Enduring Love has a justly famous opening, bringing together a group of strangers as they attempt in vain to avert a hot air balloon catastrophe in the English countryside. It then shifts focus to become a strange book about the obsessive relationship between a young religious gay man, Jed Parry, and our narrator, Joe Rose, middle-aged and married (to a woman, Clarissa). I had read McEwan’s Atonement before, so I was on the lookout for narrative games, and was convinced I had spotted a twist only to discover that there was no twist after all.
The problem with the book is that it seems rather disorganised. With a title mentioning love you have a razor-sharp thematic focus right from the beginning, and love is complex enough that it can sustain the lengthiest of works. (Including a different Clarissa, in fact.) Enduring Love, however, is not a long work. Yet it seems burdened by its title, forced into discussing love, and forced by the thought of love’s range into talking about all too much. It’s wide in scope, rather than deep. Love is one word, but it can take many forms, each of which is rich enough for a story.
Instead, speaking broadly, we have: the romantic love of Joe for Clarissa and vice versa, the obsessive love of Jed for Joe, Jed’s love of God, Joe’s love of science, Clarissa’s love for Keats, the love of the widow of one of the men who tried to stop the balloon for her husband, who nevertheless she suspects had cheated on him, the love of a trio of drug addicts for one another, reflections on the love of parents for children, and so on.
In other words, there is too much here. The main focus, Jed’s obsession for Joe (and its contrast to Joe’s relationship with Clarissa), is not given enough development despite being the dominant part of the book. The tonics, questions of moral responsibility associated with the hot air balloon catastrophe (is Joe to blame for the victim’s death?), and the contrast of reason (science) and emotions (God, faith), are too faintly drawn.
Then there is the matter of the plot. Enduring Love is a book where things actually happen. But it is also a painfully real novel. It is the most upper-middle-class English story I have ever read. It’s just about people who have nice picnics with things from Waitrose or occasionally Fortnum and Mason, who have nice houses and nice friends. The upper middle class. My people, (by birth and education, if not always by inclination). So, when we have attempted assassinations by hired killers in busy restaurants, or calling up old friends to help us buy handguns from drug dealers, there’s something that seems more laughable than congruent. The opening scene is unlikely yet believable, the rest is just silly. (And as the action is being driven by characters, we can hardly say this fits into the whole ordered universe vs randomness theme, either).
There’s a fundamental tension in modern middle-class life, it seems to me, which causes problems for novelists. In the good old days, love plots were typically structured as being against society, and brought readers on side by the truth of the love against society’s fakeness. Now, with scant exception, we can love who we want, and though we may occasionally face some disapproval, in western Europe for the dominant social groupings we cannot create nearly enough drama to make a story. Instead, the novelist of average talent or below who wants to write about passionate love and make a story of it, is practically obliged to write about something like obsession.
Obsession, however, places the lover outside of society. It’s inherently less interesting because it reflects little back on our world. Its lessons stop as soon as we think about what makes obsession happen, patting ourselves on the back at the obvious conclusion that, for the example, we must be an atomised society to cause such madness in its members. In Enduring Love, Jed is not integrated in society. He is a loner, living at home, with no family and no job. Through his obsessiveness, he gradually disintegrates Joe’s position in society, spoiling his marriage and work as he draws him into his “love”. Indeed, Jed even does a good job of disintegrating Joe’s mind.
Now there are thoughts here that are interesting, like the way that Joe’s conviction that Jed is stalking him and dangerous is shared by nobody, so that we see as he falls away from social groups just how fragile our position in society can be. But again, there’s rather too much going on. We don’t need attempted murder to make these points. While I wouldn’t want to stress the point too much, there is a sense for me that in a serious book using shocking action like this is almost like the novelist is saying that they don’t trust themselves to hold my attention otherwise. (Which is probably true of this book).
I felt like Iris Murdoch struggled with a similar problem in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which shares with Enduring Love its focus on people who I went to school with or who my mother occasionally has round for tea. Murdoch’s novel seems at first to be the story of a demonic figure who manipulates a group of friends to ruin their relationships, as if by magic. Using words like “haunted,” “demons”, “materialises”, Murdoch creates an atmosphere or uneasy horror in spite of an essentially extremely bougie London setting. Yet when the time comes to have consequential action, those moments that would prove that the demon were truly a hellish visitant, Murdoch refuses to allow anything like that before finally dismissing the mystery at the story’s close. Meanwhile, McEwan rushes to jump the proverbial shark. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory. The one brings in the unreal and surrenders to the real. The other seems real, but refuses to abide by reality’s rules.
