Enduring Love- Ian McEwan

Another thoroughly entertaining McEwan novel. Some people believe that all McEwan offers is entertainment but this novel demonstrates much more. This particular novel is famous for it's opening; a dramatic scene in a field where a hot air balloon glides perilously towards an uncertain fate, completely out of control, causing five complete strangers to run towards it in an attempt to hold it down. One of the men who attempts to prevent the balloons journey is Jed Parry, who subsequently develops an obsession with the narrator, Joe, because he believes something unspoken has passed between them in this moment of horror. One critic sums it up superbly by saying that the "first chapter acts as a drug and McEwan plays the part of dealer most effectively."


One aspect of the novel which adds to its intricacy is the element of unreliability you have with Joe as a narrator. Jed follows Joe everywhere. He stands outside his house when Joe's at home and sends him letters pulsating with crazed affection. Nevertheless, as a reader McEwan forces us to question whether or not Jed is real or merely a construct of Joe's imagination, as his girlfriend Clarissa believes. Evidence of this can found when Joe is asking Jed for his address in case he needs to talk to him, after which he tells the reader that he was "playing along" because it was a remark Jed "was bound to misinterpret." When faced with a pathological stalker, you are unlikely to "play along" with their madness. This explains why we are likely to question some of Joe's decisions.

Many of McEwan's novels seem to have an element of horror about them, and Enduring Love is no exception. The actions of Jed Parry are bone-chillingly suspenseful, which explains why one critic ended his review by saying "I'm still looking over my shoulder." Another theme of Enduring Love which is recurrent in McEwan's work is the concept of a couple collapsing under pressure: Clarissa and Joe's love is found to be anything but 'enduring' as their trust for one another unravels slowly. This relates to the novel On Chesil Beach by McEwan, when a young couple are torn apart on their honeymoon night by their inability to overcome their fear of intercourse. This is mainly because the novel is set in the pre-libertarian 60's when "conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible", as the first sentence explains.

One final aspect of Enduring Love which ultimately separates it from being solely entertaining is the influence of science on proceedings. Joe is a science journalist who struggles with his desire to be a practical scientist. However, Joe's rationality and the believe that 'truth' is merely analytic combine to produce the complexity of Joe's viewpoint, which embodies McEwan's fascination with science. One critic remarked that "rationality is a precious and precarious construct in the novel" and through this story McEwan demonstrates what can happen to a persons sense of reality when they are solely scientific, and cannot accept the idea of unproven fact (intuition, love, religion etc.)

To His Coy Mistress- Andrew Marvell

Marvell is one of the most famous metaphysical poets, whose work often uses wit and elaborate conceits to create a poem deep with meaning. A conceit is a metaphor employed by a poet, often of the metaphysical genre, to compare two things wholly unalike and invoke similarity. For example, in John Donne’s poem The Sun Rising, Donne compares the bed he’s lying in to the entire world by saying that all kings “here in one bed lay” and “this bed thy centre is”. Similarly, in To His Coy Mistress, Marvell compares the woman he’s trying to seduce to the entirety of time, saying that “two hundred (years) to adore each breast” and “thirty thousand to the rest”.

To His Coy Mistress has a clear message of 'seizing the day’ or carpe diem as it is known in Latin, and this is represented in the poems structure as well as its language. The poem is split into three stanzas; the first is mostly an admiration of female beauty with the conceit of his “vegetable love” growing “vaster than empires”, which could be interpreted as phallic imagery representing sexual desire. The second stanza sees a distinct change in tone because “time’s winged chariot” is at the narrators back, suggesting that if they do not submit to love and sexual desire before it’s too late they will be left in a marble grave where “none do there embrace.”

The final stanza is a conclusive plea for the end of his mistress’ coyness, asking her to sport while they may like “amorous birds of prey”. Therefore although the poem uses a pleasant rhyming scheme of rhyming couplets throughout, and appeals to the woman’s beauty in the opening stanza, in conclusion it’s merely a call for her relinquishment to his sexual desire. The narrator uses the idea of death and life’s brevity to entice his mistress to have sex with him which in the 17^th century when the poem was written would have led to her becoming ‘damaged goods’ and not fit to marry a gentleman.

