Enduring Love and a Misleading Title...

 

Science writer Joe and his partner Clarissa are on a picnic while heavy winds drag a huge helium balloon out of its mooring with a kid trapped in its basket. Along with five other strangers, Joe also attempts to rescue him. One of the rescuers dies after falling from a height, and the couple is disturbed by the incident. Trouble starts when another of the fellow rescuers, deeply religious Jed, starts stalking Joe, professing his love for him. Joe gets tormented by Jed's constant shadowing and his wife's reluctance to believe him. Moreover, when the dead man's widow confronts him with a secret, Joe realises that the only way out is to apply what he does for his living—research deep and uncover the hidden layers.

Enduring Love is a 1997 novel written by the British novelist Ian McEwan. The novel is a psychological thriller that is based on de Clérambault's syndrom, a rare and not much known psychological condition where the patient gets infatuated with another person and strongly believes they are in a relationship. The novel also deals with several different themes, like trust, morality, rationality, religion, and the power of perspective to bend reality. The novel is adapted into a movie starring Daniel Craig.

The plot is mostly narrated by the protagonist, Joe, in the first person, while one chapter uses the third person to show the domestic turmoil in his family. A few more chapters, which are letters from Jed, show his perspective and make the reader grasp his complex psyche. The novel is told as the reminiscences of the protagonist from a future time. He lets us know many elements of the story with the benefit of hindsight. It is very rarely that I encounter such an approach, even in novels written in first-person style. The novel contains two appendices at the end. One is a fictional medical report on Jed, and another is a letter from Jed that concludes the novel.

Joe, who is a writer of science books and articles, is portrayed as a rationalist who is very particular about perfect knowledge of things that concern him and is ready to deep dive into researching them. As a contrast, we find Jed, who is extremely religious and interprets each experience as a sign from his God. It is this aspect of Jed that causes deep disturbance to Joe. I believe if Jed were a more rational man, Joe would act more tolerant of his advances and may not even consider him a freak from the outset.

Joe recounts his tale like a thesis or a scientific paper. He never tells the story straight, as it is. To reach a point, we find that he uses the most convoluted route. He gives detailed descriptions of the surroundings, jumps back into the past and sometimes briefly into the future, tries to pry into the minds of others, explains certain nuances, and then, when you least expect it, slams you brutally with the plot. This strategy used by the author has an enormous impact on the plot. Before something eventful happens, you are given a few clues, you get to comprehend its enormity, and then the event is withheld from you ominously, to the point that you literally dread it by the time it arrives.

The novel also deals with the idea of perspective, about how the same event will be viewed, remembered, and retold by different people in a very disparate manner. For example, after the opening of the balloon accident, one of the best openings I ever read in a novel, it is mentioned that no one could remember who dropped the rope first. Everyone insists that someone else dropped first. After another important scene in a restaurant, when the police ask some questions about the dish each of them had for lunch and the order, we find that even the flavours of ice creams aren't matching.

The title of the novel Enduring Love may denote only one of the three love affairs recounted in it. The love between Joe and Clarissa, which starts out as a strong relationship, smashes into the waves of the obstacles placed by Jed. We find the unwinding of trust and confidence in each other, causing a deep wound in it, and with every hurdle, it only deepens. Similarly, the second relationship between Logan, who dies in the balloon accident, and his wife Jean goes for a tumble when Jean finds a picnic basket and a scarf inside his car posthumously. She suspects that her husband has an affair, and he joined the rescuers to show off to her, ultimately resulting in his demise.

The third affair, which I believe is the only enduring one in the plot, is Jed's love for Joe, for which he doesn't have any boundaries or an issue of trust. He earnestly believes that it is reciprocated by Joe, and he never considers any attempts that Joe makes to push him out of his life. When we read the title, we believe that it is a positive and wholesome one, only to realise after the end that the enduring love portrayed in the novel is a toxic one that crashed and shattered the lives of its characters.