Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

René Magritte, The Son of Man

(May 9) I really enjoyed Atonement and a member of BookCel said that Enduring Love was as good if not better, so I grabbed it while I was waiting for Taft to show up at the library.

It is very good. McEwan is a master at presenting the defining moment of a life-altering event. He dangles it before your eyes in advance, thoroughly details how much it changed everything for the unsuspecting character(s), then slowly, slowly builds up to it, creating, of course, all kinds of suspense, then plays out the moment itself in excruciatingly slow motion. I find it effective, although this is only my second McEwan book... it could wear thin. But I do agree that, in real life, major things happen in minor moments.

Also well done and very clever: you can’t be absolutely sure for the longest time whether the first-person narrator, Joe Rose, is reliable. Is he really being stalked, or did the episode with the hot-air balloon unhinge him?

Unfortunately, McEwan has to compromise the integrity of one of the main characters in order to achieve the ambiguity – Joe’s spouse, Clarissa, has to pooh-pooh Joe’s anxieties right from the beginning in order to prompt the reader’s suspicions, and this just makes her totally unlikable in the end, even though she is painted as a womanly ideal throughout by Joe and everyone she meets. It’s fine that the police don’t believe Joe at first, and that he himself sounds sort of manic at various points in his narrative, but it’s cheating to have the allegedly loving spouse doubt him from the beginning. Why couldn’t she have believed him at first, and become exasperated and skeptical later on?

It’s like Briony in Atonement, who destroys an innocent person’s life for the sake of a naïve notion, and who believes in the end, I think wrongly, that the rest of the activities of her life atoned for the damage she did. These are two instances of deplorable behaviour/ethics in an otherwise sympathetic character. But, of course, that whole story depended on Briony doing what she did. In Enduring Love, in the same way, the drama depends on a woman behaving in an inexplicable way.

It’s a bit unsettling to be asked to overlook vagueness in major characters’ motivations. Still, these were both gripping stories. McEwan can really work it if you’re willing to grant him the premise.