The poem opens by declaring that if he and his mistress had all the time in the world, her coyness would be “no crime”, but the fact that it’s referred to as a crime in the first place leads me to the conclusion that the narrator is putting overwhelming pressure on his mistress to sleep with him. This is supported by Marvell’s use of imagery surrounding death to reinforce the importance of sex. Therefore the poem represents a kind of game where the man is growing more and more desperate in an attempt to make his mistress sleep with him. 

Atonement- Ian McEwan

Atonement is a fascinating novel and one which McEwan describes as his "Jane Austen novel", possibly because it narrates the trials and tribulations of the romance between two young lovers. The opening chapters of the novel are divided between the viewpoints of different occupants of the Tallis household, and unlike some of McEwan's other novels, most notably Enduring Love, the action doesn't commence immediately.

When the youngest member of the family, thirteen year old Briony Tallis, witnesses a scene of ambiguity outside her bedroom window, she imagines that the working class Robbie Turner is proposing to her older sister Cecilia. Briony comments that although Robbie is "the son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father", this match is adequate because "such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance." Here McEwan is referencing an aspect of Courtly love, which states that lovers must overcome boundaries in order to be together. This strongly links to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, because both Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy must overcome their individual pride and prejudice to accept their mutual love, further evidence of Atonement being McEwan's "Jane Austen novel."

One feature of the novel which stands out for me is the way McEwan ironically references literary tools. For example, Briony Tallis is an aspiring writer and towards the beginning of the novel McEwan writes that "a story is a form of telepathy" in which she was able to "send thoughts and feelings from her mind to the reader's." This is ironic because McEwan describes writing as a "magical process" and he is obviously biased because he is an author himself. Furthermore, later in the novel Briony sends a short story to a magazine in the hope that it will be published and the magazine responds by telling Briony that "such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement", and this is arguably a self-criticism of McEwan's first few chapters.

The narrative of the novel has many shifts, and opens with each chapter having a different narrator. However, following the conviction of Robbie Turner for a crime he didn't commit, the novel shifts to Robbie's experiences during the British evacuation of France in Second World War. This shift is particularly effective because, as the Guardian review says, McEwan "deploys his research" into "vividly realised details and encounters." Another shift ensues following Robbie's evacuation and we are plunged into the world of nurse Briony Tallis during the war, where archival imagination is highly effective once again at making the shift in time and place seem effortless and without fault.

The rape of Lola, a visiting cousin to the Tallis house, is pivotal because if it had not happened Briony wouldn't have lied and accused Robbie, and he therefore would not have been sent to prison. The rape was in fact committed by Paul Marshall, a wealthy visitor to the Tallis house. The rape is foreshadowed by McEwan, because when Marshall is attempting to get Lola to eat a chocolate bar his company has produced, McEwan writes that "he crosses and uncrossed his legs" before taking a deep breath and saying "Bite it. You've got to bite it." Lola then unwilling accepts and it is written that the chocolate "yielded to her unblemished incisors", further evidence of sexual innuendo employed by McEwan.

The novel is exceptional for many reasons, and partly because McEwan explores many different types of love. Love of family is vital because Briony's atonement is arguably never achieved and therefore Cecilia fails to forgive her sister for a mistake she made as a thirteen year old girl. Furthermore the loss of love, and the subsequent yearning for completion, is recurrent in both Robbie and Cecilia and has a profoundly emotional effect on the reader.

Shadowlands- William Nicholson

Shadowlands is a play adapted from a film in the late 20th century, and is about the deep love between the writer C.S. Lewis and an American called Joy. The extract I have taken is from the final scene, and primarily deals with the way in which Lewis, or Jack as his friends call him, copes with the death of Joy. The extract opens with a short conversation between Jack and Joy, and although it is not absolutely clear, it appears as though this is their final conversation before "her eyes close" and she dies.

