Neil Bowen on
Texts, genres and discourses in ‘Enduring Love’
What kind of a novel is ‘Enduring Love’? Clearly it’s a kind of thriller; think of the suspenseful opening, the shooting in the restaurant or the tense and bloody denouement. Its exploration of science, art and religion as ways of understanding the world, suggests a ‘novel of ideas’. It’s also a love story within which McEwan seeks to distinguish true love from its dark twin, obsession. In turn such genre-crossing qualities are indicative of another type of text; depending on one’s definition, either the modern, or postmodern, novel. And weaving through these broad genre characteristics other types of discourses appear from time to time, often exemplifying competing ways of perceiving experience.
This multi-textual nature of McEwan’s novel is evinced in the famous opening chapter. ‘Enduring Love’ begins, you will remember, with Joe’s description of the balloon accident and his consequent meeting with Jed Parry. McEwan has said of this opening that he wished to make it like ‘an addictive drug’, so ‘that once you started, you would be hooked’.
The critic, David Lodge, in his excellent book ‘The Art of Fiction’ says suspense is ‘especially associated with the adventure story, and with the hybrid of detective story and adventure known as the thriller.’ Suspense, Lodge explains, is created when questions are raised and answers delayed: ‘the questions are broadly of two kinds, having to do with casuality (e.g. whodunnit) and temporality (e.g. what happens next?)’
Key to McEwan’s generation of suspense in the novel is his use of first person retrospective narration. This perspective allows him to build up the significance of what is about to happen without telling the reader exactly what it is. Lines such as ‘the transformation was absolute’ and ‘this story and its labyrinths’ indicate something dramatic and life-changing is about to happen, without being specific about its nature. We may guess from the ominous word ‘labyrinths’ that the experience is going to be complex, that the characters may feel lost in it, even that they will have to face some sort of monster, but we cannot be certain about how or why. Similarly the line ‘knowing what I know now…’ foregrounds the retrospective point of view, and suggests that Joe may not have behaved in the same way if he’d been able to foresee the consequences of his actions.
Like other postmodernist writers, McEwan is fond of using puns (consider the novel’s title, for example) to make the reader anticipate what might happen. Hence phrases such as ‘the encounter that would unhinge us’ where the verb neatly contains both the sense of separate and drive mad, and the noun ‘entanglement’. Other nouns continue to build up suspense; ‘catastrophe’ and ‘colossus’, indicating the scale and significant of what is about to happen. Eventually, of course, we discover that the characters are running towards a balloon, but even then McEwan suggests that this serves only to ‘disguise’ the real catastrophe. The switches in perspective, such as to the point of view of the buzzard, enhance the effect of retrospective comments; both pull the reader back from the action, arresting the momentum of the narrative.