Enduring Love

Ian McEwan is one of the major novelists of contemporary literature. Although he's written a dozen novels—and many short stories, screenplays, and even librettos—he never gained much recognition outside of England until the film version of Atonement, which won a number of awards a few years ago. Since then, his novels have sold well in America, and some of his earlier works, such as Enduring Love (1997), are starting to gain more recognition, too.

Enduring Love begins with suspense, literally, as Jack Rose, enjoying a picnic with his wife, Clarissa, finds himself trying to grab a rope on a runaway helium balloon that has a terrified boy in its gondola. Five other men, including the balloon's captain, desperately grab the rope, too, but a sudden gust of wind, estimated later to be 70 mph, launches them into the air. Most of them hang suspended a few feet before they become frightened and let go and drop safely to the ground. One man, however, doesn't release and is then carried more than one hundred feet into the air before he loses his grip and plunges to his death.

Surprisingly, the rest of the novel doesn't really directly dwell on the aftermath of this bizarre accident but, instead, focuses on how one of the other men who released the rope, Jed, a fanatical Christian, begins to stalk Jack, who writes for popular science magazines and is scornful about religions. Jed will not accept that Jack has no belief in God and will never seek solace through prayer, and so, increasingly more frantic, he pursues Jack because he feels compelled to "save" him. These traumas—witnessing a death that he might have helped to prevent and then being stalked—have a terrible effect on Jack's emotional state and, consequently, on his marriage.

But what if Jed isn't stalking Joe? What if, in fact, Jed doesn't exist except as a figment of Joe's anxieties about his personal failures in life?

In addition to this disturbing plot, Enduring Love is a meditation on many themes, including the nature of time, the inter-complexities of human relationships, and the impact of science on the modern world. McEwan, for example, speculates about the limits of empirical knowledge and rational thought in the face of seemingly random, inexplicable tragedy.

I've read a half dozen of McEwan's novels, and although they all, like Enduring Love, wrestle with challenging philosophical questions, they are written in such lucid prose that they are accessible for general readers who want to read about interesting characters placed into compelling situations.