In general, I suppose I just find my people boring. I try to be a well-behaved writer and pay attention, but so far as I am aware there has been not one interesting story taking place around me in that circle in all the years of my life. (My time in Russia is another story). No cheating, no problems which are not immediately thrown under the rug, pure bourgeois stability, punctuated occasionally by death or mental decline, complaining over inheritance, but nothing more than that. That’s not to say I cannot write stories from the material I’m given. But the stuff of old novels, society scandal and the like, is essentially absent. The problem, one of them anyway, is that in Enduring Love McEwan doesn’t seem to trust either himself or his readers. The novel could work just as well as a slow burn, a gradual breakdown in sanity, a growing sense of menace. Instead, McEwan feels the need here to have every chapter be dramatic like a cheap thriller, to show love from so many angles, so that it’s far too busy a work to be an interesting one.
That’s not to say that there are not things I admired in the work. One part I liked is the novel’s ending, not what it says so much as how it says it. As with Lolita, where if we want to know Lo’s true fate we must read the parts where Humbert Humbert’s narration stops rather carefully, here too we have an appendix that gives more closure to everyone’s story than the section of Joe’s narrative does, while concealing its actual significance under the appearance of an article in a medical journal.
There is also the hard-to-dismiss fact that the book does work hard to establish tension, and as novelists are supposed to make their works entertaining, this is a good place to learn it. The first chapter is not that dull conversation business that animates the start of War and Peace, for example. (/s) Here, it’s pure energy, suggesting that we needn’t care about characters if the story is exciting enough. And as for that beginning, it’s also a good example of a way to draw out a morally complex theme from a conceivable real-world situation. It’s just that McEwan, for mysterious reasons, chooses to leave this theme in the background rather than the foreground.
Overall, your blogger shrugs his shoulders. I felt this was a busy book, with uninteresting characters and a silly plot. It was a contemporary story – I could tell at once how much the work was written under the sensible eyes (and scalpel) of a sensible editor, or even the ghost of one, tutting at the thought of an opening that did not grip, of anything that might lose the reader’s attention and do something so irrelevant as add depth to themes. Yet unlike the contemporary fiction of people like Sally Rooney or Patricia Lockwood, where even if I have my complaints I still am excited by the opportunities for reflecting our changed relation with the world under the effects of an ever more pervasive technology, I did not feel McEwan wrote a book that was contemporary in the deeper sense of telling me something about my world which I did not already know. (A classic, of course, can be a thousand years old and still manage this). Enduring Love, instead, feels already dated. Or, to be blunt, it’s a book which apart its opening, will probably not endure.
Blog note: the recent paucity of blog posts is due to two factors. First, my bag, containing my laptop and other quite useful items like the heavily annotated books I was aiming to write about (apologies to the reader who recommended Cusk – both Transit and Kudos are gone but there might still be a post on Outline), was stolen on the train. Second, I was struck by inspiration and wrote the first draft of a novel in the past two months, some 110000 words. This necessarily has to take precedence over other forms of writing, and indeed living.
Anyway, should be back to slightly more regularly updates from now ish.
This is a great review, Angus. You are right in all you say, of course, but the novel is a good read. I enjoyed it simply as a page turner – and, once I’d finished, forgot so completely about it that many plot points you mention seemed utterly new to me. Incidentally, you did mention the editor’s scalpel and I think this suggests that McEwan is yet another writer ruined by that appalling fact of contemporary life, the Creative Writing degree. Students ‘learn’ how to write a novel and churn out volume after volume of perfect, yet bloodless prose. I published a brief essay on this in The London Magazine a few years ago. It won a prize and Grey Gowrie, in presenting the (very humble) award at The Traveller’s Club, observed that now writing a novel is like assembling an IKEA flat pack.
Good luck with your own novel, by the way! Peter
Thanks Peter! I managed to track down your essay and quite enjoyed it. I have to say, writing is quite a struggle – you don’t even need to do an MFA to accidentally end up writing like one. It’s dreadful. But I am working on it. I always found it shocking that Tolstoy rewrote with extreme dedication given how effortless his writing seems, with even War and Peace being redrafted about ten times. In other words, length and time are no excuses for me not to make improvements on subsequent drafts! Hope all’s well with you, Angus