One of the most provocative pieces of Ian McEwan-- Enduring Love.

One of the most provocative pieces of Ian McEwan-- Enduring Love introduces a new kind of re-evaluation and hidden conflicts of society and life, through a deliberate coherent, analytical narration. McEwan cleverly bridges different genres: psychological thriller and tragic love story into a novel of ideas that mirrors the world in a contemporary sense. A reunited couple, a bottle of wine following by a catastrophe begins Joe’s report on a tale of chaos. The protagonist, Joe Rose, a scientific writer, and his wife, Clarissa who is a romantic literature professor witness the balloon accident, which causes a doctor’s (Mr. Logan) life in the process of saving his grandchild. While Joe, one of the helpers hangs on to the rope, starts suspecting himself as the first one who lets go and causes his death, another helper, Jed Parry who suffers de Clérambault Syndrome comes along and insists praying together will help relieving his guilt. Although Joe refuses, his glances and looks only initiate Jed’s obsession. The dreadful disaster recalls heartbreaking memory for the couple that are “unable to bear children.” (31) When both of them are trying to bury their sorrow and fix up the loving relationship through love and sex, Jed intrudes their orderly life. First with numerous phone calls and messages, later, love letters and spying across the street, Jed is only anxious but never tired in revealing his infatuation to Joe who merely diagnoses his feelings through scientific and rational logic and theories which, indeed, fails him to make sense of his behaviour and Clarissa’s ignorance and annoyance against his obstinacy to a stranger’s craze. As Jed’s interference becomes more irritating and his marriage starts falling apart, Joe reaches out for help; nevertheless, police neglect his complaint until he claims to identify Jed in the shooting scene which happens on Clarissa’s birthday while a professor (Jocelyn), Clarissa, and himself are having lunch and discussing Keats. Yet, due to Joe’s fragmented statement and unreliable assertion of Jed’s attempted murder, contrary to other witnesses’, police are not the least convinced. The rational Joe, finding no way for rescue, feels the urge for self-defence and buys a gun. As Joe predicts and calculates, Jed breaks in their house and pleads for forgiveness when he admits his attempted murder. Joe’s rationale hesitates and leaves Jed no choice but threatens him with his own life. After careful calculation, Joe shoots him. When chaos is over and problems are solved, Joe assumes his marriage would heal through greater intimacy. But Clarissa, finding herself unable to fit in Joe’s logical world, only thanks him for his heroic rescue and leaves him for good in order to preserve her own values of love. Enduring Love wages war between science, art, and religion, through a unique exploration of love. A story of Joe, a symbol of systematic logic and reasons, Clarissa, a symbol of romantic poet—Keats, and Jed, an extreme romantic attachment with distorted values of love, are recounted and interpreted in a history narrative form and in the language of science logic and rationalism. Science, dominating the Western culture since Enlightenment in 18th century, is deemed as pure absolutes, powerful knowledge, and necessity of survival that triumphs art and religion which have now been degraded for leisure spiritual appreciation and luxury. This dramatic change has lasted until today where our mainstreamed culture, society, and life are still constructed in preference of scientific results and logical process, rather than natural tendency for feelings and knowledge of God. Ian McEwan, in his post-modern masterpiece, has defeated science when Joe, being a loner, loses Clarissa and re-established the irreplaceable importance of love as Jed, with no regrets, is kept in a mental institution where he is still free to love and Clarissa successfully preserves her values of love. Enduring Love awakens those who have only lived within the scientific and logical frames and guidelines, like Joe, perceiving the artificial orderly world as natural and original. McEwan demeans the values and credibility of contemporary science when Joe, the narrator, fails to decompose the homosexual obsessive love of Jed through methodical science theories. Joe’s rational analytical skills limits and blinds him from true understanding of love which is not able to be decomposed, defined, or analysed; instead, it is of no boundary and no absolute definition. In his novel, love is presented as a continuous state of mind, involving no reason and logic. Besides, love is far from what Joe presupposes—a solvent to loneliness or a compromise to heal and reconcile. McEwan skilfully employs Joe and Clarissa to demonstrate the ultimate difference between expressing love and explaining love; furthermore, Joe’s tendency in explaining all things seems to suggest certain norms in society that are shaped throughout the course of science and history. In addition, McEwan intentionally frames the tale in a conventional, history-like narrative form—self-contradictory, objective first person— aiming to linear, rationalize, normalize, and shape all events and details into an objective and reliable presentation, similar to history. McEwan challenges such limits of artificial, imposed form and order, which are merely inventive structure out of reasons and logic and unable to reconcile with love and emotion, in order to prove its unreliability and inconsideration when Joe starts narrating in remorse. When dimensions of history and society conflicts are added to provide a wider scope of what McEwan seeks to reserve—natural tendency, and break down—standards, conventions, and mainstream culture that blind us from the natural, original world that is without artificial order—he also strengthens its effectiveness by asserting some fictitious appendices to show readers into the worlds of fiction and reality which often lie side by side. With great intensity of a thriller, Enduring Love explores society and culture through a psychological exploration of love and offers readers a new kind of re-evaluation.

