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Overview
Will keep readers hooked. -- starred, Publishers Weekly
The calm, organized life of Joe Rose is shattered one day when Joe takes part in a rescue effort to save a child in a runaway ballon gondola. The day ends with a tragedy that takes only seconds, but will reverberate in the lives of those present. Ian McEwan spins a tale of life intruded upon -- and discovers how an ordinary man can be driven to the brink of madness by another's delusions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780676971392 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Canada |
| Publication date: | 09/08/1998 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.17(w) x 7.96(h) x 0.68(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Oxford, EnglandDate of Birth:
June 21, 1948Place of Birth:
Aldershot, EnglandEducation:
B.A., University of Sussex, 1970; M.A., University of East Anglia, 1971Website:
http://www.ianmcewan.comRead an Excerpt
I should make something clear. There may have been a vague communality of purpose, but we were never a team. There was no chance, no time. Coincidences of time and place, a predisposition to help, had brought us together under the balloon. No one was in charge--or everyone was, and we were in a shouting match. The pilot, red-faced, bawling, and sweating, we ignored. Incompetence came off him like heat. But we were beginning to bawl our own instructions too. I know that if I had been uncontested leader, the tragedy would not have happened. Later I heard some of the others say the same thing about themselves. But there was not time, no opportunity for force of character to show. Any leader, any firm plan, would have been preferable to none. No human society, from the hunter-gatherer to the postindustrial, has come to the attention of anthropologists that did not have its leaders and the led; and no emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
It was not so difficult to bring the passenger basket down low enough for us to see inside. We had a new problem. The boy was curled up on the floor. His arms covered his face and he was gripping his hair tightly. "What's his name?" we said to the red-faced man.
"Harry."
"Harry!" we shouted. "Come on, Harry. Harry! Take my hand, Harry. Get out of there, Harry!"
But Harry curled up tighter. He flinched each time we said his name. Our words were like stones thrown down at his body. He was in paralysis of will, a state known as learned helplessness, often noted in laboratory animals subjected to unusual stress; all impulses to problem-solving disappear, all instinct for survival drains away. We pulledthe basket down to the ground and managed to keep it there, and we were just leaning in to try and lift the boy out when the pilot shouldered us aside and attempted to climb in. He said later that he told us what he was trying to do. We heard nothing for our own shouting and swearing. What he was doing seemed ridiculous, but his intentions, it turned out, were completely sensible. He wanted to deflate the balloon by pulling a cord that was tangled in the basket.
"Yer great pillock!" Lacey shouted. "Help us reach the lad out."
I heard what was coming two seconds before it reached us. It was as though an express train were traversing the treetops, hurtling toward us. An airy, whining, whooshing sound grew to full volume in half a second. At the inquest, the Met office figures for wind speeds that day were part of the evidence, and there were some gusts, it was said, of seventy miles an hour. This must have been one, but before I let it reach us, let me freeze the frame--there's a security in stillness--to describe our circle.
To my right the ground dropped away. Immediately to my left was John Logan, a family doctor from Oxford, forty-two years old, married to a historian, with two children. He was not the youngest of our group, but he was the fittest. He played tennis to county level and belonged to a mountaineering club. He had done a stint with a mountain rescue team in the western Highlands. Logan was a mild, reticent man, apparently, otherwise he might have been able to force himself usefully on us as a leader. To his left was Joseph Lacey, sixty-three, farm laborer, odd-job man, captain of his local bowls team. He lived with his wife in Watlington, a small town at the foot of the escarpment. On his left was his mate, Toby Greene, fifty-eight, also a farm laborer, unmarried, living with his mother at Russell's Water. Both men worked for the Stonor estate. Greene was the one with the smoker's cough. Next around the circle, trying to get into the basket, was the pilot, James Gadd, fifty-five, an executive in a small advertising
company who lived in Reading with his wife and one of their grownup children, who was mentally handicapped. At the inquest, Gadd was found to have breached half a dozen basic safety procedures, which the coroner listed tonelessly. Gadd's ballooning license was withdrawn. The boy in the basket was Harry Gadd, his grandson, ten years old, from Camberwell, London. Facing me, with the ground sloping away to his left, was Jed Parry. He was twenty-eight, unemployed, living on an inheritance in Hampstead.
