"The beginning is easy to mark" starts the novel; yet my response has no such natural point of genesis. McEwan likes to play with how later knowledge overlays our memories and opinions; and that is how I feel about Enduring Love, whose precedent as an admired novel of erudite finesse elicited conflicting emotions.
The aspect which particularly changed my feelings was part discovery, part recollection of a friend's outrage which I share: the book's appendix reveals that that this story pinches the psychiatric notes of a real life patient, without every explaining if it was done with his permission or knowledge. And it's hardly a flattering portrayal.
I wondered how I was meant to take narrator Joe Rose and his supposed stalker, Jed Parry. I didn't like Joe. But I wasn't sure if I was meant to. I thought this story was going somewhere other than where it did - and had it gone there, this would've been a powerful tale. I was intrigued by the scientific rationalist who is pursued by his antithesis. It wasn't so much the twist of making Joe mad that I desired, but that Jed and Joe could give each other something positive. I hoped that faith and love could challenge and enhance science. I hoped that Jed's loneliness and social difficulties could be alleviated through Joe. I fear for a society which warmed to Joe as a hero and put away the Jeds of this world without trying to help him, but put him through violating treatments and damning medical pronouncements, then tell his story as entertainment.
After the ridiculous gun scenes and chase to rescue the apparently hostaged Clarissa, I was relived at the mention of forgiveness. What a wonderful end to the spiralling frenzy and violence. I sought redemption and a journey towards enlightenment; but the trajectory is predictable and diminishing. It diminished the scale of this supposed overarching story of literary and scientific pretensions. It becomes a creep show, a simple story of impending terror. Like Notes on a Scandal, I felt sorry for the ‘mad' one, preferring complexity and pathos rather than a story of compulsion and homoeroticism.
McEwan's style is consciously self reverential; a kind of clunky mix of unnaturalistic dialogue and supposedly metaphysical meditations, puffed up with their own importance (e.g. the gun-getting episode where a dog is ‘bereft of generative grammar'). It is tempting to conclude that this is what Joe fears of his work as popular science writer: a narrative which imparts the ideas and lives of others at a lower level than they were originally transmitted, without doing anything new or earth shattering in itself.
Some research shows that this story is not in fact plagiarism but - as McEwan thinks - cleverly presented as truth, topically blurring the line between what is real. Yet such staging reinforces my low view of the work, and endangers the dupe earning the author the reputation of immorality in pinching the life of another without permission.
