Enduring Love
by Ian McEwan

Our Price: $23.97
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of Enduring Love

Book Review: Many treasures, small and large, in this heartfelt novel
Summary: 5 Stars

1. The NY Times reviews discussed the juxtaposition of the case-history Appendix with the fictional elements of the novel, but only from the standpoint of the fictional Joe's observation on "the death of anecdote and narrative in science". Yet the Times reviewers fail to mention that the real end of the "fiction" (what happens to Joe and Clarissa after the ambiguous end of the novel) is to be found only in the last paragraph of the "scientific" appendix. Throughout the novel, in fact, Mr. McEwan continually counterposes the "rational" and the "artistic" -- Joe/Jed, Joe/Clarissa, Joe/police, Joe/JohnnyBWell, Jocelyn/Clarissa, Steve-Xan/Daisy, .... He also makes clear that no one important really fits the stereotype of either extreme: on the serious side, Clarissa is right-brained, but she's just as busy chasing down some details of Keats's correspondence as any genome-project guru is worrying about a particular base-pair; on the lighter side, the gun dealers are supposed to be "intellectuals" and "big-questions" people, but in the event they turn out rather different. John Logan, doctor and mountaineer, is perhaps the most important of these hybrids: while his wife later says he always calculates the risks first (and as a physician he is a "scientist"), he joins the rescue team in an uncharacteristically foolhardy act of bravery, then dies because he is the last to think of "me" before "us". And his story ends with another such balance -- between the professor of logic and his young student, between them and the Logan family, and between the Logans and Joe and Clarissa.

2. Chapter 9 -- Joe's third-person narrative of the events leading up to his first serious split with Clarissa -- is the most honest, selfless, and heart-breaking portrayal of a man's understanding of his lover and himself that I have ever read. That chapter alone is worth the Booker.

3. I must say that I found all of Jed's letters, and all of his behavior, completely unbelievable and off-putting throughout my reading. In other words, Mr. McEwan achieved what I believe to be his intended effect: to portray Jed as deranged, and to impart something of the feeling of being the object of his attention.

Summary of Enduring Love

In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. (In one of the novel's many ironies, the balloon eventually lands safely, the boy unscathed.) But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.

Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye.

Gay Books

• Books > Subjects > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Fiction
• Literature & Fiction > Literary