This was the crew. As far as we were concerned, the pilot had abdicated his authority. We were breathless, excited, determined on our separate plans, while the boy was beyond participating in his own survival. He lay in a heap, blocking out the world with his forearms. Lacey, Greene, and I were attempting to fish him out, and now Gadd was climbing over the top of us. Logan and Parry were calling out their own suggestions. Gadd had placed one foot by his grandson's head and Greene was cussing him when it happened. A mighty fist socked the balloon in two rapid blows, one-two, the second more vicious than the first. And the first was vicious. It jerked Gadd right out of the basket onto the ground, and it lifted the balloon five feet or so, straight into the air. Gadd's considerable weight was removed from the equation. The rope ran through my grip, scorching my palms, but I managed to keep hold, with two feet of line spare. The others kept hold too. The basket was right above our heads now, and we stood with arm
s upraised like Sunday bell ringers. Into our amazed silence, before the shouting could resume, the second punch came and knocked the balloon up and westward. Suddenly we were treading the air with all our weight in the grip of our fists.
Those one or two ungrounded seconds occupy as much space in memory as might a long journey up an uncharted river. My first impulse was to hang on in order to keep the balloon weighted down. The child was incapable, and was about to be borne away. Two miles to the west were high-voltage power lines. A child alone and needing help. It was my duty to hang on, and I thought we would all do the same.
Almost simultaneous with the desire to stay on the rope and save the boy, barely a neuronal pulse later, came other thoughts, in which fear and instant calculations of logarithmic complexity were fused. We were rising, and the ground was dropping away as the balloon was pushed westward. I knew I had to get my legs and feet locked around the rope. But the end of the line barely reached below my waist, and my grip was slipping. My legs flailed in the empty air. Every fraction of a second that passed increased the drop, and the point must come when to let go would be impossible or fatal. And compared with me, Harry was safe, curled up in the basket. The balloon might well come down safely at the bottom of the hill. And perhaps my impulse to hang on was nothing more than a continuation of what I had been attempting moments before, simply a failure to adjust quickly.
And again, less than one adrenally incensed heartbeat later, another variable was added to the equation: someone let go, and the balloon and its hangers-on lurched upward another several feet.
I didn't know, nor have I ever discovered, who let go first. I'm not prepared to accept that it was me. But everyone claims not to have been first. What is certain is that if we had not broken ranks, our collective weight would have brought the balloon to earth a quarter of the way down the slope as the gust subsided a few seconds later. But as I've said, there was no team, there was no plan, no agreement to be broken. No failure. So can we accept that it was right, every man for himself? Were we all happy afterward that this was a reasonable course? We never had that comfort, for there was a deeper covenant, ancient and automatic, written in our nature. Cooperation--the basis of our earliest hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for language, the glue of our social cohesion. Our misery in the aftermath was proof that we knew we had failed ourselves. But letting go was in our nature too. Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict: what to give to the others a
nd what to keep for yourself. Treading that line, keeping the others in check and being kept in check by them, is what we call morality. Hanging a few feet above the Chilterns escarpment, our crew enacted morality's ancient, irresolvable dilemma: us, or me.
Someone said me, and then there was nothing to be gained by saying us. Mostly, we are good when it makes sense. A good society is one that makes sense of being good. Suddenly, hanging there below the basket, we were a bad society, we were disintegrating. Suddenly the sensible choice was to look out for yourself. The child was not my child, and I was not going to die for it. The moment I glimpsed a body falling away--but whose?--and I felt the balloon lurch upward, the matter was settled; altruism had no place. Being good made no sense. I let go and fell, I reckon, about twelve feet. I landed heavily on my side; I got away with a bruised thigh. Around me--before or after, I'm not so sure--bodies were thumping to the ground. Jed Parry was unhurt. Toby Greene broke his ankle. Joseph Lacey, the oldest, who had done his National Service with a paratroop regiment, did no more than wind himself.
