Enduring Love: A Novel [Kindle Edition]

i think for that alone he deserves a modicum of respect. HOWEVER i would like to contradict everyone by saying that although terrible scenario in chapter 1 is very clever, leading up to it is quite boring, isn't it. and the plot of the novel overall does become a bit forced and unevenly paced. ESPECIALLY the restaurant and hippie/gun scenes. i thought it was unconvincing of mcewan to randomly give us an insight into clarissa's frame of mind (that bit when she comes home from work cross and tired) and yet remain with joe for the rest of the novel - blatantly inconsistent. there were also minor inconsistencies in the text eg joe claims to have lime-flavour ice-cream in the restaurant, but when he relates the incident to the police it is apple-flavour. unusual for both an author as obsessed with detail as mcewan is, and for his eerily similar narrator joe.

and yes the book can be intensely boring - not just when joe is going on about science, but also when mcewan is being generally pedantic about descriptions of ppl/places/events. i couldn't gauge whether mcewan was being boring and scientific because he couldn't help it, or whether he ws writing "in character" as joe.

in the book's favour, i think mcewan invites us to compare ourselves with jed and empathise with him in the horrible way he makes us empathise with all his skewed characters. come on, how many times have you had a crush on someone and suspected/KNOWN that they knew, and they kind of liked you to, but couldn't say ... ? think about it ... think and shudder ...

All five men grab ropes dangling from the balloon, but four of them drop off as the wayward balloon rises, leaving one brave man clinging on for life. Eventually he loses his grip and falls hundreds of feet to the ground. "I've never seen such a terrible thing as that falling man," Joe writes later.

In a moment of unnatural calm after the man's death, Joe turns to one of the other men, Jed Parry, and gives him a quick, nervous, reassuring nod. "It's all right," he says before running to attend to the dead man. In that instant, an obsession is borne.

Parry's obsession with Joe manifests itself almost immediately, and it is confirmed that night when he calls to tell him: "I just wanted you to know, I understand what you're feeling. I feel it too. I love you."

Already struggling with guilt over the death of the fallen man, Joe must now also fend off the advances of Parry, a man of deep religious conviction, with an increasing propensity towards violence.

Essentially, Enduring Love is a study of de Clerambault's syndrome. According to the book, in 1942 the French psychiatrist de Clerambault described his eponymous syndrome as a state of erotomania in which the "'subject,' usually a woman, has the intense delusional belief that a man, the 'object,' often of higher social standing, is in love with her." Every gesture the object makes--drawing a curtain, running a hand along a hedge--is interpreted as a sign of the object's underlying love. And in many cases, it is a love that the subject takes with him or her unrequited to the grave.

McEwan's examination of Parry's homoerotic mania is not without sympathy, but he also show us how debilitating the syndrome is to its object, Joe, and his relationship with Clarissa. Joe quickly grows irritable and eventually irrational himself, threatening the fabric of what was once a stable relationship. McEwan's sure hand makes Enduring Love terse, lucid reading, and his insight into the subtler workings of the human mind makes it a thoughtful read. He develops his plot steadily, incorporating several surprising developments which ensure the novel is difficult to put down.

In an appendix to the novel, a fictitious professor notes this about Jed Parry's obsession" 'it is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology."

McEwan's subtle prose says it more elegantly near the beginning of the novel. Upon first observing the giant helium balloon, Joe considered it "a precarious form of transport when the wind rather than the pilot set the course." But then he thinks, "perhaps this was the very nature of the attraction."

So, too, the human need for love is sometimes so great that it pays little heed to the course it takes, regardless of how reckless.