Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

The third of my recent McEwan catch up exercise, prompted by a Waterstones promotion – who says marketing schemes don’t work?

The review I roughed out in my mind mid way through this novel is a very different beast from what I am now about to write. Let me explain.
The principal narrator of the novel, Joe Rose (there are other voices but the bulk of the novel is described from his point of view) is involved in a tragic ballooning accident in which a man dies. A fellow participant in this accident develops an obsessive delusion – that he is in love with Rose – and begins to stalk him.

There are consistent hints throughout the novel that Rose’s account of the accident is flawed. Sometimes these hints are more heavy handed than others The accident victim’s widow is torn apart at the thought that her husband was having an affair, and wouldn’t have been at the site of the accident if he was not having a clandestine meeting with his lover. She sees the accident as a judgment on his fidelity, showing off to his young mistress. We later learn he was not having an affair, and the circumstantial evidence to that effect is explained away innocently. Later in the novel a shooting in a restaurant is shown through Rose’s eyes, but the deconstruction of this incident by a police officer makes it clear that none of the witnesses saw the same thing, even down to what flavour ice cream they ate. There are many more subtle hints that perception is flawed, and that what Rose describes during and after the accident may not be the whole story – in fact, that he may be the delusional one. Even his partner struggles to believe his account of his being stalked, pointing out that the writing on the letters sent to him by his stalker, Jed Parry, looks remarkably similar to his own – one of many such strange coincidences.

I patiently waited for the reveal, the moment at which we learn what “really” happened, the extent of Rose’s self delusion. Rose is a writer on popular science, and digresses at length about the mind’s ability to deceive itself. Surely that is what is going on here – the accident didn’t happen in a way in which he is completely blameless, and has excised any possible suggestion of responsibility from his account.

But it’s not. In a classic double bluff, everything Rose tells us is true. The big reveal is that there is nothing behind the curtain. Everyone else in the novel is deluded or mistaken to some extent or another, including the police, his partner, the widow, his stalker, you name it. The police assume that an attempt on his life, in which a fellow diner is shot in error, was correctly targeted because the victim was the subject of a failed assassination attempt the previous year. Now there’s a coincidence – a contract killing misses its target and instead falls upon a diner at the next table who only months before had been the target of an earlier murder attempt.

Is this McEwan messing with us, setting up expectations only to kick them out from under our feet? I have become so used to the sudden changes of focus in McEwan’s novels, “Sweet Tooth” being a fantastically effective example of this, that to be deprived of one felt wrong.

The novel is not without merit of course. The relationship between Rose and Clarissa seemed genuine. I thought the “going to buy a gun from some hippies” scene was bizarre and out of character with the realism of previous scenes. The digressions on Romantic poetry, popular science, etc were undemanding and integrated well into the overall narrative.

Does love endure? Or is it one big delusion? The only love that lasts in this novel is the product of a psychiatric illness, a delusion that has no foundation in reality. Rose’s relationship with his partner, Clarissa, the portrait of which is one of the principal strengths of the novel, is strong and loving, but does not survive the stress of the stalking and its denouncement. But this novel isn’t an essay on love, more on big game of hide and seek between the author and the reader, with “reality” out there in plain sight all along.

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

On a walking holiday (and honeymoon) in early post-war southern France, a young idealistic woman, June Tremaine, is terrified by an encounter with two menacing attack dogs. This incident leads in turn to a spiritual experience and changes her life. Surprisingly she decides on an apparent whim to live in France (very near to the scene of the attacK), in the process effectively separating from her new husband, Bernard.

This incident is the kernel around which McEwan winds this novel. Ostensibly a memoir written by June and Bernard’s son-in law, written shortly after June’s death, this novel has a complex narrative structure in which the telling of the tale is delayed time after time. The dogs themselves carry a heavy symbolic burden that they couldn’t quite bear – we know from the early pages that however scary they may be they do not carry out their attack (or at least that June survives to go on and have a family). And in fact it is not the encounter with the dogs which is the turning point in June’s life, but the spiritual epiphany which follows. While we can be gripped and menaced by the dogs, June’s quasi-religious response is not one the reader can easily follow or identify with.

If you have been scared out of your wits, and feel that your survival is a result of divine intervention, and that you need to rethink your life choices as a result – fine – but June’s response, essentially settling in a farmhouse in rural France and having a very nice, fundamentally selfish and not particularly spiritual life for the rest of your days, doesn’t seem to be a coherent response.

The scenes in Berlin as the Wall is coming down, something that obviously has an especial resonance for McEwan, contrast strikingly with the views of France. If a point is being made here – other than the mundane “war is brutalising and nasty” I couldn’t spot it. War has ravaged and damaged France, but the area the couple visit on their walking holiday seems largely untouched, even though the spectral presence of the black dogs is a reminder of the damage the war has done. But other than providing “colour” I didn’t understand why the scenes in Berlin in which the narrator hears a different version of the story of June and Bernard’s marriage needs to have the backdrop of the fall of the Wall.