By the time I got to my feet, the balloon was fifty yards away and one man was still dangling by his rope. In John Logan, husband, father, doctor, and mountain rescue worker, the flame of altruism must have burned a little stronger. It didn't need much. When four of us let go, the balloon, with six hundred pounds shed, must have surged upward. A delay of one second would have been enough to close his options. When I stood up and saw him, he was a hundred feet up and rising, just where the ground itself was falling. He wasn't struggling, he wasn't kicking or trying to claw his way up. He hung perfectly still along the line of the rope, all his energies concentrated in his weakening grip. He was already a tiny figure, almost black against the sky. There was no sight of the boy. The balloon and its basket lifted away and westward, and the smaller Logan became, the more terrible it was, so terrible it was funny, it was a stunt, a joke, a cartoon, and a frightened laugh heaved out of my chest. For this was prepost
erous, the kind of thing that happened to Bugs Bunny or Tom or Jerry, and for an instant I thought it wasn't true, and that only I could see right through the joke, and that my utter disbelief would set reality straight and see Dr. Logan safely to the ground.
I don't know whether the others were standing or sprawling. Toby Greene was probably doubled up over his ankle. But I do remember the silence into which I laughed. No exclamations, no shouted instructions as before. Mute helplessness. He was two hundred yards away now, and perhaps three hundred feet above the ground. Our silence was a kind of acceptance, a death warrant. Or it was horrified shame, because the wind had dropped, and barely stirred against our backs. He had been on the rope so long that I began to think he might stay there until the balloon drifted down or the boy came to his senses and found the valve that released the gas, or until some beam, or god, or some other impossible cartoon thing, came and gathered him up. Even as I had that hope, we saw him slip down right to the end of the rope. And still he hung there. For two seconds, three, four. And then he let go. Even then, there was a fraction of time when he barely fell, and I still thought there was a chance that a freak physical law, a fur
ious thermal, some phenomenon no more astonishing than the one we were witnessing, would intervene and bear him up. We watched him drop. You could see the acceleration. No forgiveness, no special dispensation for flesh, or bravery, or kindness. Only ruthless gravity. And from somewhere, perhaps from him, perhaps from some indifferent crow, a thin squawk cut through the stilled air. He fell as he had hung, a stiff little black stick. I've never seen such a terrible thing as that falling man.
What People are Saying About This
"A remarkable novel, haunting and original and written in prose that anyone who writes can only envy."
—Washington Post
"Impeccably written—[McEwan] is the quietest and most lucid of stylists, with never a word wasted or fumbled."
—New York Review of Books
"A timeless tale about the way fate and faith shape our relationships—part existential fable about the human desire to control fate, [Enduring Love] is also, most affectingly, a story about the strength and fragility of married love."
—Glamour
"Eerie, slow-paced suspense worth its weight in caffeine for keeping you up all night."
—Entertainment Weekly
"[A] beautifully realized—novel about our responses to violence. It asks us to choose between competing visions of events, and, in the process, forces us to examine the way we react to both art and life when something terrible happens."
—Boston Globe
"McEwan's writing—is unflaggingly poised and, as usual, capable of excavating deep, painful trenches in the back corridors of the psyche and the heart."
—Miami Herald
"Cleverly imagined, beautifully executed —Mr. McEwan has few peers."
—The Wall Street Journal
Reading Group Guide
1. Questions for Discussion
Which is the enduring love the title refers to?
2. Look carefully at the first chapter and talk about the way in which it holds the promise of the whole novel.
3. The narrator says, "I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible" (page 2). Discuss this as a theme throughout the novel.
4. How does science infuse this story? Discuss the different theories described and explained and their importance to this novel.
5. The author writes of "... morality's ancient, irresolvable dilemma: us, or me" (page 15) in relation to the balloon accident. Does this apply to other situations in the novel as well?