In this piece of dialogue between the two lovers Jack tells Joy that she is "the truest person (he's) ever known". The idea that 'truth' is a vital aspect of love relates to Forster's novel A Room with a View. In Forster's novel, the character of Mr Emerson, who represents the voice of the author, tells the young protagonist Lucy that "we fight for more than Love or Pleasure: there is Truth. Truth counts." Similarly, in the concluding stanza of Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach, the narrator speaks directly to his companion and says "Ah, love, let us be true to one another", making the point that although the world around them "hath neither joy, nor love, nor light", truth between lovers is more important.

Another key aspect of the extract from Nicholson's play is Jack's questioning of faith. Harrington says that Jack has "faith solid as a rock" but this faith is seriously questioned following Joy's death. People often struggle with belief in God when faced with suffering and Jack is no different, asking angrily "does God care? Did he care about Joy?" Jack goes on to describe God as the vivisectionist and human beings as "rats in the cosmic laboratory" and by referring to science Nicholson is exploring the idea that science had begun to triumph over religious belief in the early 20th century, mainly following Darwinian understanding.

The extract from Shadowlands deals with the idea that love and pain go hand in hand and are ultimately inseparable. Jack says to his step-son Douglas, whose grieving the loss of his mother, that "if you want the love, you have to have the pain." This demonstrates one of the ideals of courtly love, a medieval conception dealing with love and admiration, which says that love will inevitably lead to pain. Jack closes the play by saying that "the pain, now, is part of the happiness. That's the deal", demonstrating this aspect of courtly love which is recurrent in literature. For example, Auden's poem Stop all the clocks ends with the line "and nothing now can come to any good" demonstrating the narrators pain following the death of a loved one.

This is one of the first plays I have looked at as part of my course, and although I was only given a short extract I think the play has great wealth in the topic love through the ages because it explores how grief is expressed in relation to friends and family, and how it can impact on a mans religious belief.

Stop All The Clocks- W.H. Auden

Auden’s poem follows a traditional rhyming scheme of AABB and has four stanzas with four lines in each. The poem has a generally pessimistic tone and this is because the narrator is mourning the death of a loved one. The opening line “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” proposes unrealistic actions which imply the narrator has been heavily struck by grief, and would prefer that the world stopped altogether. Furthermore, the reference to time may be a comment on the brevity of life and how the clocks have stopped for the deceased.

The first stage of grief is often denial and this is represented in the opening stanza by the narrator’s unrealistic propositions. The second stanza opens with the lines “Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead/ Scribbling on the sky the message He is dead.” The use of the word ‘moaning’ to describe the noise made by the planes is effective because it’s similar to the word ‘mourning’ and represents the aspect of death in the poem. The image of a plane writing the message ‘He is dead’ in the sky suggests that the person who has died was well known, and this is reinforced by the idea of putting “crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves.” However, planes are unlikely to share this message and public doves are unlikely to wear crepe bows making these more unrealistic propositions and further evidence of the narrator’s denial.

With the third stanza comes an obvious shift in tone. An intimate relationship is implied by the fact that “He was my North, my South, my East and West/ My working week and my Sunday rest”. The reader learns that a man has died, however the relationship is never made explicit. The poem could be a man mourning a man, a woman mourning a man or even a man/woman mourning someone that they didn’t know personally but who had a powerful influence on their life (politician, celebrity etc.) Although the narrator is left partially ambiguous, the final line of the third stanza, “I thought that love would last forever”, suggests naivety, and reinforces the narrator’s disillusioned interpretation of time.

The narrator becomes angry in the final stanza, and Auden uses hyperbolic metaphor’s such as “Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun” to represent the void left by the lovers death. The final line is extremely pessimistic: “nothing now can ever come to any good”. This is further evidence of the narrator’s depressive state and concludes the poem in the same melancholy tone that has persisted throughout. Auden’s narrator is hyperbolic, disillusioned and unrealistic, and this is arguably a comment on the power of love to bypass reason and reality, in this case unfortunately for the worse. 

