Enduring Love

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
February 1998

The story begins on a windy spring day in the Chilterns when the calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he witnesses a tragic accident: A balloon with a young boy trapped in it is tossed by the wind, and in an attempt to save the child, a man is killed. The afternoon, Joe reflects, could have ended in more tragedy but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry, who has joined Rose in helping to bring the balloon to safety.

But unknown to Rose, something passes between them — something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test the limits of Rose's scientific rationalism, threaten his relationship with his wife, Clarissa, and drive him to take desperate measures to stay alive.

Parry suffers from a condition known to psychiatrists as De Clerambault syndrome, in which the afflicted individual obsessively pursues the object of his desire until the frustrated love turns to hate and rage — transforming one of life's most valued experiences into pathological horror. Seeking answers in science, Rose grows more paranoid and terrified until his fear threatens to crack his marriage, and he realizes that he needs something beyond the cold reason of science if this love is to be endured.

With the brilliance and deep compassion that have brought so many readers to his work, Ian McEwan once again spins a tale of life intruded upon — and discovers profound truths about the nature of love and the power of forgiveness. Compelling, utterly and terrifyingly convincing, Enduring Love reveals howanordinary man can be driven to the brink of murder and madness by another man's delusions.

Journal of the American Medical Association

The novel is lyrical and engrossing. Episodes have an emotional impact that forges associations (I will always remember of a piece the opening chapter and the setting in which I read it). Readers of JAMA will find pleasure and provocation in Enduring Love.

Elizabeth Judd

The opening scene in Enduring Love is absolutely riveting: Joe Rose, who's picnicking with his wife, Clarissa, hears a shout and races toward a helium balloon that's about to crash with a boy trapped in its basket. Joe and four other passers-by attempt to rescue the child by grabbing onto the balloon to weigh it down. But as the balloon suddenly rises, four of the men -- Joe included -- let go; only one man holds on, and he's killed for his bravery. "Hanging a few feet above the Chilterns escarpment, our crew enacted morality's ancient, irresolvable dilemma: us, or me."

In the early chapters, McEwan slows the action and savors the implications of individuals' pulling together or falling apart. But it's soon revealed that the ballooning accident is a bit of clever misdirection, an intense experience that propels Jed Parry, one of the would-be heroes, to fall hopelessly and obsessively in love with Joe. While Joe, a science writer, is prepared to parse out the Darwinian impulses that might explain the ballooning tragedy, he's powerless to make sense of Parry's stalking phone calls and appearances outside Joe and Clarissa's flat.

McEwan, the author of The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, is interested in how we construct coherent narratives out of chaos. Eventually, Joe de-mystifies Parry by diagnosing his feelings as a morbid passion called de Clerambault's syndrome. Too bad, because naming and pathologizing Parry's love saps the story of its energy. Instead of confronting Parry, Joe buys a gun and becomes enmeshed in a meandering side plot. And then -- unexpectedly, miraculously -- the novel comes alive again in its two appendices, one a clinical case study of de Clerambault's syndrome and the other a blissed-out letter from Parry to Joe. McEwan offers these two poles, the scientific and emotional, to frame the range of responses to the inexplicable mystery of love, pathological or otherwise.

Enduring Love gracefully bridges genres; it's a psychological thriller, a meditation on the narrative impulse, a novel of ideas. McEwan's prose is deft, unself-conscious and a joy to read. Here's a book that kept me up all night, mesmerized and entertained. So why am I ingrate enough to complain? For all the wonderful moments, I wish McEwan hadn't dropped the ball, chasing stray plot lines when he could have been teasing out the complexities of the relationships between Parry, Joe and Clarissa. It's because Enduring Love sometimes soars to such heights that I'm disappointed it didn't, in the end, reach greatness. -- Salon

Library Journal

After the calm of a pleasant afternoon picnic is punctured by a terrible accident--a man falls to his death as a hot-air balloon floats away, carrying a child--Joe Rose finds himself imbedded in the aftershock. One of several men who tried to hold down the balloon but eventually let go, he must reconcile his part in the tragedy with the threat posed by a stalker trying to save him through love. In turns obsessively morbid and cunningly funny, McEwan's deftly crafted prose holds the reader with the intensity of a thriller while engaging in a deep psychological exploration of shock, grief, the need for redemption, and, ultimately, the makeup of compassion and love. (LJ 10/15/98)

Sven Birkerts

...[A] vibrant and unsettling [novel that] reminds us that normal behavior conceals but does not banish unsavory truths.
— The New York Times Book Review

Rosemary Dinnage

Ian McEwan's reputation as a writer of small, impeccably written fictions is secure. His gift for the cold and scary is well established, too....But his books are more than tales of suspense and shock; they raise issues of guilt and love and fear, essentially of what happens when the civilized and ordered splinters against chaos. There can be something of Greek myth in his narratives....At the same time he is the quietest and most lucid of stylists, with never a word wasted or fumbled.
— The New York Review of Books