6. Joe describes how Clarissa views the trend in science toward neo-Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and genetics as "rationalism gone berserk, " and adds that she thought "everything was being stripped down... and in the process some larger meaning was lost" (page 75). Discuss this as a theme in the novel.
7. Did you think at the beginning that Joe and Clarissa's relationship would reach the crisis point it did? Did you think that Joe and Clarissa's love would endure? At different points, what made you think so?
8. In chapter nine, the author switches from first-person to third-person point of view, where the reader is in Clarissa's head as imagined by Joe. Talk about this unusual choice. What does it add to your understanding of Joe? Of Clarissa?
9. Did you doubt Joe, as Clarissa and others did? Did the author want you to?
10. In responding to Jean Logan's theory of her husband's tryst, Joe says,"But you can't know this... it's so particular, so elaborate. It's just a hypothesis. You can't let yourself believe in it" (page 132). Discuss the irony of Joe's remembering, moments later, what he's read about de Clerambault's syndrome.
11. At the moment before Clarissa first tells him it's over between them, Joe thinks about love, about how it "generates its own reserves." About how "conflicts, like living organisms, had a natural lifespan" (page 155). Later he notes that "... sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener" (page 231). In light of what happens in this novel, in what ways is Joe right or wrong about this?
12. In both Amsterdam and Enduring Love, characters at a police station have faulty memories of events. Talk about the role of unreliable perceptions in this novel.
13. "It's like in banks. You never say money. Or in funeral parlors, no one says dead" (page 205). Though this is not a comic novel, the author uses observational humor throughout. Talk about other examples of humor in the novel.
14. The novel ends with the children and the river. What is the author saying with this choice?
15. In the appendixes, we're reminded (with Jed's letter) that "it is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology" (page 259). Is this true in your experience?
16. Why did the author choose to let us know that Joe and Clarissa reconciled (and adopted a child) with a line in a case study in the appendix?
Interviews
On Wednesday, February 25th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Ian McEwan to discuss ENDURING LOVE.
Moderator: Thank you for joining us this evening, Mr. McEwan. Where are joining us from?
Ian McEwan: From Seattle. I'm in the Alexis Hotel. I'm about to go read at Elliot Bay Books, which I think is one of my favorite independent bookstores. I think it was one of those that caught on early on to have coffee in the stores.
Matthew from Cypress Creek, FL: Hello, Mr. McEwan. Is the ballooning accident based on a real event? Thank you.
Ian McEwan: The ballooning accident actually happened in southern Germany about four years ago. A man and his grown-up son were helping to tether a huge zeppelin-type balloon in a high wind. The balloon belonged to a radio station; it was hired for publicity purposes, and both men, father and son, were lifted away from the ground and fell to their deaths. It caused something of a public argument at the time, because a TV station showed footage taken by an amateur video camera, and it was generally felt that this was intrusive and sensationalist. I didn't get the full details of the story till after I had finished the book. A friend had read about it in a paper, but I was never able to locate the clipping. It was only when I was giving a reading in London last year that a young German woman came up to me and filled me in on the details. You'll see that I've adapted the story very much to my own ends.... Those two men become five, and what drew me to the incident was the way in which it dramatizes something about our moral nature. The urge to cooperate, but not at any cost.
Manoj Nair from India: There has been a great change in the themes that you have chosen from that in your first novel, THE CEMENT GARDEN, to BLACK DOGS to ENDURING LOVE now. Can you explain how or why you chose the theme for your novel before going about the act of writing it? Or does the theme develop as you write it? And there is a general feeling that your later books could not match the promise of THE CEMENT GARDEN...
Ian McEwan: I think my works have greatly extended the ambition of THE CEMENT GARDEN. In the early days, perhaps because I didn't know a great deal about the world, I made a virtue of ignorance and concentrated my fiction into very tight and labyrinthine plots. Over the years, I've become interested in retaining many of those features, but at the same time, adding dimensions of history, adding also a world of society with all its contradictions; I also have wanted to extend my emotional range. In some ways, THE CEMENT GARDEN was for me simply a first step.Like most writers, I don't think in terms of themes. The earliest promptings of a novel can be as disparate as a certain kind of voice, an imaginary place that haunts me, a visual detail.
