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Review by Nan Goldberg
Question:
What do you get if you cross Stephen King with Kafka?Answer:
Ian McEwan, the genre-busting author of such horrifying literary thrillers as "The Comfort of Strangers" and "The Child in Time."Joe, the narrator of McEwan's new novel, "Enduring Love," would be delighted by that pseudo-scientific hypothesis: He is a writer whose specialty is elucidating scientific concepts for the non-scientist. A strict rationalist, Joe is much too practical and sensible to try to do physics rather than just explain it. And most of the time, he can live with that failure.
Joe is a typical resident of McEwan's world, a random, frightening place populated by conventionally amiable characters all proceeding nicely along their conventionally civilized 20th-century paths, until something goes terribly awry, whereupon the train not only jumps the track but goes hurtling onto the busy sidewalks of Main Street.
"Enduring Love" begins when Joe and four strangers rush to the aid of a child trapped inside the basket of a runaway helium balloon. Their combined weight would have kept the balloon on the ground, but someone panics and lets go of the rope, promptly followed by all the others except one, John Logan, who is lifted 300 feet into the air, then falls to his bone-shattering death.
In the aftermath, Joe's wife, Clarissa, searches for some meaning in the tragedy. But Joe refuses to sacrifice reason for false solace. "Logan had died for nothing. The boy, Harry Gadd, turned out to be unharmed," he tells us bluntly, and he responds to Clarissa's comfort-seeking with irritation: "Logan's death was pointless," he declares; end of discussion.
But was it blameless? Joe thinks it wasn't. Worse, he can't remember who was first to let go -- and that mystery, never resolved, infects him with an uneasiness that mutates into dread, as another, related problem develops: He finds he is being stalked by someone involved in the accident.
Jed Parry, one of the men who ran over to help anchor the balloon, exchanged a glance with Joe as they helplessly watched Logan fall. Parry's interpretation of that glance -- that he and Joe had instantly and mutually fallen in love -- creates a different kind of moral crisis for Joe, having to do with the bonds of love and trust between partners. Because although Joe tries again and again to explain to Clarissa his fear of Parry and Parry's obsessive behavior, she just doesn't get it. In no time at all, Joe and Clarissa have reached an impasse in their relationship.
It's a wild, depressing ride, yet told in language that is almost unbearably beautiful. Recalling the moment before he and the others reached the balloon and set the tragedy in motion, Joe writes: "We were running towards a catastrophe, which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes." At home that night, Joe describes himself and Clarissa endlessly reliving the event, "leaning over the table like dedicated craftsmen at work, grinding the jagged edge of memories, hammering the unspeakable into forms of words, threading single perceptions into narrative, until Clarissa returned us to the fall, to the precise moment when Logan had slid down the rope, hung there one last precious second, and let go. This was what she had to get back to, the image to which her shock had attached itself."
It is as if McEwan is hoping that lyricism itself might redeem the terrible randomness of life -- which, in fact, it might. At least until something better comes along.
Nan Goldberg lives and writes in New Jersey.
©1998, ProMotion, inc.
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