Contemporary Writing Book Review - Ian McEwan's Enduring Love
'...a most lasting form of love'. That is the description given in the first appendix of Ian McEwan's novel of a condition suffered by Jed Parry, one of its protagonists. Although it offers the reader a final clue to the love alluded to in the title, ever-present ambiguity has already allowed it to evade succinct definition.
'Enduring Love' begins with what its narrator, Joe Rose, calls a 'pinprick on the time map.' Joe and his longtime lover, Clarissa, a Keats scholar just back from an extended research trip, are setting up a picnic in the Chiltern Hills. As Joe reaches for the wine bottle, they hear an alarmed shout. He hurries toward the sound with others nearby to find a grounded hot-air balloon threatening to take off with a young boy trapped inside. 'We were running toward a catastrophe,' Joe notes retrospectively, 'which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes.' Brought together by the accident, two men exchange words briefly, but fatefully: this moment is the catalyst for an obsession by the younger man, Jed Parry, for Joe.
'...a most lasting form of love'. That is the description given in the first appendix of Ian McEwan's novel of a condition suffered by Jed Parry, one of its protagonists. Although it offers the reader a final clue to the love alluded to in the title, ever-present ambiguity has already allowed it to evade succinct definition.
'Enduring Love' begins with what its narrator, Joe Rose, calls a 'pinprick on the time map.' Joe and his longtime lover, Clarissa, a Keats scholar just back from an extended research trip, are setting up a picnic in the Chiltern Hills. As Joe reaches for the wine bottle, they hear an alarmed shout. He hurries toward the sound with others nearby to find a grounded hot-air balloon threatening to take off with a young boy trapped inside. 'We were running toward a catastrophe,' Joe notes retrospectively, 'which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes.' Brought together by the accident, two men exchange words briefly, but fatefully: this moment is the catalyst for an obsession by the younger man, Jed Parry, for Joe.
