How many times do we find ourselves believing that gestures mean more than words, that there is a deeper meaning in everything, that our beloved, or God for that matter can speak to us in signs? And how difficult it is, even for the most rational amongst us, to get rid of such delusions?
In many ways, the obsessive 'love' of the stalker who 'knows better than you what you feel' is a parody of our 'normal' romantic love, it's a monstrous mirror but a mirror nevertheless. The sequences of events leading to conflict, the inevitability of misunderstanding, the inscrutability of emotions, the birth of mistrust, and - of course - the fundamental and unavoidable self-centeredness of love. It's a meditation on the nature of love, with the relationship of Joe and Clarissa described in ultra realistic if somehow dry and subtle terms.
McEwan knows how to create suspense: the breathless, scary kind more scary because the sense of foreboding is realistic rather than taken from some ridiculous horror story.Īpart from the suspense, Enduring Love has so much more, though. I read 'Enduring Love' in a day, like a thriller impossible to put down, even though it's classified as high-brow literature. It took a lot to make me 100% sure it was really happening the grotesque and out-of-different genre finale was almost necessary to reassure me of Joe's sanity. Despite that, most of the time I had a doubt - just a tiny one - as to the actual reality of the stalking.
The story is told from Joe's perspective and the reader tends to generally trust Joe's version of events to have some connection to reality. The bulk of the novel deals with Joe's experience of being stalked by Jed Parry, and the resulting fallout - the way it affects his relationship with Clarissa, makes him reconsider his work life, but also the way it affects his feelings and ideas about the nature of reality. But it's not a mere tragedy, it's not the accident that turns Joe's life upside down, it's the fact that Jed Parry, a fellow rescuer, seems to have developed an obsessive passion for Joe, a passion which only after a time Joe manages to identify as an instance of De Clerambault's Syndrome or erotomania. So we already have the set-up, when something - a tragedy - invades the seemingly comfortable and ordered lives of characters. Their welcome countryside picnic goes awry when Joe becomes involved in a ballooning accident in which one of the rescuers is killed. Joe Rose is a science journalist, in a long term relationship with Clarissa who is coming back from the US that fateful day when the story of 'Enduring Love' begins. Summary: An analysis of the irrational nature of love and religion, 'Enduring Love' reads like a scary, suspenseful, thriller with strong characters and storyline with a stalker, based on well-researched condition of erotomania.
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