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Pierrette Lavanchy reviews

"Enduring Love"
by Ian McEwan

Italian translation by Susanna Basso
"L'amore fatale", Einaudi, Torino, 1997, pp. 280, Lit. 28.000.



From the skies of England an aerostatic balloon comes down on a grass field. Six men come running up to the aid of the pilot and of his passenger, a boy of ten. But violent gusts of wind repeatedly snatch off the aerostat, which is lifted again from the ground. One after the other the succorers, who have been clinging to the ropes in order to balance the force of the wind with their weight, release the grip and let themselves drop to the ground. The last one to hold on, a physician, is taken away through the now unstoppable rise of the balloon, until he loses his grip on the rope and falls. A useless death, since the child on board manages to land and save his life.

This narration has appeared on the New Yorker of May 19, 1997, in the section Fiction, with the title Us or me?, which alludes to the conflict of the succorers between the tendency to cooperate and the instinct of individual survival. It almost looks like a story of its own, were it not for some allusion to dire consequences, which however are not described. Actually it is the first chapter of McEwan's recent novel, Enduring Love, translated in italian with the title: L'amore fatale. In the economy of the book, the balloon's catastrophe finds its real dimension as the antefact of a drama, which shall upset the lifes of two of the succorers, Joe Rose (the first person narrator) and Jed Parry. What happens is that Jed Parry falls in love, in a wayward, merciless way, with Joe, after they have met near the fallen physician's body.

The leap between the initial fact and the story's successive evolution reflects, on the narrative level, the (at least apparent) discontinuity between phenomena of nature and human emotions, between inanimate matter and living substance, which is the object Joe recurrently wonders about, in line with his training as a physicist and his job as a scientific divulgator. To his naturalistic, darwinian form of mind, the fall of the balloon appears as a primordial catastrophe, a sort of Big Bang, following which a fortuitous meeting of two men becomes a relationship with unescapable dynamics. Joe makes a constant effort to reconstruct a continuity between subjective experience and the world of objective facts, trying to insert the human elements into the realm of physical and biological occurrences. On the level of literary technique, such an effort is rendered through variations of point of view, for instance redescribing the men's meeting on the field as a movement of white dots on a green surface, as it may look at the eyes of a flying bird; or inserting brief reflections of the narrator into the narration, for instance the observation that the helion used to inflate the aerostat is also the elementaty gas that sets life going. The first-person narrator's wandering from the side of direct, deeply felt experience to the side of its cognitive working through gives the reader a feeling of mobility, which expresses well the precariousness of certainties and the many potentialities open to the search for meaning before a definite attribution.

The scientistic, materialistic key to which Joe makes reference, eventually clinging to it as to a salvation anchor, stands in a complete contrast to Jed's religious view. Jed interprets all the internal and external events as the expression of a superior will, and attributes to wordly feelings the function to open man's heart to God's love. To the reader and also to the first-person narrator, Joe's first look at Jed together with the proposal to join him to the place where the physician has precipitated are the products of an alteration of consciousness (a sort of dédoublement), and of the emotional upheaval connected to the tragedy just occurred. To Jed, the same words are an erotic call, immediately interpreted as the decisive enlightenment of his personal destiny. From this moment, Jed will assail Joe with phone calls and letters, follow him in the street, waiting for him at the door; he will supplicate Joe to listen to love's voice and leave everything (his wife, his work, his atheism) to come and live with him. Jed avails himself of the fact that Joe has been the one to start the relationship; Joe has talked to him first, has invited him to come over to the physician's body; Joe cannot, save for a transitory motion of human fright, shut himself to a feeling that has already possessed his own soul; he cannot go on professing his absurd scientific theories. Joe puts back Jed's assault on his emotions and convictions, but he discovers to be very vulnerable. The first chapters show him involved against his will with Jed's love speech, stricken by its pertinence, troubled by its likeness to any other love speech. As his anxiety grows, Joe becomes less and less open to the other's words, more and more inclined to selectively recognizing symptoms and threats. His answers develops from disquiet to intolerance, from fascination to rejection, from an existential crisis to the rebuilding of scientistic barriers, from depression to action. From his own part Jed grows more and more bitterly frustrated, so that he looses his oblative enthusiasm and becomes demanding and eventually vengeful.