Dennis from Cheyenne, Wyoming: Could you tell us a little bit about how you first learned of de Clerambault's syndrome?
Ian McEwan: I read about it in connection with stalkers, a number of whom suffer from this syndrome. I became intrigued, partly because the condition seems to hold up a distorting mirror to our valued experience of falling in love. I delved into the psychiatric literature, and was both fascinated and appalled: De Clerambault's syndrome is a mental prison. The sufferer believes that a certain person has fallen in love with him (or her) and no evidence to the contrary will shift this conviction.
Liam from New Zealand: I have two questions for you: What are the initial ideas that start a story for you. For instance, do you start with theme, character, plot...? Did you worry about the possible negative reaction your family or friends might have toward you when you wrote THE CEMENT GARDEN or FIRST LOVE, LAST RITES, given their controversial subject matter?
Ian McEwan: I think I've already answered the first part of your question. As for the second, however difficult it might seem, I think it's extremely important to clear your mind of any consideration of the adverse reaction of your family. The most important thing is to be true to your material. Having said that, obviously, you don't want to make any particular person suffer. But still, if people are offended, you have to honor them with the thought that everyone has to take responsibility for their own responses. I think we spend too much time worrying about offense. The real issue is artistic value.
Christophe from Paris, France: I haven't read your novel yet (but intend to very quickly!), and here's my question: without unveiling any secret, it seems that your story is based on true events. The reader is not aware until the final section of your book. Why do you have to mix fiction and reality? Why do you think this technique is necessary to tell a story? According to you, what does it bring to literature in general? In other words Mr. McEwan, why does your inspiration have to feed from news in brief? Bienvous.
Ian McEwan: ENDURING LOVE is pure fiction in that it is not based on any particular event in my life or anyone else's, even though, as I've said, there was a balloon accident in which two men died in southern Germany. It's inevitable, and perhaps necessary, if fiction is to mirror the world in some interesting way, that writers will draw on anything they want -- real or invented. Perhaps there is a real divergence between the Anglo-American traditions on the one hand, and the continental European tradition on the other. In the former tradition, lines between fiction, journalism, and social documentary are often blurred. Perhaps the European tradition values pure invention above all.
Paul from Morris Plains, NJ: I am curious to know what types of changes you make to your book from the English version to the American version? What if any changes did you make to ENDURING LOVE?
Ian McEwan: Nearly all the changes were very minor matters of line-editing concerned with American spellings. One or two phrases that are familiar to an English ear that would seem strange to an American ear, I changed because I did not want the reader's attention snagging at that particular point. For example, in Chapter One, Clarissa says, "Keats loved Fanny so hard," the U.S. edition reads, "so much." There are no significant differences between the editions.
Marion from Marion, OH: Did you have any doubt that you wanted to include the appendices at the end of your book? Do you think it alters its effect as a novel? I think it strengthens its effectiveness, but did you ever doubt that you would include it, rather than just explain it in the novel?
Ian McEwan: No, I never had any doubts. From the beginning, I always planned to retell the novel in different terms and in a different language. In part, I wanted to relieve the reader of the burden of research in the main body of the novel; in part, I wanted to advance the story; in part, I thought it necessary for the reader to know in retrospect something about the mental condition of Jed Parry. Many readers, especially critics, have thought that the first appendix was a published authentic case history, and one critic even castigated me for sticking to the case too closely. I suppose I should feel flattered. It should be clear from the second appendix that the first is pure invention. The names Wenn and Camia are an anagram of Ian McEwan.
Erin from Babylon, NY: What did you learn about the nature of love while you were writing your book?
Ian McEwan: What I've learned about love in my 49 years is what I put in the book. Often the things we value and the things we most fear can lie side by side. Falling in love or being in love can be an obsessive and delightful state of mind. Some obsessive states of mind can parody falling in love and be very frightening.
