Enduring Love

English Literature AS A level Wider Reading
Enduring Love - Ian McEwan (1997) Analysis
Struggle for Identity in Modern Literature Wider Reading

A startling balloon crash makes for one of the most famous opening chapters of all time. It's riveting first few pages is the hook into an enormously complex and stimulating read which provoked questions that kept me tearing through the pages at an incredible rate of knots. It turns out, pretty much, to be a stalker-novel based around the conflicts of illusion and unreliability. These themes are all embodied, but therefore juxtaposed, in the narrator who's whole belief system is central to science - and therefore we'd believe rationality? Yet we are led to question the sanity of our own narrator - our eyes through the novel - as he makes a number of minimal, yet heartbreakingly significant mistakes. Ones we could see ourselves making so easily in retrospect. McEwan threads these points so seamlessly, so subtly through the novel that we find ourselves questioning our own judgement and realise that our world is built around ambiguity and inaccuracy. This is encompassed in many aspects of the book: Joe's unstable job as a writer, his unsettled relationship with wife Clarissa and Parry (the stalker)'s hazy yet all encompassing concept of religion

McEwan asks musing, psychological questions which made me feel clever and deep, for once. The dwindling scientific passages, which some regard as McEwan's downfall in the novel, I found interesting and inspiring - I felt like my Chemistry and Biology A-Levels might actually mean something! Lo and behold!

Scientific Reading of Enduring Love 

Enduring Love may not seem from the title to be a novel about science, but its origins are entirely based on the clash between relative fact and human nature. The main character’s hamartia comes when unexplainable, turbulent emotions, such as love, cannot be rationalised by way of scientific thought.  He explains incredibly emotional human experiences such as death as “the closing down of countless interrelated neural and bio-chemical exchanges” and a baby’s smile as simply a product of evolutionary requirement and scientific rationality. We are frequently exposed, as the reader, to Joe’s explanations of the unexplainable through scientific chaos: cosmology, formation of the Universe, quantum electrodynamics, general theory of relativity, light curvature, dinosaurs, black holes and neuroscience. These lengthy scientific passages are injected sporadically throughout the novel as part of the wider storyline of Joe’s battle with his stalker, Jed who becomes infatuated with him after they both witness a deadly balloon accident. Jed is religiously obsessed with Joe and claims God sent Joe into his life through an act of fate so they could love each other. This creates another ideological dispute in the novel – the widely argued theme of science versus religion.

As a writer by occupation, “Joe” our narrator, symbolises the crossover point between science and emotion. A writer is inherently someone who can attempt to embody and explain life and human feelings through words. But as a scientist also, Joe struggles with his occupation. His wife Clarissa is an English lecturer on poet John Keats who Joe regards as “a genius no doubt, but an obscurantist too who had thought science was robbing the world of wonder when the opposite was the case.” Writers, especially those like John Keats and his romantic contemporaries, write with the goal of shining greater light on understanding human nature; regarding intuition over reason. “Joe” attempts to challenge this reading of the world by explaining emotional human experiences by way of scientific reason. He writes “We do not arrive in this world as blank sheets, or as all-purpose learning devices. Nor are we the ‘products’ of our environment.” “We evolved like every other creature on earth”. He uses Darwin’s theory of evolution to explain processes we see to be governed by human emotion. Evolution is the theory that every living species on this earth has evolved from a few very simple life forms. These few simple life forms have changed and “adapted” over millions of years to form different species and classes of living things through natural selection. Mutations in genes cause the changes in different organisms. Some mutations are favourable meaning these organisms have better chance of survival, finding food and avoiding predation and therefore live on to reproduce. And some mutations are unfavourable meaning the organisms cannot survive the competition and die out. McEwan writes “we come into this world with limitations and capacities, all of them genetically prescribed.” He uses this to explain why emotional responses are the same in us all “The way we wear our emotions on our faces is pretty much the same in all cultures.” “[The infant smile] appears in Kung San babies of the Kalahari at the same time as it does in American children of Manhattan’s Upper West Side” and that although we may wish to believe as humans that these are emotional responses triggered by something of greater significance than chemical and genetic material built inside us, they are far less “romanticized” in the scientific meaning which we are led to believe.

Interestingly, Darwin and Keats were writing around the same time in the 1800s. Darwin’s work caused outrage in the religious outlook of the world at the time and Keats was writing in the romantic era, which took its inspiration from the animal and impulsive nature of humanity.  As centuries have passed and we have learned more and more about science, we have moved away from being a global community governed by the teachings of religion and instead we rely increasingly on scientific principles to explain the unexplainable. For example, where the origins of the Earth were once biblically believed to have been a good six day’s work for god, instead now, as “Joe” explains in Enduring Love, it has become more widely accepted that it started with the big bang. “Helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including ourselves and all our thoughts.”

Each character in the “love triangle”, Joe, Jed Parry (the stalker) and Clarissa (Joe’s wife) have different views on love, the emotion that sparks the majority of conflict in the novel and each I found equally as frustrating. Joe takes a logical approach the emotion, which often leaves him too “cold” and “detached” to understand it. Jed tries to explain it through religious obsession, but

McEwan attempts to convey in Enduring Love the conflict between the logical, and often practical way, of explaining the unexplainable through science versus the more romanticized and intuitive way of explaining the unexplainable through religion, moral code, art or literature (like Keats). Clarissa argues that in Joe’s logical outlook on life  “everything was being stripped down…and in the process some larger meaning was lost.” And although science is important in forwarding our progress on earth and helping us understand our physical selves, art and literature help us learn what it is to be human emotionally and passionately, which is what makes us unique and appreciable beings – even if there are chemical explanations for these feelings.