The End of an Affair- Graham Greene

The End of an Affair is a semi-autobiographical novel, written from the perspective of an up and coming novelist, and set with the back drop of World War II. The protagonist Maurice Bendrix starts an affair with his friend’s wife Sarah. Sarah’s husband is a civil servant whose impotence and general dullness leads her towards other men, but Maurice struggles to cope when she cuts off their affair without an explanation.

This is the last in a series of novels written by Greene which focus on Catholicism and religious belief. Through Greene’s protagonist many questions are raised of religion, such as whether belief in God can lead to a sense of loneliness and whether or not it injects false hope into people. Therefore it’s possible that Greene wrote these novels in an attempt to propose and make sense of these big questions himself. The character of Sarah is loosely based on a lover Greene once had, further demonstrating the autobiographical nature of the novel.

A bomb strikes outside Maurice’s house and Sarah find him limp underneath the dislodged door. Believing him dead she prays that if God brings him back she will leave Maurice and repent her adulterous sins. Maurice was merely unconsciousness and when he rises from the ‘dead’ Sarah slowly but surely starts believing in God.

One book review describes the novel as a “three-way collision between love of self, love of another and love of God.” Maurice becomes fixated in trying to find out if Sarah left him for another man and who this other man may be, before discovering that God’s presence had replaced him in Sarah’s heart. This leads to a deep resentment towards the religion that has taken away his one true love: “I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and you took her away.” 

Maurice’s resentment of religion grows into undisguised hatred. However as the novel draws to a close, Maurice seems to unwillingly draw closer and closer to the conclusion that God exists, and the novel ends with him speaking directly to God and asking to be left alone forever. This suggests that he is resigned to the fact that whether he likes it or not, God has power over him.

As well as love of God, the love depicted between Maurice and Sarah is crucial to the story. Maurice says that “there was never any question of who wanted whom- we were together in desire” and although their relationship originates from lust, it develops intensely into something else. Maurice claims “even vacancy was crowded with her”, demonstrating the ‘love of another’ that I mentioned earlier. I enjoyed the novel, and would like to read The Heart of the Matter by Greene next because it also explores Catholicism and is set in West Africa. 

On Chesil Beach- Ian McEwan

On Chesil Beach is a short novel, telling the story of two young lovers whose lives are transformed on their wedding night by words not said and gestures not made. McEwan wrote the novel with the intention that it could be read over three hours and therefore be recollected in "real time", as the events take place in a brief yet significant evening. The novel is set in pre-libertarian 1962, occcasionally described as the year before sex was invented, which would explain the statement in the opening sentence that "they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible."

Edward and Florence retire to their honeymoon suite overlooking Chesil beach, part of the Dorset coastline, and immediately both become victim to convention by believing that sex on their wedding night is obligatory, despite their strong inclination against doing so. By continuously switching between the two characters McEwan effectively creates a sense of dramatic irony as the two halves of the newly wed couple believe they are alone and powerless, when in fact the feeling of unease is mutual.

In an article written in the New York Times by Jonathon Lethem, McEwan's writing style is described as "microscopic" and his vocabulary as "forensic". By using scientific language to describe McEwan's style Lethem is portraying On Chesil Beach as carefully studied, each word with it's own place and each sentence with an important meaning. This is an accurate portrayal of On Chesil Beach because it's pithy nature is what sets it apart from other loves stories I have read.

The Observer review interestingly writes that McEwan details "the chance of Florence and Edward's meeting, and the little mythologies they had established with each other to make love seem like fate." In writing this, the reviewer is suggesting that although McEwan has led the reader to believe that the love they share is a consequence of fate, love at first sight and generally meant to be, it is in fact all a creation by the characters themselves. Therefore perhaps the novel is expressing the innefficiency of believing in such ideals as fate in terms of love.

Ian McEwan is often described as a modern literary legend and this was his first book I have read. Next I am going to read perhaps his most infamous and classical love story, once described by McEwan himself as his "Jane Austen novel"; Atonement. It will be interesting comparing the writing style in both and generally looking for similarlities and differences between the texts.