Synopsis
Considered by many critics to be the novel that should have won Ian McEwan the Booker Prize, ENDURING LOVE is an extraordinary exploration of love, faith, and obsession, the story of two delicately ordered lives thrown out of balance by a desperate, deranged passion. Joe Rose is a scientist by training and a science writer by trade. Though he has a secure, loving relationship with his wife, Clarissa, the stillborn specter of the scientific career he might have had still haunts him. Clarissa also has her ghosts -- those of the children a medical mishap has left her unable to bear. Despite these disappointments, they have established a careful emotional equilibrium between themselves and their professional lives. But while hiking through the Chiltern Hills one windy spring afternoon, Joe and Clarissa become unscripted players in a hot-air balloon tragedy that leaves one would-be rescuer dead and saddles Joe with the ardent and unwanted attentions of a disturbed young man.
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