Joe is a scientist and has a rational way of thinking, and is also the narrator in this novel. He gives a clear and detailed account of events that he saw. His social status could be classed as being upper-middle class, clues to this is in the food he eats, "mozzarella," "black olives," "focaccia" and in the places he visits, "Convent Garden" and "Carluccio’s," which you generally associate with the well-off. He describes the hot-air balloon using very scientific terms, "Helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen." His reaction to the accident is, that if he were in ...

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Ian McEwan came to the Capitola Book Café for a reading on February 23, if it weren't for this fact I doubt I would have picked up his new book Enduring Love. And oh what a mistake that would have been.

The opening of the novel is simply stunning. A man and woman are beginning a picnic in an open field in the English countryside when they hear a distant shout. They both turn and see what the narrator calls, "the danger." A balloon has come down across the field. Its passengers are a man and a young boy. But the man, who has gotten out of the balloon, is now tangled in the mooring ropes, and the boy is still in the passenger basket. And the wind is gusting. The man is being "half dragged, half carried across the field." The narrator springs to his feet and runs toward the balloon, as do a handful of other men, who are in different parts of the field for various reasons. This instinctive act of goodwill proves momentous. As the narrator says, "We were running toward a catastrophe, which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes."

The narrator's name is Joe Rose. He is a scientist, of sorts. His early academic career was filled with promise, but through the mishap of delays and misdirection’s, of paths followed to dead ends, he finds himself far from the cutting edge theoretical research he'd always imagined he'd be doing. So he becomes a writer of articles for popular science magazines. And he's good at what he does, though he feels it's a bit below his potential. His wife is Clarissa. In Joe's eyes she is beautiful, someone he is consistently astonished to find in love with him. She is a professor, a scholar of Keats, the most romantic of the Romantics. Unlike the narrator, she seems content with what she does, impassioned by it. These differences, seemingly ancillary to the story at first, become essential to its structure as the novel progresses. They begin to embody the tension between science and romance, between what we can prove with evidence, and what we feel in our hearts.

The other major character in the novel is Jed Parry, one of the men in the field. Jed is a strident Christian, to put it mildly. After the ballooning incident, he develops an insatiable obsession with Joe. Jed doesn't seem like the violent type, though the power of his obsession is itself a kind of violence. He describes his love for Joe, in his various letters and phone messages, as something dictated by God. He sees himself, in short, as the conduit of Joe's salvation. The tension here is a slight variation of that between Joe and Clarissa. It revolves around the battle between science and faith. The fact that this tension is perhaps the defining theme of the last half of the current millennium is not lost on the author.

The novel reads - and I say this in all kindness - like an intellectual potboiler. It has all the elements of a good mystery or crime thriller: the odd characters, the intrigue, and of course the plot. The difference here - which is essentially the defining difference between all commercial fiction and literary fiction - is the attention paid to language and detail. As he's running toward the balloon, Joe notices a man to his left, also running. He sees the man's car parked back on the road, and notices that one of the doors is open. Or were both doors open? The answer becomes crucial later. Jed insists that Joe is sending him signals, urging him to continue moving forward with their "love." But of course the signals are Jed's invention, or are they? As Jed's obsession invades the relationship between Clarissa and Joe, we see Joe interpreting the signals given off by Clarissa. But are they his invention, or not? How much of social interaction, after all, is dependent upon reading signals encoded in subtle movements and glances. This notion returns us to the ballooning incident, where Joe and the other men are forced to assess a volatile situation in an instant and act accordingly.

As the title suggests, the novel is ultimately about love. But in the context of the novel "Enduring" plays both as adjective and verb. And there are many kinds of love here: Joe's love for Clarissa, and for science. Jed's love for Joe, and for God. And Clarissa's love for Joe, and for Keats. In the hands of a lesser writer these multiple threads would become tangled in unintelligible knots. Bur Mr. McEwan weaves them through the story beautifully. Together they create a compelling, powerful novel.

One of the most provocative pieces of Ian McEwan-- Enduring Love.

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