Date Posted:12:00:07 08/21/09 Fri Author:Food for thought Subject: Re: Lovely Enduring Love In reply to:
geoff Herbert
's message, "Lovely Enduring Love" on 18:58:18 06/14/08 Sat
You comment that Enduring Love seemed eerily unrealistic. I agree with this assessment and that of the marriage as synthetic. However, I think that your comment that these things stem from a lack of support beneath the “superb writing” is too hasty in its consideration of McEwan’s craftsmanship. You also mention that you experienced difficulty in accepting the storyline of Atonement. I think that in your reading of these two texts you overlook the possibility that McEwan’s authorial intent may have been to produce these very feelings that you write off as some failure of the plot. The plot in Enduring Love was meant to be eerily unrealistic, both to show how a seemingly normal life might be suddenly plunged into the absurd in the wake of tragedy and to cause the reader to wonder whether or not the protagonist is imagining things as part of some breakdown, as his wife suggests. Similarly, I would suggest that Atonement, as a novel mostly fictionally authored by Briony herself in some attempt to Atone for a crime which can never be put right, is meant to be slightly unbelievable. In fact, other than the obvious change in true events in the ending of Briony’s novel, there are numerous references earlier in the text if you read closely that Briony has altered small aspects of the story throughout to suit her purposes. But if you have only read the novel once this is easy to miss as it is not known on first reading that Briony is the narrator.
For this reason I urge you to re-read Atonement, at least, and consider each aspect of the plot that you find hard to accept with the acute awareness of Briony’s voice and intentions in mind. Finally, I do not mean to say that this is what McEwan really did intend in writing these novels. Perhaps you are right and I am reading too far into what really just amounts to shoddy plotlines. The dangerous thrill of analytical reading stems from this knowledge that authorial intent in any text can never be definitively surmised. But after reading and re-reading most of McEwan’s novels I believe that he is an author who writes with strong intentional control of his narratives, plotline as well as superb writing.
