Ian McEwan's Enduring Love

A Routledge Study Guide

Peter Childs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134282418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ian McEwan is one of Britain's most inventive and important contemporary writers. Also adapted as a film, his novel Enduring Love (1997) is a tale of obsession that has both troubled and enthralled readers around the world. Renowned author Peter Childs explores the intricacies of this haunting novel to offer:

• an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Enduring Love
• a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present
• a selection of new and reprinted critical essays on Enduring Love, by Kiernan Ryan, Sean Matthews, Martin Randall, Paul Edwards, Rhiannon Davies and Peter Childs, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Enduring Love and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds it.

1
Text and contexts

The text

In terms of subject matter, McEwan’s book is to many readers most clearly a novel about endurance, or survival, and love in its several forms: romantic, familial, idealised, obsessive, jealous. It is additionally both about the forces that are destructive of love and about love as a destructive force. As Joe mentions, while Hollywood films show how love can be forged or strengthened by shared intense experiences, in fact ‘sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It’s the great deadener.’ ¹ In terms of story shape, with Enduring Love McEwan also wants to break free from the formulas of romantic convention, in which marriage or reconciliation supplies a satisfying but artificial narrative closure. The novel form conventionally follows an arc of beginning, middle and end, moving from stasis through complication, crisis and confrontation to a new stasis, but McEwan shapes the trajectory of his story to include a recognition that life does not come to an end the way a narrative concludes on its final page.

This irresolution or resistance to closure is a feature of much twentieth-century experimental literature, but it is also a part of the thematic tissue of Enduring Love. The novel has not one but three endings, signalling different viewpoints on the events Joe has narrated. The twenty-fourth chapter concludes not with Joe and Clarissa’s story but with a visit to the Logan household, which is only a moment in the couple’s attempt to see if their lives can be pieced together again. The first appendix turns their experience of Jed Parry into a case history of the kind that Joe might wish to research if he could resuscitate his academic career. It concludes that Parry’s ‘case’ involves ‘a most lasting form of love, often terminated only by the death of the patient’ (Appendix I, p. 242). Disallowing this termination, Parry’s death itself is not encompassed by the novel and instead his voice surfaces again in the second appendix to affirm continuity and continuance, three years after the main events of the novel. Previous events have themselves taken place over only a small space of time, a few weeks, and the breathless pace of the narrative is suggested by its arrangement into twenty-four chapters, like the hours of one day.

In terms of distinctiveness, the aspect of the novel most praised by reviewers on the book’s publication was the gripping opening chapter. These scenes immediately throw the characters into a situation of crisis, which appears initially not to be in the lives of the protagonists, Joe Rose and Clarissa Mellon, but in the lives of others. That the balloon incident proves also to be an important moment for Joe and Clarissa brings immediately into focus some of the key questions McEwan is interested in with regard to self-preservation and cooperation. The selfish response to this event would be merely to ignore or observe it. From the point of view of the individual’s principal evolutionary drive to survive, the logical and natural response would seem to be to avoid a situation that can place the self in danger. Yet, humans also have an altruistic component to their psychological make-up, and they frequently seek to help others who are in danger, sometimes to the extent of endangering their own safety, as happens at the start of McEwan’s novel.

McEwan has described the several effects on the reader he was trying to achieve in the pivotal opening chapter: first, that he wanted to suggest immediately a particular, highly organised materialist cast of mind in his use of Joe’s narration; second, that he sought to create a chapter concentrating on the visual and on the detailed imagination of the spatial relationship between a group of individuals; third, that he wished to fashion a dramatic incident that would work as a moment of intensity in which Jed could become emotionally attached to Joe; and fourth, that he aimed to grab the reader’s attention in a situation ‘that involves morality, involves instinct, involves an adaptationist account of why we are what we are, quite distinct from the deist account that Jed is going to espouse’.²

In another interview, McEwan explains that the story of the balloon was not the genesis of the book, but a device to bring disparate people together to explore issues he had been researching.³ He says that, when he heard about a balloon accident in Germany,

What immediately struck me was the dilemma of knowing that if you all hang on, you can bring this balloon down to earth. But as soon as anyone breaks rank, then madness follows. The issue is selfishness. And that seems to me to be the underlying basic moral factor about ourselves. We’re descended from generations of people who survived, who acted successfully. But who also cooperated successfully; so we clearly need to save our own skins and look out for own interests, but we’re social animals and we need other people dearly.⁴

When planning Enduring Love, McEwan found himself most interested in the way contemporary scientists were starting to write about human nature and the links between biology and psychology. He was also interested in the anthropological turn from studying human difference to observing human sameness:

[O]ne of the things you’ll find in all humans is that people stand around and talk about each other and judge each other and take great delight in examining their motives. [. . .] We identify ourselves by it, our groupings, and we bring to bear all that emotional intelligence, talking about someone’s motives or how they crossed the line of acceptability or how they didn’t pull themselves back from disaster. Novels, in a focused and more articulate way, do many of the same things.⁵

With respect to the catalytic force driving the dramatic events in the novel, McEwan wanted to stage a trial for the faculty of reason. His rational protagonist was to be faced with ‘the most irrational thing’ McEwan could conceive:

a man who not only has fallen in love with him and believes that Joe loves him back but is persuaded, as are a number of schizophrenics, that he’s receiving messages and the endorsement of God in this pursuit and that he must bring this materialist, this atheist, into the lap of God.⁶

McEwan also wanted his narrator to be doubted by the reader, not just by Clarissa and the police:

I wanted a man at the centre of this who was a clear thinker, who appears to be right but then perhaps is wrong, but in fact is right [. . .]. I wanted, in other words, to write a book somewhat in praise of rationality which I think gets a very poor showing in western literature.⁷

The men that McEwan assembles at the balloon at the start of the story can be considered from a number of angles. To begin with, they are a disparate group in terms of employment and age: Joe Rose, a forty-seven-year-old freelance science writer; John Logan, a forty-two-year-old Oxford family doctor; Joseph Lacey, a sixty-three-year-old farm labourer; Toby Greene, a fifty-eight-year-old farm worker; James Gadd, a fifty-five-year-old advertising executive; and Jed Parry, a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed man. Aside from Gadd, the pilot, Logan is the only one who has children, and his sacrifice to save Gadd’s grandson has to be considered with this in mind, because children serve in this childless novel as a means to bring people together, from the first scenes to the last.

The purpose of the tragedy is not simply to bring Joe and Jed together. All of the men are assigned a role in the narrative. James Gadd is guilty of losing control of the balloon, and this is anticipatory of all the guilty actions and thoughts that occur throughout the book. Toby Greene breaks an ankle at the site, while John Logan of course loses his life, and Joseph Lacey will be the key figure in finding the people who can explain what happened before the fall of Logan. None of the men is unaffected by the accident.

The situation the rescuers find themselves in is neatly summarised by Joe: ‘A child alone and needing help. It was my duty to hang on, and I thought we would all do the same’ (Ch. 1, p. 13). Yet, seconds later he is thinking ‘The child was not my child, and I was not going to die for it’ (Ch. 1, p. 15). Underlying the entire scene is the question of the degree to which individuals have an obligation towards others, which is an issue again at the end of the novel when James Reid and Bonnie Deedes step forward out of a sense of obligation – and in doing so ‘save’, or at least redeem, John Logan. Though it may not seem so at first, this is intricately tied to the other key elements of the novel, and is important in terms of: Joe’s obligation towards Jean Logan; his ‘right’ to buy a gun to protect himself and Clarissa from Jed Parry; the extent to which Joe and Clarissa have obligations of trust and understanding towards each other after their seven-year relationship; and the question of the degree to which Jed has any right to involve himself in Joe’s life or to which Joe has any obligation towards Jed. ‘When are you going to leave me alone?’ (Ch. 10, p. 91) is a key concern in the novel between these last two people, but on the occasion this question enters the text, it is asked by Jed. Joe has earlier summarised the social issue of human interaction in these terms: ‘our mammalian conflict – what to give to the others, and what to keep for yourself. Treading that line, keeping the others in check, and being kept in check by them, is what we call morality’ (Ch. 1, p. 14).

For McEwan, exploring morality is something that can best be done at the extremes of human experience. For this reason, his subject matter is often harrowing, such that, even at the start of his career, he appeared to reviewers to be in the vanguard, with Martin Amis, of a new generation of writers emerging in the late 1970s and 1980s, including Pat Barker, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift. Like other novelists, including Amis, McEwan has subsequently been repeatedly upbraided as an immoral or amoral writer, when in fact his interest in the horrific, the marginal and the perverse has precisely been aimed at defining ethical limits. The contemporary novelist Michèle Roberts wrote about him in a review of Enduring Love:

Ian McEwan is always described as writing about gore and nastiness, perverse philosophies, machismo metaphysics – and very fed up he must get with this, too. Just because he wrote one story about things that go bump in bell-jars doesn’t mean he should be typecast forever as baddish and laddish.⁸ In fact, his novels are sheep in wolves’ clothing.

