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. If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport. 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.Īpart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals-the contingencies-that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that same night. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. In itself, the accident would change the couple and the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. The perfect day turns to nightmare however, when they are involved in freak ballooning accident in which a boy is saved but a man is killed. At the far end of the field two farmhands are working.Joe planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after 6 weeks in the States. As the novel opens, he is sharing a picnic with his long-standing girlfriend, Clarissa. The narrator of Enduring Love is a science writer and broadcaster called Joe Rose. Accidents occur randomly, without meaning – or, as the Americans put it: shit happens. McEwan’s vision is different: here, logical positivism rules.
It is God’s Plan to make sense of the chaos, redeeming the suffering. In Wilder’s hands, what looks like a freak misadventure turns out to have been determined from on high. But the two writers place very different interpretations upon death and destiny. In Wilder’s story, it is as they plunge to their deaths from a breaking bridge in McEwan’s, the story begins as a hot-air balloon lunges out of control, bringing tragedy to a spring morning above the Chilterns. As in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey – a marvellous novella, still unaccountably underrated – a large cast is introduced in a moment of breathtaking drama.
The opening chapter of Ian McEwan’s latest novel is a tour de force.
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