McEwan can be forgiven some misses among the many hits. This isn’t his worst novel – I still struggle to accept just how silly “Amsterdam” was and is – but others are far more coherent and interesting. I don’t normally do this but one comment from an Amazon reviewer jumped off the screen as spot on – “there is also the idea that McEwan perhaps had a deeper vision he has failed to communicate.”

The Innocent by Ian McEwan

McEwan is always strong when it comes to evoking a particular time and place, whether it be early 1960’s in “On Chesil Beach”, the Dunkirk evacuation (amongst others) in “Atonement”, or early 1970’s MI5 in “Sweet Tooth”, just to mention a few. The thing that jumps out from that short list for me is how precise this timing is – it is not a decade, or a generation which is invoked, but a very exact point in time and place. In “The Innocent” the setting is Berlin, 1955. Berlin is an occupied city, still literally shell-shocked, reconstruction is barely underway although the Wall has yet to go up – again giving us a very exact moment in time, a turning point in the way “On Chesil Beach” is timed between the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles first EP. The city is a microcosm of the Cold War and into this volatile environment Leonard Marnham, the eponymous innocent, a British telephone engineer, is dropped. Leonard is an everyman figure, innocent in many ways – sexually, politically, socially – and although he is quickly absorbed into an American plan to tap Russian telephone messages out of Berlin, he makes a terrible, indiscreet spy.

As a standard Cold War spy story in the Le Carre model, the introduction of a femme fatale, Maria, who approaches Leonard in a night club, comes on cue. Maria seduces Leonard by the book, and very soon he is under her spell. Leonard is too young to have fought in the war, but 30 year old, divorced Maria, survivor of the brutalities of the occupation of Berlin, is a wiser, more mature character who quickly becomes the senior figure in the relationship. Leonard develops a fairly sick fantasy in which he is an occupying soldier who forces himself on the helpless, vulnerable Maria. When he tries to act this out in a disturbing scene she is unsurprisingly repelled, and their relationship only survives by the intervention of Leonard’s American senior officer, Bob Glass.

The (protracted) climax of the novel comes with the return of Maria’s brutish ex-husband, Otto, a bit of a Teutonic caricature. Leonard and Maria are the only ones surprised by his return, and the denouncement is equally predictable, albeit the brutality of the episode is detailed and relentless. There then follows a scene when Leonard tries to dispose of the body (sorry, spoilers) and ends up leaving it in two suitcases in the tunnel dug to intercept the Russian telephone lines, on the Russian side of the border. When he then passes on the secret of the tunnel to the Russians, in a desperate attempt to avoid the body being found by the Americans, his fall from grace is complete, his last innocence lost.

The post-script “30 years later” chapter, when Leonard returns to Berlin just before the Wall comes down, is probably unnecessary, but does give Maria a voice, finally.

Although this is relatively early McEwan, a little derivative in its setting and characterisation, his potential as a mature novelist shines through. if you want to explore early McEwan start here rather than the award winning but badly flawed “Amsterdam”.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Read in the Jonathan Cape hardback first edition.

Any new novel by McEwan is something of an event, and this is no exception. Sweet Tooth is an ambitious novel. Set in the early 1970’s, and rich with period material, the story follows a young woman, Serena Frome, in her first few months working for MI5. Sweet Tooth is the name of the operation to which she is assigned, designed to channel MI5 funding into sympathetic writers – in effect the cultural Cold War. Serena is tasked with providing funding for a supposed pro-establishment writer, without letting him know where the money is coming from. No doubt MI5 did something very similar, although the operation is plainly ridiculous, all the more vividly so when contrasted with some of her more incidental work supporting operatives under cover within the Provisional IRA.

Serena begins a relationship with the writer, Tom Haley, she is “running”, without telling him she is a “spy”. This provokes a strong reaction from one of her colleagues. Much of the novel is spent reaching this point, filling in Serena’s early love affairs, including one with a professor at her university who in later turns out, to little surprise, was leaking information to the Russians earlier in the Cold War.

Serena reads Haley’s short stories, and we are given detailed synopses of them, including extensive quotes. This gives us the stories within stories which gives the novel a complex structure. Eventually the details of the MI5 funding come out in the press, no doubt leaked by this jealous colleague, and the relationship reaches at crisis.  In the final chapter there is a revelation which reframes the rest of the narrative in a very similar way to the disclosure at the end of Atonement, and prompts the reader to look at the novel in a completely different light. This technique could be irritating – it’s not really necessary – but the successes of the novel elsewhere outweigh this distraction.

