Exploring life’s boundaries

Another fantastic article from The Age. This one discusses Enduring Love and its exploration of science and reason and their limitations.

DOES science have the answers to everything about “reality”?

Science cannot really account for Jed Parry, despite the “diagnostic criteria” of de Clerambault, outlined in the first appendix in Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love.

The final appendix (the last word?) belongs to Parry and his ironically “enduring love”, which has been frantically “endured” by Joe Rose, whose own behaviour has been ambivalently “endured” by his partner Clarissa.

Definitions, behaviours and meanings around “love” and “reality” are integral to the novel’s themes, but also the meaning of science.

Science and reason are among the defining features of Western culture, and this 1997 novel mounts an intriguing case to explore their limits — and limitations.

Read the rest here.

An interview with Ian McEwan about Enduring Love

The following is an abbreviated version of an interview that ran on the NPR affiliate KUSP on February 16th, 1998 and 12:00 pm. Eric Schoeck is the Capitola Book Café Events Coordinator.

E.S.: Several of the reviews I’ve read have targeted the opening scene of Enduring Love as particularly compelling. Have you been hearing this from people as well?

I.M.: I came across a journal entry I wrote about six months before I began working on Enduring Love. My journal tends to be full of little exhortations, and it said, “write a first chapter that would be the equivalent of a highly addictive drug.” I did want to have the reader hit the ground running…

E.S.: So to speak…

I.M.: So to speak. In fact, one of the other chapters was originally the opening. It’s a chapter where someone makes an attempt on the life of the narrator in a restaurant.

E.S.: Which comes much later.

I.M.: Which now is Chapter 19. But originally was the opening. Then I thought, no, that needs to go in its correct place chronologically and we’ll start somewhere else. So, yes, there always was a scheme to have something fairly arresting and, more importantly, an event that would bring fates of different characters into collision.

E.S.: The randomness of fate seems to be one of the most important parts of this novel. It reminded me once again, not how fragile we are, but how fragile fate can be.

I.M.: I often think that when people talk of coincidences that they’re almost bound to occur because we’re like so many atoms in a turbulent system or a gas under pressure. If you lead an averagely busy life, the number of people that you collide with, so to speak, is extraordinary. One could become your husband, or your wife, or, for that matter, your murderer. That random element in life is a gift to a novelist to make a pattern of it, to make some sense of it, to contest its meaning or even ask whether there’s any meaning to it at all. That’s part of the pleasure and unpredictability of writing a novel itself.

Read the rest here.

Reading Enduring Love

Hopefully these holidays you are revising and reading to be up to speed next term. Check out reviews of Enduring Love to get some ideas. Here is what Kirkus Reviews had to say about the novel:

A sad, chilling, precise exploration of deranged love, by the author of, among other works, the novels The Innocent (1990) and Black Dogs (1992). Joe Rose, a middle-aged science writer, takes his wife Clarissa to London’s Hampstead Heath for a picnic–and stumbles into a tragedy when a man and his young grandson, on a jaunt by balloon, get into serious trouble. Joe is among the bystanders who race to seize the balloon, which is damaged, close to the ground, and being pushed by high winds toward a precipice. One of the rescuers dies. In the aftermath, Joe exchanges words with Jed Parry, a deeply disturbed young man among those who came rushing to help. Isolated, independently wealthy, Parry has attempted to suppress his homosexual inclinations by immersing himself in a fervent and very personal version of Christianity. Parry quickly fixates on Joe, and, deciding that he is meant to be the means by which Joe, a nonbeliever, will be brought back to God, Parry begins haunting him. He shadows Joe’s movements around London, loiters outside his apartment, constantly leaves messages and letters. It’s not only God’s love that Parry believes he’s carrying; he’s also, in a confused and only partially conscious manner, convinced that Joe loves him and knows everything about him. Joe’s increasingly angry attempts to rid himself of Parry seem to the obsessed man only another test of his devotion, while Joe and Clarissa’s marriage begins to crumble under the strain, as do their careers. Finally, a desperate Parry decides he must get rid of Clarissa and, possibly, even Joe himself. In lesser hands, the story might be overwrought and unbelievable, but McEwan’s terse, lucid prose and sure grasp of character give resonance to this superb anatomy of obsession and exploration of the mind under extreme circumstance. Painful and powerful work by one of England’s best novelists.

Could you answer the following questions about the  book:

1. Which is the enduring love the title refers to?

2. Look carefully at the first chapter and talk about the way in which it holds the promise of the whole novel.

3. The narrator says, “I’m lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible” (page 2). Discuss this as a theme throughout the novel.

4. How does science infuse this story? Discuss the different theories described and explained and their importance to this novel.

5. The author writes of “… morality’s ancient, irresolvable dilemma: us, or me” (page 15) in relation to the balloon accident. Does this apply to other situations in the novel as well?

6. Joe describes how Clarissa views the trend in science toward neo-Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and genetics as “rationalism gone berserk, ” and adds that she thought “everything was being stripped down… and in the process some larger meaning was lost” (page 75). Discuss this as a theme in the novel.

