Enduring Love, Lessons and McEwan’s Men
Picked up a couple McEwan’s after listening to Amit Verma raving about him in class and in each instance I was equally transfixed and disappointed. The prose moves with propulsive force — every line, every turn of phrase hauls me onwards and deeper — only for the plot to deposit me back ashore, sandy, inconvenienced. Nevertheless, much as I try I can’t quite get his protagonists out of my head. I am loathe to admit that I identify with them because one, that might reflect poorly on me; and two, because it would mean that my judgement hinges upon my familiarity with and not my evaluation of the text.
But there is something to be said about the way McEwan writes his men. To begin with McEwan’s men appear smart and capable. They are distinctly upper-middle class and said smarts and capabilities equip them to deal with the headier abstract difficulties one might encounter as members of this class. They are men of culture; well read gentlemen that index the world through the literature they read. They not only presume to understand the workings of the world but are just as aware of the limits of their knowledge: in short they know what they don’t know and they believe that, with their smarts and a little elbow grease, they sure can work it all out. All this to say, McEwan’s men are certain that they know themselves.
I am not suggesting that they are smug. Neither are they unkind nor do they under-estimate those around them. Only that every experience the world has on offer is refracted through the prism of their certainty and triangulated against their constellation of references. These men are students. They take copious notes and every errant feeling is accounted for, processed and turned into a statistic.
But as the plots in both books unravel so do these men. I don’t mean this as some terrible fall from grace. Instead the plots reveal how a belief in absolute self awareness is just a facade, an intricate latticework of grandiose theories scaffolding something real and fragile.
Both Enduring Love and Lessons are written in the first person from the point of view of these men and both begin with the narrators recounting formative incidents of their lives. The narration, in sharp staccato verse, ends in a rousing climax imbuing the event with a sense of inevitability. For all the control these men exercise, they seem to have succumbed to that one moment of fatalism. But persevere they shall and they do so by examining these incidents with scientific rigour. Their method is archeological and they believe that truth can only be revealed through a meticulous reconstruction of facts. But the incidents in question deal with death and abuse and neither an autopsy nor a court of law can account for that loss of innocence. Mere facts cannot tally life.
Interestingly, the books differ in how they address the reader. In Enduring Love McEwan pits us the readers, along with his wife Clarissa and even the the neurotic Jed against the protagonist Joe. With his back against the wall, having spent two thirds of the book under scrutiny, Joe has no choice but to act the auditor and lawyer. However, in Lessons Ronald Baines enlists us as a witness as he appraises his life, from cradle to grave, to string together a zettelkasten of the self. World events act as a scale — spatial, temporal — and the supplementary evidence helps us determine with absolute certainty why he is who he is.
Both Joe and Ronald pack their pages with proofs and it’s hard to not be swayed in their favour. Viewed from the mechanics of the plot, both men are proven right. Indeed Joe was stalked and Ronald left stranded with child. But both men are so busy staging their impassioned defence that they forget to extend any sympathy towards themselves. More importantly, having reconstructed every detail of the traumatic incident from memory they fail to grasp a fundamental truth: in Jed’s words, ‘Everything’s changed now. Please don’t put on this act.’
This is not to say that McEwan’s men are unfeeling. A bad faith reading of Enduring Love might find McEwan guilty of stereotypes: of appointing men as the sole arbiters of reason and women as champions of feeling. In fact, Joe and Ronald are aware of every change in their pulse and they say so, even if only to themselves. No, the crime here isn’t bad communication either.
McEwan’s trick is his style: that obsessive focus on vivid details, on extrapolating every experience into a metaphor, on cherry-picking literary references. That his characters are his narrators, they suffer the sin of needing to be hyper-articulate. McEwan’s men are condemned as narrators, conscripted to articulate an experience they can never feel. For feeling such a thing might require them to withhold their words and this would leave us readers with nothing but a blank page.