The central character appears to be an open, slightly delusional, slightly dishonest, and not very likeable character, and prior to the final chapter revelation I (and I think most readers) thought this was simply a flawed narrator of the kind we are very familiar with in much contemporary fiction. The fact that McEwan has gone further than this doesn’t I think take us anywhere particularly new – one kind of flawed perspective in a narrator is very similar to another; it is not as if we get any closer or indeed further away from “the truth”.

A couple of other moans before I try to get to why I read this novel in little over 24 hours. First, the period detail which McEwan tries so hard at getting right. The problem with this is that his trying is just too apparent – for example telling us the price of a pint of beer in 1974 (13p). Period detail needs to be accurate and appropriate, but not flaunted. Second, the plot developments, other than the final twist, and too obvious – the Cambridge don who turns out to be a spy is just a bit of a cliche, and can be seen a mile off; like-wise the boyfriend who is not just that much into sex with his hot girlfriend, who shockingly turns out to be gay. And so on. Lastly, the Monty Hall problem, which McEwan doesn’t spend too much time on, thankfully, has already been done in Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident” and comes across as tired here.

So why did I keep reading with such interest? McEwan’s prose style is mature and well crafted – there is rarely a false note with the language (as opposed to the plot). The central character is a bit wet and dim, always a few pages behind the reader and her associates, but is generally likeable and pleasant. Some of the period and geographic detail also struck a personal chord, and many of the other writers referenced were familiar. In itself that’s not enough to account for the interest, so I think what I am going to do is let the novel settle in my mind for a bit, maybe read some reviews and reread a few chapters, and come back to it in a few weeks.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Read in 1999 Vintage edition

The important thing to remember about this novel, winner of the 1998 Booker prize, is that it is pre-Atonement, pre-On Chesil Beach, even pre-Saturday.  In other words it is not the work of a mature writer at the height of his powers – which I know is not much of an excuse, but it was the best I could come up with. In fact after a few hours of puzzlement – what the heck was he thinking of? – I think I came to understand what McEwan was trying to do here, and I was willing to forgive him.

The plot is flimsy. Molly Lane has died in her forties of an unspecified dementia, (false note struck straight away – everyone would have wanted to know what her illness was, and would have talked about it) and her past lovers assemble to mourn her. The cast includes:

·         George, her present husband, who maliciously prevented people from visiting her, and used her illness as a means of imposing the control on her he was never able to exercise when she was well.

·         Vernon, editor of a mildly left wing broadsheet, who is struggling to take it down market, running stories about conjoined twins instead of chess tournaments

·         Clive, a composer who has been commissioned to write a millennial symphony (we are in the late 1990s). Clive is revealed as a casual plagiarist;

·         Garmody, the Foreign Secretary, who has a range of unpleasant right-wing views. He is a Portillo-like figure (that is the nasty Portillo of the mid 1990’s not the avuncular figure he has become).

Clive and Vernon, long standing friends, casually make a pact to kill one another should either of them become ill in the way Molly did. George finds pictures of Garmody amongst Molly’s possessions that show him cross-dressing.  He sells them to Vernon, who uses them to boost circulation, but falls out with Clive as a result. Meanwhile Clive, on a walking break in the Lake District, sees a woman being attacked, but does not intervene because he wants to work on his composition.

Vernon is sacked, Clive can’t finish his composition, and in a rage they decide to kill one another, which they do while in Amsterdam, using the country’s relaxed laws on euthanasia. The front cover of this edition shows two gentlemen in frock coats and top hats duelling in a wood or forest, with one or two others watching on as seconds, a not so subtle reference to this mutual destruction.

Each character tells their section of the story in the first person, so we don’t see them in their full awfulness immediately – they have little or no insight into their own behaviour. For example when Clive sees the woman attacked he views the incident as little more than a domestic argument, when to the reader it is chillingly, obviously, more than that: “She made a sudden pleading whimpering sound, and Clive knew exactly what he had to do.” (88) He walks away.

McEwan assembles a cast of grotesques, and hurries to dole out suitable outcomes to them all. The implausibility of the ending really needs no elaboration from me, and he came in for a huge amount of criticism – the worst of which was to compare it to the kind of contrivance used by Jeffrey Archer. To a point this is justified – the ending is ridiculous and unbelievable. But I have a theory as to what McEwan was aiming for. It is a mistake to read this as social realism, a psychological study, or a thriller. This was intended as social satire, however clumsily it is executed. In fact the novel I am most strongly reminded of is Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved Ones, which is deliciously dark, and ends, like this, with sudden death. But while Waugh carries it off, McEwan undoubtedly doesn’t. Principally this is due to simple care with the various elements of the plot. Satire is such a difficult art that a near miss – as I believe Amsterdam is – is nevertheless a profound miss. If evidence of this were needed, I think it is significant that while the characters and events of Waugh’s 1930s novel have stayed clearly with me for more than 20 years, I could remember nothing of this novel from a 1999 reading until I read the book this week. McEwan’s themes – the intrusions of the press, injunctions, euthanasia, etc – are still very relevant, so I was surprised at how dated the novel felt.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, 2007

I am going to break all my rules and say what I think this book is about, bearing in mind that I am not sure I even believe in the idea of books simply being “about” one thing.

