Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

I was incredulous upon learning that Amsterdam, one of the most disappointing novels in recent memory, was also winner of the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.  It was not that the author, Ian McEwan (born 1948), is a bad writer; quite the contrary.  It was simply that in writing Amsterdam McEwan threw away a potentially wonderful book in order to tell a protracted and laborious shaggy dog story.  Though many post modernists may have found this final trick amusing, it produced nothing more than a sigh from me.

So, it was with some trepidation that I approached another of his celebrated novels, Enduring Love (1997).  Enduring Love is an interesting psychological novel, but also one that asks some rather large questions, such as, how do we fill up the empty spaces within ourselves?

Enduring Love details the plight of Joe Rose, a successful science writer.  One day he and his long-term lover, Clarissa, witness a hot air balloon lose control with a young boy inside the passenger basket.  Joe and several others grab the ropes that would secure the balloon to the ground, but a gust of wind pulls it from their hands.  One man, John Logan, holds on longer than the others and is carried hundreds of feet into the air before falling to his death.

To make matters worse Jed Parry, one of the men who also grabbed for the ropes, responds to the tragedy by asking Joe to pray with him.  In no time at all, Parry becomes obsessed with Joe, writing long love letters, calling him constantly, offering to bring him closer to God and hovering outside his front door.

The tragedy is that, despite all of Joe’s misgivings, he cannot make anyone believe that Parry is a threat or dangerous.  The police laugh off his concerns and Clarissa blames Joe himself for mishandling the situation.  In addition, Clarissa is not even entirely convinced that Parry exists outside of Joe’s imagination…

Though by turns a tragic romance, thriller and a novel of psychological suspense, I think McEwan is after bigger fish than mere thrills.  Joe, our successful writer, is a frustrated scientist.  He fills his world with reason and a dry catalog of facts; he fills his life by stocking his mind.  Clarissa is a scholar specializing in the work of poet John Keats, and spends much of her time tracking down lost or missing correspondence from the great poet.  She and Joe are also childless, and she spends a great deal of time with younger relations and the children of friends.  And Jed, who seems to have very little life at all, fills the emptiness of his soul with visions of God and worship of Joe.  In fact, the love he bears for Joe has very little to do with Joe the man himself, and is, instead, a grandly constructed romantic fantasia.  It’s not the Jed has sexual feelings for Joe, but, rather, Joe becomes a filter by which he can measure, dedicate and justify his own life.

One can’t help but think that McEwan is writing, in fact, a profoundly religious novel.  In an increasingly secular world, where many creeds seem to have become little more than cultural touchstones, how does one fill the void left by unanswered questions?  What are the stories and the myths we use to give meaning to our lives?  And, more importantly, can any of us really connect when we each ‘worship’ differently than eachother?

One more thing about McEwan -- despite the melodrama of the plot and complexity of the issues raised, the man has a real and pungent sense of humor and of irony.  Later in the story, Joe decides he needs a gun for protection.  He goes to a drug dealer of his acquaintance, Johnny, and they head out to buy it from some low-comedy thugs:

We were still stuck in traffic.  On the radio the jazz has been dishonestly succeeded by a program of atonal music, an earnest whooping and banging that was getting on my nerves.  I turned it off and said, “Tell me more about these people.”  I already knew they were ex-hippies who had made it rich in coke.  They had gone legal in the mid-eighties and dealt in property.  Now things were not so good, which was why they were happy to sell me a gun for an inflated price.

“Relative to the scene,” Johnny said. “these people are intellectuals.”

“Meaning what?”

“They got books all over the walls.  They like to talk about the big questions.  They think they’re Bertrand Russell or something.  You’ll probably hate them.”

I already did.

Enduring Love is highly recommended.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Amsterdam, inexplicably winner of the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, is a remarkably uneven novel … one is nearly tempted to say disjointed. 

That is not to say that Ian McEwan’s prose style is lacking.  He is not a luminescent stylist in the manner of, say, Michael Chabon, but McEwan writes with a striking economy of line and incisive ability to capture character with a phrase.  So how did so accomplished a writer fail so badly with this book…?

Amsterdam tells the story of four people, one dead and her three surviving lovers.  The novel opens at the funeral of Molly Lane, who died painfully after a swift and debilitating illness.  Molly seems to be that perfect woman who can only be realized post mortem: she is loving, sexy, talented, erudite, carefree and supportive.  Clearly too difficult to write in anything other than the reminiscences of other characters. 

Among the mourners are composer Clive Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday.  Each had longish affairs with Molly in the past, and are friendly with each other independent of her.  Also attending is Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony, another of Molly’s ex-lovers.  Garmony is an extreme right-winger (he would seem to be nearly as loathsome as our former President Bush) in line to become Prime Minister who uses the funeral as an event to glad hand reporters.

Also attending is Molly’s husband George, a wealthy publisher of trashy books. 

Following the funeral, Clive -- perhaps McEwan’s one sympathetic character in the novel -- fears that he too may be ill.  Both he and Vernon were upset by the horrific details of Molly’s passing and he discusses end-of-life care with Vernon.  Both men vow that if either becomes too sick or too debilitated with illness to live with dignity, that the healthy man will help the other find the release of death.

Clive’s illness proves to be nothing more than anxiety, and the novel lurches to its next key plot point: George has uncovered, among Molly’s effects, compromising photos of Garmony in drag.  He sells them to Vernon’s newspaper and Clive and Vernon argue bitterly over the morality of publishing them.

Vernon decides to print them, and is absorbed in the roll-up to publication while Clive works on his symphony, commissioned by the government to celebrate the coming millennium.  The bitter words exchanged have festered to some degree in both men, and their misunderstandings escalate after Garmony out-maneuvers Vernon by having his wife make the photos public herself.

All of this is good stuff.  Both Clive and Vernon are realistically rendered, each with a some degree of sympathy.  And while this is not a comic novel per se, there is a great deal of humor in the depiction of each man.  We also get an idea of the inner workings of Clive as an artist.  Here he is thinking while taking a train across London:

In his corner of West London, and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for Clive to think of civilization as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine, and the like.  But now it appeared that this was what it really was – square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic.  It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after.  No one would have wished it this way, but no had been asked.  Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it.  To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare of Milton, had ever existed?

What happens to McEwan’s book then is quite tragic – the final chapter seems to flee from the main body of his story and turn into some kind of grotesque shaggy dog story.    Let me make this clear – the closing chapter of Amsterdam seems to belong to another book; it comes almost completely from left field, as if McEwan suddenly remembered he had been writing a comic novel, and decided to close it off with an unfunny joke.

With his conclusion, McEwan successfully breaks the covenant between writer and reader by effectively defacing and erasing all that has come before.  What is doubly confusing to your correspondent is that McEwan seems to want to write a straight novel while playing some cheap kind of post modernist game.  That Amsterdam won the Booker Prize is just one unpalatable aspect of the book among many.