Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

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 misdirections, 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.