Love is a narrative tour de force that traverses the timorous bridge between science and emotion, as well as the areas in which those two things overlap. This is not a breathless Fatal Attraction-type redux; the novel attempts to tackle obsession, guilt, delusion, and love, and all the gray areas wherein all those things intersect. Surprisingly, it succeeds and does so damn near flawlessly.

The title certainly refers to Jed’s obsessive love for Joe, as Joe and Clarissa’s marriage is in tatters by the end of the novel (although it is implied in the fictional appendix that the two managed to reconcile, it doesn’t quite match the singular, relentless devotion that Jed has shown Joe). The characters were all deserving of sympathy (yes, even the wretched sociopath that is Jed Parry) and richly constructed, despite Joe’s restricted point of view. Like his protagonist, Mr. McEwan’s tone is one of aloofness. There were times when Joe’s stubborn rationalism was maddening, but it is consistent with the point that Mr. McEwan is making: that some emotions cannot be explained away by science, and that the things that define us – our love for the people we share our lives with – are unpredictable and ambiguous by nature.

Originally posted on my Vox and my LJ show less

Enduring Love is another book that I have recently entered blind, completely ignorant of its story or theme, spurred on only by reviews and recommendations. This does leave me somewhat apprehensive of enjoying a book, but in this case, the opening chapter sealed my fate. A gripping encounter at the scene of a terrible hot air balloon accident got this novel off to a scintillating start, unbearable to read, but impossible to put aside.

The story then follows the narrator, Joe, and his partner Clarissa, in their struggle to come to terms with the tragedy and the events that follow. In the aftermath of the accident, Joe has an encounter with another helper, Jed, who develops an unhealthy obsession with Joe, stalking him and waiting outside show more his apartment for him to be alone. Joe's reaction is not particularly rational, and causes the situation to escalate out of control, as all the characters' lives begin to unravel around them.

This book struggles constantly with the themes of religion, science and rationality, none of which is mutally exclusive. Joe's career as a science writer puts him at further odds with Jed's religious fervor and emotional instability and spurs him to take matters into his own hands. The entire book felt like the moments before a car crash, the tension painfully real and growing towards the inevitable conclusion, though it is perhaps not what the reader expects. Although McEwan's ability to write tense and painful situations is undeniable, I found it hard to really care about his narrator. One can only empathise with the impossible situtation Joe has found himself in, but his attitude and reactions to events made him a somewhat unsympathetic character.

Not an easy read, but impossible to put down and I would still recommend it. show less

A youngish married couple is picnicking near Oxford when they see a huge hot-air balloon being swept along the ground, a young boy in the basket and an older man on the ground twisted in the lines. The husband, Joe, and several other men in the park run towards the balloon, at first having success keeping it on the ground but finally being pulled up into the air in a strong gust of wind. All but one of them drops off as the balloon ascends with the boy still aboard and one rescuer dangling from a rope, hundreds of feet up. As the onlookers watch helplessly, the man loses his grip and plummets to the ground, and the balloon floats away. Joe and a second man, Jed, approach the body, and what they find is described in vivid and horrifying show more detail and, I'm sorry to say, will haunt me for many a day.

Joe, from whose viewpoint the story is told, is wracked with guilt, convinced that if they had held on for a only few seconds longer the gust would have passed and no one injured. But a more serious situation arises as Jed becomes obsessed with him and begins to stalk him, convinced it's their destiny to be together and for Jed to bring Joe to his God. Here we arrive at the central problem with the plot: even while he tries to convince his wife of the seriousness of the stalker, Joe erases 30+ phone messages left by Jed instead of having her, or the police, listen to them. This seemed really implausible to me, and to the wife. Jed changes his tactics frequently so that the wife never sees him, and she begins to think her husband is imagining the situation. I found it interesting, and an indication of how good a writer McEwan is, that as a reader even I began to wonder if Joe was crazy.

More and more isolated, Joe decides that only he can protect himself from Jed, and he takes a desperate step that brings the story to its climax. show less

This book scared the bejesus out of me!

I love a lot of what McEwan writes, and didn't know anything about this book before I started into it. I didn't even read the blurb on the cover, and I'm so glad I didn't as everything was a delicious surprise. It's the type of book where I don't think it's fair to even hint at what it's about. He makes it seem so real it's downright alarming.

Suffice to say this is a fantastic psychological thriller, and I couldn't help but regularly marvel at how good the writing was. McEwan is fabulous at taking a small, fateful occurrence from a seemingly normal day and letting it snowball it into something positively heart-wrenching. He's the book equivalent of the movie 'Sliding Doors' - what if the character show more hadn't decided to go here that day, or what if they hadn't said those words at that time.

I loved it. McEwan at his best, which is great as I felt a little bit lukewarm about Atonement. I loved The Cement Garden and On Chesil Beach.

4.5 stars - Gripping, gripping, gripping. I dropped half a star as it got slightly far-fetched at one stage, but loved it nonetheless. show less