Ian McEwan, Enduring Love
Joe Rose is a scientific writer whose life changes drastically on a single fateful day: as he is picnicking with Clarissa Mellon, his girlfriend of seven years, he witnesses a tragedy happening: an elderly man and a young boy are in trouble in the basket of a helium balloon about to land. Joe Rose runs to the balloon, along with four other men. As they try to save the boy, still in the basket, things get out of hands and one man dies. In the aftermath of the trauma, one of the remaining men, Jed Parry, starts to act in a strange way: he calls Joe and tells him he loves him…
In the following days, it becomes obvious that Jed Parry is obsessed with Joe. He calls him, writes long letters (never explicitly threatening), stands for hours in front of his building, etc. Soon, Joe too becomes obsessed with Jed’s obsession. His sanity is threatened by Jed’s insanity. Joe can’t escape Jed’s attention and it changes him, bringing out the worst out of him. Clarissa is the most impacted by this change. She even doubts Joe’s story, since she hasn’t been told about Jed’s first phone call straightaway, and Joe erased subsequent messages on the answering machine. She thinks that he invents, or at least exaggerates. Their whole previously solid relationship is put to the test for the first time in seven years.
One of the main themes of enduring love is obsession, the dark side of love. Jed and Joe’s unhealthy "relationship" echoes Clarissa and Joe’s "perfect" one, so much that we wonder which is the "enduring love" of the title. Jed’s intervention in their lives highlights the fact that theirs might be an imperfect love after all. Then Jed’s "love" for Joe is complicated by his love of God, and the mission he feels he has to convert Joe, an atheist scientist. Confronted to Jed’s irrationality, Joe tries to save his crumbling world by reassuring himself with scientific theories, that he is still part of the "great chain" of nature. However, he is forced to confront a difficult fact for any scientist, that the truth might be inaccessible:
We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favor, and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy.
This idea is also found in Atonement, written later but that I read a couple of years ago.
I really enjoyed Enduring Love for its originality, its complexity and its suspense. Ian McEwan is really good at describing relationships and personalities. He gives us insights into the minds of his characters, and his style flows, at the same time precise and spare. He reminds me a bit of Ruth Rendell. I might have found another favorite writer, and I am looking forward to reading more of his novels…
Rating: 4/5
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