The concept of normalization of the Chaos appears to be particularly adequate to reckon with the operation every character in the book is trying to perform. Jed normalizes his own Chaos through falling in love (which in turn brings the Chaos in the others' life). The ideology of supreme love gives a meaning and an end to a life that has been suddenly granted many means (Jed has got an unexpected legacy), but is still devoid of aims, affects and stimulations. Also Clarissa, Joe's wife, attempts to normalize the Chaos that has infiltrated the relationship to her husband. To her the factor of normalization is guilt. Clarissa accuses her husband to collude with his persecutor; she reproaches him for not having spoken at once; even when confronted to Joe's proven good faith and to the reality of the risk represented by Jed, she maintains that a conversation in three with Jed would have dissipated the misunderstandings. In a word, psychoanalytic prejudices and illuministic ingenuousness converge in her answer, actually scarcely fit to an expert in romanticism (she is a specialist of Keats).
But naturally either the presence of the Chaos and the attempts to normalize it are best caught in the character of Joe. According to his vocation as a scientist, Joe goes in search of an objectivizing and reductionistic explanation. In this way he eventually identifies the psychiatric diagnosis in which Jed's past, present and future behaviour may be enclosed. This diagnosis (a particular form of erotomanic delusion) legitimates Joe's suspicion that his interlocutor might become dangerous, and authorizes him to defend himself from possible attacks through action.
Which sort of action, we leave it for the reader to discover. In fact from this point on, the novel changes tone: we might say that it "normalizes" itself in the thriller genre, with a displacement of emphasis from interiority to exteriority, from the relational level to the situational level.

Two questions come to the reader's mind. The one is of a naturalistic kind: could the plot evolve in a different way? The other is of a literary kind: could the author avoid trespassing into action novel? As to the first question, passages of a psychiatric essay inserted as an appendix to the novel seem to imply that the author has taken a clinical story as his model. The behaviour attributed to Joe reflects the data of the article, and also reproduces the usual reaction of persons invested with someone else's love passion against their will. The sources agree in affirming that stalkers, obsessed with the desire of taking possession of a person and entering his or her life, become real persecutors. With continous forms of invading the chosen person's life (coming inside his home, reading his mail, waiting for him outside his job place, assail him with phone calls), they may even induce the victim to change residence, job, name, in the attempt to cover his track. The victim's resort to police remains of no avail, unless some serious trouble occurs, as happens in the novel. Looking for dialogue is considered useless or even harmful; it could be taken as an encouragement (this is probably right, if anyone has the illusion of being able to convince the stalker to give up; dialogue might have a better result, so we think, but only in case the victim was disposed to allow the Chaos in his life in a permanent way).

On the literary side, the impression of an impoverishment, of a diminished emotional resonance, that the reader feels as the narration develops into a detective story is in a sense understandable: action is simplifying; it let the material events prevail over the immaterial ones; it displaces the reader's attention from emotions to deeds. We might then think that the change of literary tone has been chosen by the author in order to mirror (art imitates nature) the same kind of modification occurred inside his book's main character. But even if Joe is involved in a climate of physical violence, just as if he were a improvised detective, he is not completely identified with this role. And McEwan emphasizes very well, and in many ways, the growing dissonance between Joe's shape of mind and his actions. In particular he shows Joe's awkwardness and estrangement in acquiring a pistol, an enterprise completely alien to his mental makeup.
But, in order to emphasize the sense of unreality that pervades the protagonist, the author accentuates the grotesqueness of external elements: the journey, the places, the persons met. In a word he uses an expressionistic technique, which results in an overtoned narration, to the limit of unlikeliness.
Those who write stories know that the ending is perhaps the most difficult part of the job. Termination is where an author is most liable to give in to his personal temptations. McEwan's temptations seem to be the taste for story-telling (which, as we have seen, has taken his hand in some passages of the book) and the need for giving an answer to every question. This tendency, typical of detective stories, had already shown in a preceding novel, Black dogs, in which all the mystery was dissolved at the end with the narration of a clarifying antefact. Similarly in this novel, Joe's narration finishes with the unexpected solution of an enigma concerning the initial episode: the presence of a woman in the dead succorer's car. Moreover the resolutive explanation takes place on a grass field during a picnic, in a perfect symmetry to the first chapter's scenery. A geometrical conclusion, in a book still very good and captivating.


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