Past Reviews

The book to be discussed is:

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

Joe, a well-known science writer and his longtime companion Clarissa, professor and expert on Yeats are picnicing when they become participants in a freak hot air balloon accident. A young boy is in the uncontrolled balloon. Joe, and several spectators rush to help. The result is that a man falls to his death. This accident brings Joe into contact with Jed one of those who attempted to help. Their brief contact is the beginning of Jed's obsessional love for Joe. He telephones, writes and follows Joe expressing his unrequited love for this newly met stranger. One strange accident, one chance meeting will change the lives of Joe, Jed and Clarissa.

Romantic, marital and obessive love is explored in this novel. It's a fascinating look at psychopathology. In addition there are similiarities with the more recent and deeper novel, "Saturday" just published by McEwan. Both Joe and Henry Perowne of "Saturday" have their lives altered by a momentary encounter. Both are men of science and rationality placed in relationships with women experts in the literary field. Henry's daughter is a poet forming a juxtaposition of thought and philosophy. While Enduring Love is a psychological thriller, "Saturday" is that and more - a look at forgiveness in the post-911 world. Even if it is not a deeply introspective as "Saturday", "Enduring Love" is still beautifully written and well worth reading. There are phrases, descriptions in "Enduring Love" that are so perfect and truth, that they will take your breath away.

 In this book, McEwan takes a shocking event and traces the impact it has on the life of the narrator, Joe Rose. And while the book is somewhat of a mystery -- is Joe imaging things or not? -- the true thread of the book has to do with doubt between loved ones. The fact that Joe's wife actually doubts his interpretation of the book's opening events is what ultimately drives this narrative. As a reader, I was fascinated by how McEwan was able to manipulate my interpretation of what I was reading. For the first half of the book, I assumed that Joe's version of events was factual, and that Joe's wife, Clarissa, was merely being unsupportive. About midway through, however, I began having my own doubts, much like Clarissa. At the end of the book, we are left with the sense that the two of them will work to overcome this episode. They have, in effect, had an epiphany by meeting with the widow of the man who was killed at the beginning of the book. This woman, too, was wrongly filled with doubt about her husband. Her statement that the only person who could forgive her is dead jars both Clarissa and Joe. McEwan's writing, as in all of his books, is top-notch. And while we may assume it was the opening balloon accident which pushes all subsequent action, it actually was Clarissa's doubt which proved to be the most damaging.

Ripple effects, April 10, 2005
Reviewer:
Glenn Miller (Minneapolis, MN USA)

Suggested books for future reading

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Discussion Questions

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 humor 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?