7. Did you think at the beginning that Joe and Clarissa’s relationship would reach the crisis point it did? Did you think that Joe and Clarissa’s love would endure? At different points, what made you think so?

8. In chapter nine, the author switches from first-person to third-person point of view, where the reader is in Clarissa’s head as imagined by Joe. Talk about this unusual choice. What does it add to your understanding of Joe? Of Clarissa?

9. Did you doubt Joe, as Clarissa and others did? Did the author want you to?

10. In responding to Jean Logan’s theory of her husband’s tryst, Joe says,”But you can’t know this… it’s so particular, so elaborate. It’s just a hypothesis. You can’t let yourself believe in it” (page 132). Discuss the irony of Joe’s remembering, moments later, what he’s read about de Clerambault’s syndrome.

11. At the moment before Clarissa first tells him it’s over between them, Joe thinks about love, about how it “generates its own reserves.” About how “conflicts, like living organisms, had a natural lifespan” (page 155). Later he notes that “… sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It’s the great deadener” (page 231). In light of what happens in this novel, in what ways is Joe right or wrong about this?

12. In both Amsterdam and Enduring Love, characters at a police station have faulty memories of events. Talk about the role of unreliable perceptions in this novel.

13. “It’s like in banks. You never say money. Or in funeral parlors, no one says dead” (page 205). Though this is not a comic novel, the author uses observational humor throughout. Talk about other examples of humour in the novel.

14. The novel ends with the children and the river. What is the author saying with this choice?

15. In the appendixes, we’re reminded (with Jed’s letter) that “it is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology” (page 259). Is this true in your experience?

16. Why did the author choose to let us know that Joe and Clarissa reconciled (and adopted a child) with a line in a case study in the appendix?

Are the catastrophes of life tragic, or only horrible?

To read more about Enduring Love try this article from The Boston Globe. Here is an extract:

In Ian McEwan’s novels, something terrible always happens. A young boy and his sisters are made orphans and try to hide the putrefying evidence in the basement of their home (The Cement Garden); a woman on her honeymoon in France is attacked by wild Nazi guard dogs (Black Dogs); an adolescent Englishman in Berlin takes part in a horrific murder and disposes of the corpse one piece at a time (The Innocent).

Enduring Love, McEwan’s latest novel, is as beautifully realised as his others, and every bit as gruesome. In some ways, this new book can be read as a kind of commentary on all his fiction: It’s not only a violent novel, but also a novel about our responses to violence. It asks us to choose between competing visions of events, and, in the process, forces us to examine the way we react to both art and life when something terrible happens.

Read the rest here.

Key sections in Enduring Love

S-Cool has a key sections page. The intention is to not include every possible key moment, it is not exhaustive on what it covers but use it to stimulate connections between what is there and what’s left out. Here’s a sample:

Chapter 1

The accident. The first meeting with Jed. Notice the multiple perspectives from which it’s told.

A search for scientific objectivity?

An appropriate tone for such a catastrophic event?

McEwan deliberately aiming for suspense through the halting, teasing narrative?

I think I’m right, therefore I am

Now that you have finished the novel find some reviews to read. I found an interesting one for you to start with on the Guardian site. Here’s an extract:

There’s an odd moment in Ian McEwan’s new novel, when the narrator, Joe Rose, is being interviewed by the police after a murder attempt in a restaurant. Asked what flavour of ice cream he was eating before the shooting, he replies: ‘Apple’. It’s not simply that this goes against the testimony of other witnesses, who remember the attack occurring fractionally earlier, the sorbets tainted with blood before they could reach the lunchers who had ordered them, but it contradicts the version we were given earlier, minimally detailed but easily remembered 10 pages later: ‘The flavour of my sorbet was lime, just to the green side of white’.

Immediately before he lies to the police, or to himself, or merely the reader, Joe has been thinking about a truth free of self-interest, doubting whether a willed objectivity can save us from our engrained habits of mind, and has even asked explicitly, in a sentence standing alone as a paragraph: ‘But exactly what interests of mine were served by my own account of the restaurant lunch?’

McEwan is anything but a crude writer, even when he chooses extreme subject matter, and such a sharp-elbowed nudge to the reader is out of character. To introduce at this late stage an unreliable narrator is perverse: it recapitulates on the level of gimmick, the novel’s central theme, that unreliability is an ineradicable part of what we are.

Read the rest here.

Interview with Ian McEwan

On Bold Type there is an interesting interview with Ian McEwan in which he discusses his novel Enduring Love. Here is a little:

A recurring theme in your work seems to be that of ordinary lives that are rocked by the unthinkable. What inspires you to place your characters in these situations?

Moments of crisis or danger represent a means of exploring characters–the strengths and defects of personality-while at the same time offering a degree of narrative interest: it’s a matter of having your cake and eating it.

Introduction to Enduring Love

Joe Rose, scientific author and journalist, and our first-person narrator claims that the “beginning” of this story “is simple to mark”. However, the following events appear anything but simple. Whilst enjoying a picnic with his long-term (seven years now) partner Clarissa Mellon, a literature academic and Keats scholar, a ballooning accident occurs – a catastrophe for virtually all those involved.

Read the rest at S-Cool.