I have called my 2006 attempt to read more contemporary fiction, Elaine's Personal Challenge, and I have to say that the word challenging certainly describes Enduring Love by Ian McEwan which I finished at the weekend. I had had a difficult Saturday due to a family illness and was wide awake in the middle of the night at the time when your mind goes round and round and you cannot get to sleep. I had started this book earlier in the week and so, knowing that attempting to sleep was useless, made myself a cup of tea, propped myself up in bed and spent the next two hours in a state of total emotional disarray until I had finished it.
The story begins on a lovely summer day in the English countryside. Joe Rose and Clarissa are having a picnic which is dramatically interrupted by a bizarre ballooning accident in which a man is killed. During this incident Joe meets Jed Parry who immediately develops an obsessive love for Joe so powerful that it threatens his work, his marriage and, ultimately, his life.
Joe is an academic turned scientific journalist who, though having a successful career, is dissatisfied with the way his professional life has turned out. After Jed has read his published articles he sends him a letter in which he seems to have gone straight to the heart of Joe's dissatisfaction 'I mean, I knew you wrote about science and I was prepared to be baffled or bored, but I didn't know you wrote out of contempt'. His obsession leads Jed to stand for hours outside Joe and Clarissa's home, to read hidden messages in Joe's simplest actions, to bombard Joe with letters which gradually become more threatening 'I'll never desert you but never never try to pretend to yourself that I do not exist'
As Joe becomes more and more unnerved by the situation he is bewildered and angry by the realisation that Clarissa does not totally believe him and their relationship comes under increasing strain. He becomes more and more frustrated at his inability to make anybody take him seriously and believe that Jed is dangerous.
The tension gradually builds and finally culminates in a scene set in a restaurant where Joe and Clarissa are having lunch with her godfather, Professor Kale. There they sit, swapping ideas and thoughts in their own little cocoon oblivious of what is going on around them. At a table close by sits another trio, an older man, a younger man and a young girl. We do not know them, we do not know who they are and yet we begin to realise that they are there for a reason, they are going to be part of the story. I can't go into further detail without revealing what happens next, but I will say that it is mightily difficult to read this chapter without the reader's nerves twanging. Mine certainly were.
I read this book with a horrified fascination. It affected me very strongly and left me feeling quite shaken and when I finally finished reading the notes and the Appendices at the end I closed it up, leaned back on my pillow and just went Phew O My God. Not a very analytical or reasoned response, I know, but a real one. I cannot say I loved this book or even liked it, neither of those anodyne phrases come anywhere near to describing my feelings, but I can say that I was bowled over by it and by the density and sheer mastery of the language which kept me totally gripped.
While I was recovery the next morning, I was surfing other blogs and came across a post, Hair Shirt Books, on Susan Hills' blog which sums up quite perfectly how I feel about Enduring Love:
"A Hair Shirt Book is not a book one dislikes. It is a book one admires and re-reads and gains from each time - but it is always a difficult read, always challenging and often upsetting and never comforting".
I couldn't think of a more apt description. This was my first Ian McEwan, but will not be my last.