Ginnie from Bloomington, Indiana: Hello Mr. McEwan. I admire all of your novels -- your prose is so elegant and lyrical, it's just beautiful. Do you write poetry as well?
Ian McEwan: Thanks for your kind remarks. I haven't written poetry since I was 20. I once wrote a long poem for a friend who was getting married, and it was this poem that made me realize I would never be a poet. It was full of the voices of other poets, and I never found myself in this form. But I do spend a great deal of time playing with sentences, tasting them, if you like, saying them aloud, and I suppose my love of poetry and my respect for the difficulty of doing it well comes through in that care I take with phrases and single sentences.
Terrence from Hollywood, FL: How did you get your first book published? Can you tell us the story? Just curious.... I am a big fan as well as an aspiring author myself.
Ian McEwan: I wrote short stories. I think they offer a very good testing ground for a beginning writer. Failure needn't take more than two or three weeks. You can commit yourself [to a] pastiche or imitation of the writers you admire, you can listen to and give space to all kinds of different voices. I published my earlier stories in literary magazines. I wasn't particularly concerned with book publication. I went my own way. After a year or two, publishers began to notice these stories, and offered to publish them in collected form. This worked for me. And obviously I can't guarantee that it will work for you in the same way. However, I do recommend the short story as a form and as a route to finding your first readership.
Max from Albuquerque: Halfway through the book, when we meet Mrs. Logan, it seems that everything flips over in the way we view the characters, and the story becomes tenser and richer. Did you know, when you wrote the balloon scene, why Logan held on longer than the others?
Ian McEwan: I always thought this had to be an instinctive matter, in that Logan held on because, as Joe says, the flame of altruism burned just a little longer -- enough to close his options.
Tom from Park Rapids, Minnesota: I'm curious about how this story came to be what it is. I am assuming that you knew the ballooning accident was what would set it all in motion, but what about the rest of it? Did you have any idea it would become what it is now?
Ian McEwan: Certainly the novel shaped itself to some extent during the writing. Perhaps it would help you to know the order in which it was written. First I wrote the scenes where Joe goes and buys a gun. At that point, I had no idea who Joe was, or what was threatening him. Sometime later, I wrote the scene in which Jed Parry attempts to kill Joe in a restaurant. At that point, I discovered who Jed Parry was and who Joe was. Next I wrote the conversation between Clarissa and Joe about John Keats. By the end of it, I had a sense of who Clarissa was. It was at this point that I wrote the first chapter. By then, about a year had passed. I had done a great deal of reading and research and my task was then to build the bridge of the novel to connect with the restaurant scene. Technically, the ballooning accident offered a high-temperature moment for Joe and Jed to meet and for Jed's obsession to be triggered.
Roosevelt from Boise, ID: Are you working on a novel right now? Can you tell us a little bit what it's about?
Ian McEwan: I've recently completed a novel called AMSTERDAM. It's subtitled: A COMITRAGEDY. I'd say its tone was generally more comic than tragic. It's about two old friends. One is an editor of a national newspaper, the other is an eminent composer. It's the story of how they each make a disastrous moral judgment and become the agents of each other's undoing. It will be out in Britain in September, and in the States, I hope, early next year.
Irena from Iowa City, Iowa: In this book and in other previous books of yours that I have read, I have noticed a thread of psychological obsessiveness that reappears. Is this something you find you can't stay away from when you are writing? What draws you to write about it? Thanks.
Ian McEwan: Perhaps I do find writing itself an obsessive act, and therefore its obsessive states of mind are right to the fore. I am interested in people in the grip of an idea or a desire. I'm interested, too, in what space this leaves for free will.
Moderator: Thank you so much for joining us, Mr. McEwan. Do you have any closing comments?
Ian McEwan: I've really enjoyed traveling around the U.S. and finding that perhaps because of the information revolution, the passion for reading is enduring. Thank you all. -- Ian McEwan.