Under their dark, bristling, thrillerish surfaces lurk explorations of the way we love now: men and women mostly, but parents and children too. His world appears a naturalistic one, but is also metaphorical, as in a romance. He illuminates inner states as well as outer ones, though his landscapes are always realistic and noir-ish enough to satisfy the butchest of readers.⁹

This seems to be a fair assessment of McEwan’s writing, and it is one I will return to as part of the discussion of the adaptation of Enduring Love to film (see Adaptations, p.), yet it is a judgement that most critics only arrived at with the publication in 2001 of Atonement. Enduring Love was primarily greeted on release as a psychological thriller in the context of McEwan’s previous career, to which I will shortly turn.

First, to end this introductory section, I want briefly to sketch the particular ingredients of the novel that make it a unique mix of concerns centred on questions of human interaction. There are five aspects to be mentioned here. The first is psycho-sexual. On Enduring Love’s publication, many reviewers thought that McEwan had made up the term ‘de Clérambault’s syndrome’, but this is not the case. The condition is named after Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, a French psychiatrist (1872–1934) who published his detailed work, Les Psychoses passionelles, on the subject in 1921. A person suffering from de Clérambault’s maintains, like Jed, an unwavering delusional belief that another person, usually of higher social status, is in love with them. This form of erotomania, which may be a feature of paranoid schizophrenia, was originally described by de Clérambault as having a phase of hope followed by one of resentment. It is an extreme form of erotic or emotional attachment that is peculiar for having no basis in a relationship between the two people involved. In Enduring Love McEwan is interested in the syndrome as another example of bonds that can tie strangers together, metaphorically figured in the balloon ropes that Jed and Joe grasp, but he is also concerned with the connections between an extreme psychological state, de Clérambault’s, and the everyday phenomenon of being in love.¹⁰

A second aspect to the novel’s concern with human interdependence and attraction is literary and draws its relevance from Clarissa’s research interests. The Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) is associated less with love poetry than love letters, and the posthumous publication of his correspondence outraged sections of Victorian society. Keats became obsessed with a young woman he met in London called Fanny Brawne and wrote her letters of passionate intensity, but his love remained unconsummated at the time of his death in Rome from tuberculosis. The elements of ardent love, impassioned correspondence, obsession and illness all provide contexts for discussion of Enduring Love, as will be explored below.

Third, at the end of Enduring Love there is an acknowledgements page which states McEwan’s indebtedness to several books and authors. Aside from two biographies, one by Robert Gittings on Keats and one by Stephen Gill on Wordsworth, the books listed are nearly all, broadly speaking, works that have had an impact on the field of evolutionary biology, an area of study which, among other things, advances the gene rather than the individual or species as the unit of (natural) selection. Evolutionary biology is still controversial but gained a foothold in university biology departments in the 1970s and 1980s. These books will be considered in further detail later (see Text and contexts, pp.) but for now it is worth signalling that McEwan is interested in evolutionary psychology and socio-cultural evolution in Enduring Love. For example, if love is unique to humans, what part does it play in the individual’s survival or the species’ endurance? Also, if evolution promotes the survival of the fittest, what role do altruism and collaboration play in self-preservation?

A related area to evolutionary biology is that of microbiology, the discovery of DNA, and the Genome Project that Jocelyn briefly talks about with Joe and Clarissa (Ch. 19, pp. 164–5). In the 1940s, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) was identified as the transforming principle responsible for transmitting genetic information, and in the early 1950s Francis Crick and James D. Watson (Ch. 19, p. 165) published their breakthrough work on the structure of DNA, based on the research of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins (Ch. 19, p. 165), thereby reorienting the understanding of evolution as a molecular process. The brooch of human DNA, two gold bands ‘entwined in a double helix’ (Ch. 19, p. 163), which Jocelyn presents Clarissa, is another example in the book of patterns and of interlinkages: a material representation of chemical connections that underlie emotional ties. It is also an object of beauty linking the realms of art and science, aesthetics and empirical truth. It is DNA that contains the genetic blueprint dictating the biological development of all cellular life forms, and Joe is reminded of the connections between all living things when the animal urge to defecate forces him to crouch in the woods:

Some people find their long perspectives in the stars and galaxies; I prefer the earthbound scale of the biological. I brought my palm close to my face and peered. In the rich black crumbly mulch I saw two black ants, a springtail, and a dark red worm-like creature with a score of pale brown legs. These were the rumbling giants of this lower world, for not far below the threshol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Notes and References
• Introduction
• 1 Text and Contexts
• 2 Critical History
• 3 Critical Readings
• 4 Adaptations
• 5 Further Reading and Web Resources