"Enduring Love" by Ian McEwan

Shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Novel Award.

 A science journalist gets caught up in a tragic accident and comes to believe he is being stalked by one of the others involved. This has a destabilising effect on his rationalist understanding of the world and on his relationship, leading to violence and madness.

This is a typical McEwan novel: there is an inciting incident which leads to an avalanche of consequences. It is told in the past tense with a well-educated, upper-middle-class first person narrator; this lends a certain distance so it is not, perhaps, as absorbing as it might otherwise have been. Nevertheless, it is packed full of incident and, although everything that happens seems inevitable in retrospect, it is full of surprises which I think is the mark of a great narrative. There's a lot of suspense. Scenes are carefully described so that you know something momentous is about to happen, but not exactly what. There is also the question for a large part of the book whether the stalker is real or is imagined by the narrator as a consequence of the trauma stemming from the initial accident.

All of these things make for a very educated but very exciting novel.

McEwan at the top of his form.

Selected quotes:

• "All that sincerity would permit me were the facts, and they seemed miraculous enough to me: a beautiful woman loved and wanted to be loved by a large, clumsy, balding fellow who could hardly believe his luck." (Ch 1) This seemed appropriate to me and my wife; certainly when I read it out to her she thought it very funny. Later on we have this reprised: "how did such an oversized average-looking lump like myself land the pale beauty?" (Ch 12)
• "Co-operation - the basis of our earliest hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for language, the glue of our social cohesion." (Ch 1)
• "He must be living inside a hard-on." (Ch 5)
• "He was the hero, and it was the weak who had sent him to his death. Or, we were the survivors and he was the miscalculating dolt." (Ch 6)
• "She was looking at me in a new way now and was moving through the conversation with the caution of a bomb disposal expert." (Ch 6)
• "I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, back-trackings and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs." (Ch 8)
• "Even a trashy movie can make you cry." (Ch 12)
• "Adults when I was small ... seemed a grey crew to me, too fond of sitting down, too accustomed to have nothing to look forward to." (Ch 14)
• "Too much was made in  pop psychology, and too much expected, of talking things through. Conflicts, like living organisms, had a natural lifespan. The trick was to know when to let them die. At the wrong moment, words could act like so many fibrillating jolts." (Ch 17)
• "He still wore his moustache American frontier-style with the hairs, now whitened at the ends, curling over his upper lip, almost into his mouth. Was it flinty manhood women tasted, kissing a set-up like that, or yesterday's vindaloo?" (Ch 21)
• "It's a big deal when you point a gun at someone. Basically you're giving them permission to kill you." (Ch 22)

Ian McEwan's novels:

• The Cement Garden (1978)
• The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
• The Child in Time (1987)
• The Innocent (1990)
• Black Dogs (1992)
• Enduring Love (1997)
• Amsterdam (1998)
• Atonement (2001)
• Saturday (2005)
• On Chesil Beach (2007)
• Solar (2010)
• Sweet Tooth (2012)
• The Children Act (2014)
• Nutshell (2016)
• Machines Like Me (2019)
• The Cockroach (2019) (novella)
• Lessons (2022)

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Rather appropriately, the next book I am about to read is written by an ex-physics researcher turned science journalist. I wonder if he feels the same way about his profession as McEwan's protagonist?