Tragedy

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Novels

Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love

Enduring Love is a tentative and yet searching exploration of love in an intensely postmodern world. Joe Rose, a science journalist is somewhat blindly in love with a Keats scholar, Clarissa Mellon, who returns his love, though somewhat less ardently. Their comfortable, idyllic and somewhat idealised (by Joe) life in London is disturbed by a balloon accident, in which Joe is part of a failed rescue attempt. A man dies and all the would-be rescuers are left feeling guilty rather than heroic about their actions. One of the other rescuers, twenty-eight year old Jed Parry fall in love with Joe as they are standing over the body of rescuer who died. This rapidly turns in De Clerambault syndrome. This leads to a tense and escalating series of events, which at times strain credibility, and ends with a shooting and another picnic.

Each of the three main characters represents an approach to the truth, or less dramatically perhaps a working understanding of life. Joe is the narrator, scientific anxious to be precise and accurate; Clarissa, the Keats scholar stand, I think for a kind of compromise – not religious exactly, but not scientific either and she believes strongly in the power of love, without coming across as a particularly loving character. That leaves religion for Jed, and rather unfairly it is represented by the nutter version.

Joe Rose

Joe has been given a bad press, I think. He is scolded an unreliable narrator by most students: he is at times inaccurate it is true, at other times swayed by his emotions. But He is NOT unreliable – because he tells the reader these things. He checks his own facts against other possible perspectives, even an eagle’s, he tells us how he is feeling and that what he says and does may be a rationalisation for him. So – he is not unreliable: he fails to tell us the whole truth (as anyone must) but he lets us know that this is the case, that other versions of the story are possible. Even at his worst point in the story – when he is invading Clarissa’s study in chapter 12 – he reveals his own lack of honesty. In other words the reader can trust him. I think it is irritation with his pedantic precision, with is ‘cold’ scientific accuracy which readers falsely interpret as unreliable. We may not like him, but we can trust him to tell the truth as far as he is able and where he is uncertain he tells the reader so. And, apart from Jed’s three letters, the appendices and chapter 9, which he tries to tell from Clarissa’s point of view, we get the story from Joe’s point of view – and end up with quite a good grasp of what is going on.

Jed Parry

Jed is the last of the central characters to be introduced – certainly the last at the scene of the balloon accident. His first individual action is to follow Joe to John Logan’s body and offer to pray with him as it might ‘help’ in such frightful moments. That night he telephones Joe and tells him that they love each other. This begins a long tale of persistent stalking, which Joe at first treats with humour and kindness, despite his fear. Joe is aware that much of what he does might ‘encourage’ Jed, but the reader is reminded that Jed would persist in his stalking, his belief and his feelings no matter what Joe did. He has de Clerambault syndrome – there is nothing Joe can do, Clarissa is wrong about that. One cannot reason with madness. Clarissa is wrong about that in her final letter to Joe. Despite his obvious madness – Jed gets two of the most lyrical passages in the novel – in his letters of chapter 11, 16 and the appendices. His impossible, wrongheaded and mad love is after all enduring in a way that Joe and Clarissa’s is not (though they are reconciled at the end) and are his letters hints at those letters of Keats’ for which Clarissa is searching?

Clarissa

She is the most sketchy of the three main characters – and I can’t help but wonder whether McEwan has not taken too much of a short cut with her. She is a Keats scholar, passionately searching for Keats’ final love letter. Joe tells us that she is convinced that the most perfect love can only be expressed in a letter. So we immediately assume she is a Romantic – but she clearly is not. Her responses to Joe often seem cold and analytical – and selfish. Her bad day at work in chapter 9 makes her irritable when he is clearly highly distressed and not fulfilling his function for her – taking care of her. It is hard not to wonder with Joe why she is with him – are we to think, with her focus on being taken care of – that she found in him the father she lost so young? She seems unconvincing – someone who believes love is the only thing one needs to know about a baby’s smile treats it so lightly? At the first sign of trouble with Joe – she insists that they are ‘over’.

In responding to these characters – and readers tend to respond strongly to them, generally picking either Joe or Clarissa’s side – it is important to remember that they are only characters. That McEwan created them, wrote them to elicit certain responses from us. And those responses can at times be surprising. We accept Clarissa as right perhaps simply because we are women and agree that men struggle to open up and share their feelings. Or our opinion on religion may colour our understanding of Jed and we may fail to see how similar his thinking is to Clarissa’s – both of them interpret signs, both of them think science removes something larger from the world.

McEwan makes the meticulous Joe our narrator, makes the crazy Jed his adversary – albeit an adoring one – while Clarissa is the prize – at least for Joe. The plot thickens about these three characters – and until the restaurant scene in chapter 19 I felt that I could trust Joe’s narration. The restaurant scene changes that – now Joe’s narration seems deliberately vague and confusing, you have to read it several times to picture what is going on and he forgets what kind of sorbet he ordered. Then when the police tell him that Colin Tapp has been shot before, it is hard not to think that Clarissa must have been right all along – Joe is obsessed and paranoid. And so we swing from one to the other, making judgements because our emotions are involved, but not till the very end can we know whether we were right or wrong. And that being right or wrong turns out not to be the most important thing. Lots of characters in the novel are wrong Jean Logan, Henry Gadd, Clarissa, Joe too and Jed – but being vindicated at the end does not lead the way back to love – forgiveness does – which means that is some way, whether we like it or not, even Jed has been right.

Poetry

Aspects of Narrative: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy

Think about what poems do:

They tell stories
They create images – through detail and close observation
They create melodies: sound patterns of rhyme and rhythm, pace and alliteration
They reflect upon life
They are artefacts in themselves – to be admired or disliked and can therefore be analysed

Download the Aspects of Narrative Word Doc here