Enduring Love: A Novel | Ian Mcewan | Can we let go of our illusions?

Enduring Love: A Novel | Ian Mcewan | I loved this book!

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Enduring Love: A N...

	Enduring Love: A Novel Ian Mcewan Anchor, 1998 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 171 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Can we let go of our illusions?

An elegantly crafted meditation on whether love, value and meaning can survive in a life guided only by the indifferent torchlight of scientific objectivity.
Mcewen grapples with the big questions here, questions that seem to grow ever more relevant in a world torn by the conflicting extremes of religious fundamentalism and moral vacuity. There might not be a simple answer to be found in these pages, but Mcewen's genius allows us to draw our own meanings and interpretations of the conundrum from both the surgical precison of his prose and the eerily symbolic beauty of the story.

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I loved this book!

This is a must-read for Ian McEwan fans, and a wonderful introduction to the author for those unfamiliar. The book is warm, well-written, meaningful and beautiful. I won't forget it soon.

Fragile Love

Enduring Love

Ian McEwan got the idea for this novel from a case report in the psychiatric literature of a man with an unusual illness called de Clerambault's syndrome. The subject of the illness exists in a delusional system in which he believes that another person, usually of much higher social rank, is in love with him. There is stalking and then the emotional and physical damage to follow. McEwan, fleshes out this case report, putting meat on the bones of the "subject" and "object" of the sterile case report, giving them a clear voice. Through his magic touch, his sensitivity, and perception as a very fine writer, McEwan helps us understand what this aberration meant to the characters, and what it means to us.

Why would McEwan choose this subject? To showcase a freak of nature? To "steal" a real-life psychological catastrophe from professional literature, exploit it, for the purpose of entertaining his jaded reader with something more still more bizarre than he sees on TV or reads in the papers? I think not. The "love" that the de Clerambault subject experiences, is vice-like, sick, and enduring, with religious overtones. Ironically, the real love that the existed between the protagonist, Joe Rose and his mate, Clarissa, was consensual, and, by contrast, fragile, unsupported by religious sanction. Love can fail. Most of us have experienced, at one time or another, the failure of love. McEwan contrasts the rigid, tenacious nature of pathological love with the fluid and fragile nature of the real thing.

There are lots of interesting side trips in Enduring Love. McEwan, eloquently presents the apologetics for God, or Intelligent Designer, as our current idiom would allow, from the point of view of the psychotic stalker, and scientific "reason," from the point of view of his atheistic protagonist-victim. The psychotic person has Christian dogma mostly right, but he is socially disconnected and cannot use his Christian faith to interact positively with other humans. Through other characters, Mr. McEwan delves into the worlds of literature (mostly Keats), evolution of species and thought from the point of view of a devout Darwinist, and biochemistry, with some very interesting history on the earliest discoveries (and subsequent squelching) of DNA in the middle part of the 1800's.

There is much in Enduring Love that is at once disturbing and beautiful. Wow!

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RBradbury451 You were duped.

The Case Study you refer to is Appendex I written by Wenn & Camia. (Anagram for Ian McEwan). Don't feel bad many noted professionals were also duped by the hoax case report.

That aside I found the book a great work by McEwan. He is a bit heavy handed by having Joe respresenting Scientific thought, Clarissa representing Artistic (Emotions) and Jed representing Religious fervor. Then mixing it all together.

I think the title is spot on; Enduring the verb represents the ordeal Joe has to face by enduring Jed's love for him as well as enduring the adjective for the love between Joe & Clarissa.

I still haven't figured out why so many of the names start with "J". Joe, Jed, John, Jane, Jocelyn, Johnny. Then there is Clarissa the only significant character that is NOT a "J" name.

Any Ideas out there?

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not as good as everyone tells you it is

OK, the opening scene is excellent, one of the best. You are gripped and intensely engaged in the story and characters from the outset. So far so good.

So how come you come to dislike and, frankly, not care about the characters by the end of the book? McEwan is a great writer but he populates his fictional world with some of the coldest and most unlovable characters in literature. The risk with this style is that the reader won't give a monkey's what happens to them, and this is the case here.

**SPOILER** So, when a lead character lies bleeding on the floor at the end of the book you aren't really all that bothered whether they live or die. You just want the plot wrapped up neatly one way or another.

Read the opening scene then put it down and read something else instead - you'd be better of with some Charles Baxter or Paul Auster. Trust me.

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