THE EDGE magazine | Book reviews | Ian McEwan

Enduring Love
Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape hardback, 247 pages, £15.99
Review by Andrew Hedgecock (1997)

To some extent McEwan is ploughing familiar ground. Once again, he’s appropriated the thriller format as a means of dealing with the dualities that obsess him: materialism versus spirituality, sanity versus madness, masculine versus feminine and rationality versus intuition. So far, so familiar. But while his recent books, Black Dogs in particular, have been witty, cleverly constructed and essentially heartless intellectual exercises, Enduring Love is a touching reflection on the fragile nature of human relationships.

The narrator, Joe, and his wife Clarissa are celebrating the end of a six week separation with a picnic on a bright, breezy day in the Chilterns. Joe is about to open a bottle of 1987 Daumas Gassac when this scene of bucolic bliss is cut short by a ballooning accident. The balloon’s appearance is a ticket to a new, uncertain and dangerous world.

Joe joins in a bungled rescue attempt. One of the other would-be rescuers is a young religious fanatic called Jed Parry who, in an instant, falls obsessively in love with him. Jed inaugurates a stalking campaign, beginning with nuisance phone calls and letters expressing the religious and sexual basis of his feelings, escalating to confrontations outside Joe’s home and the hiring of a contract killer.

The plot could be from a Hitchcock film -- the tension stemming from no-one believing Joe’s claims that Jed is persecuting him. Jed’s psychological condition -- de Clérambault’s Syndrome -- impairs his perception but not his intelligence or resourcefulness, and he takes care not to harass Joe in front of witnesses. There is also a convenient resemblance between the handwriting of hunter and hunted, so not even Jed’s rambling epistles of love and hate can persuade Clarissa or the police of the reality of Joe’s plight. McEwan dramatises by temporarily switching from Joe’s point of view to those of other characters.

As the pressure mounts, Joe and Clarissa’s relationship begins to unravel. Joe is a science journalist, whose professional objectivity proves to be a liability in dealing with Jed’s out of kilter spirituality. Ironically, the openly emotional and intuitive Clarissa takes a cooler-headed attitude to the problem, while Joe’s rationalism draws him into rage and violence. Joe begins to lose confidence in his judgement, abilities and value, but never loses faith in the ability of scientific analysis to provide a fix for any problem: once he finds a label for Jed’s condition, he deludes himself into believing his troubles are over. When Clarissa accuses him of colluding in his own persecution, you feel she’s got a point. Another irony is the fragility of Joe and Clarissa’s genuine love for each other in comparison to Jed’s robust, durable and spurious love for Joe.

The story is structured around a series of set pieces. The bizarre balloon accident, with its freeze-frames and switching between close-up and long-shot, and a chilling attempted hit in a restaurant, presented in slow motion, are drawn with haunting clarity. Best of all is a comic episode involving the purchase of a gun from a gang of sixties revenants -- the most hilarious bombed-out hippie casualties since the Camberwell Carrot segment of Withnail and I

McEwan’s style is subdued and, once in a while, a little lifeless. But Enduring Love is well crafted, intelligent, unsettling, and occasionally very funny; its portrait of a relationship collapsing under pressure is moving and believable. •

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