The plot, such as it is, is quickly summarised in McEwan’s opening sentence:

“They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible”. 

We go on to find out that the couple are named Edward and Florence, are in their early twenties, and that the novel is set in summer 1962. Florence is terrified of the imminent consummation of the marriage – which never actually occurs, Edward suffering a spectacular bout of “over-excitement”. After this traumatic start the marriage, indeed the honeymoon, never recovers, and scarred by disappointment and fear they part.

When I first read this novel, shortly after the splendid Atonement, I thought it was about those moments in people’s lives where roads part, and where a word at the right time could change the course of events. The narrator in closing the book explicitly invites the reader to view it in that way. A kind word or words by one or other of the main characters could have rescued their relationship. Fear of sex combined with first night nerves probably feature in many honeymooners’ experience, but love manages to bring couples through the other side.

So why is Florence – (echoes of Florence Nightingale perhaps?) – so scared of sexual contact with her husband. She is clearly torn between her love for him, and her fear of sex – McEwan describes this as a “secret affair between disgust and joy”(page 23). Even French kissing, portentously reminiscent of intercourse itself, makes her want to gag.

The author never tells us directly what causes this fear, but “clues” are scattered throughout the text. On the opening page we are told Florence is an old hand at staying in hotels (a strange expression) “after many trips with her father”. Not with her parents note. Later, when describing Florence’s childhood, we are told (page 54) “Florence found it harder to contradict Geoffrey (her father). She could never shake off a sense of awkward obligation to him. Among the privileges of her childhood was the keen attention that might have been directed at a brother, a son. …And then the journeys: just the two of them, hiking in the Alps, Sierra Nevada and Pyrenees, and the special treats, the one-night business trips to European cities where she and Geoffrey always stayed in the grandest hotels.”

Where is her mother, very much still part of the family, when these jaunts are going on? We are not told. Why is it “Geoffrey”, not “her father”?  The omniscient narrator appears to be viewing these jaunts as unexceptional, nothing out of the ordinary, but this is clearly Florence’s flawed perspective rather than a reliable viewpoint. Her relationship with her mother on the other hand is fragile and unphysical “Violet had barely ever touched her daughter at all” (Page 55) – we are left to infer why, but the mother must have withdrawn affection from her daughter for a reason.

When the dreaded moment approaches, and Edward is about to “make his move”, Florence lies back and thinks herself elsewhere. Her mind takes her to an occasion when she

“was twelve years old, lying still like this, waiting, shivering in the narrow bunk with polished mahogany sides….her father was moving about the dim cramped cabin, undressing, like Edward now. She remembered…the clink of a belt unfastened…her only task was to keep her eyes closed and to think of a tune she liked. Or any tune. She remembered the sweet scent of almost rotten food”

It can’t be a coincidence surely that her memory of this scene is prompted by her imminent if ultimately unsuccessful “deflowering”.  McEwan has given Florence this memory for a reason. Something has traumatised her. In both scenarios she feels a passive victim of male lust. So when Edward finally gives out a wail “the sort of sound she had once hear in a comedy film when a waiter appeared to be about to drop a towering pile of soup plates” (candidate for simile of the year in my book) her revulsion, as well as the immediate visceral objection, has

“another element, far worse in its way, and quite beyond her control, summoning memories she had long ago decided were not really hers. … She was incapable of repressing her primal disgust”. (My emphasis)

Why would this incident summon memories she had decided long ago were not hers? What memories, and why were they far worse than her already strong reaction?

Finally, when they are on the beach itself, discussing her reaction, she jokes “perhaps what I really need to do I kill my mother and marry my father” (page 153). Indeed.

I think we are being invited by McEwan, without being told to do so, to consider the distinct possibility that this is a novel about how sex abuse can happen in the best of families, and how it can ruin lives. The final paragraphs telling us to think of the novel as being about turning points in our lives is misdirection.

Of course this is just one element to the book. There are many carefully drawn scenes, and the sense of time and place, that precarious moment in the country’s history “between the end of the Chatterley ban, and the Beatles’ first LP”, where memories of the war are still strong, and national service is still in force, is exquisitely drawn. The writing is confident and precise, and although only 150 pages long I believe this is McEwan at his best.

P.S. One final point, to indulge my hobby of joining the dots between books – I spotted a strong echo of Lawrence in the scene (page 46) where Edward cycles, “at reckless speed, for the brakes barely worked” which reminded me of Paul Morel’s barrelling around the lanes of Sons and Lovers on a bicycle without brakes, risking life and limb and demonstrating his manly bravado.