A romantic homecoming picnic ends abruptly for Joe Rose in Ian McEwan's new novel, Enduring Love (Cape, £15.99 in UK), when he joins a tragic rescue mission. Having watched another volunteer fall to his death, Joe becomes the object of an obsessive love. That this love is proffered by a complete stranger, an odd young man who was also involved in the failed rescue, does not make the situation any easier for Joe and his wife, a Keats scholar with problems of her own.
Ian McEwan is at his most comfortable and convincing when describing strange states of mind. Yet it is interesting that although his career began in the sinister mood of the macabre which dominated his first book, the short-story collection, First Love, Last Rites (1975), its successor In Be- tween the Sheets (1978), and his first novel, The Cement Garden, also published in 1978, and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), McEwan has shifted away from the grotesque extremes and has instead become concerned with disturbed and disturbing psychological trauma.
In The Child in Time (1987) - his best work to date - the protagonist has to live with the fact that he lost his small daughter in a supermarket. Far more powerful than his previous books, The Child in Time is deceptively understated and achieves a sense of quiet helplessness. At times, it seems as if Enduring Love is intended to create similar feeling. Yet all too often the narrative evokes no more than the exciting, pacey world of the television psycho-thriller with suitably terse dialogue. Nor does it ever develop the sombre menace of either The Inno- cent (1990) or Black Dogs (1992) - a meditative study in the power of memory.
In Joe Rose, McEwan has created a narrator whose formal, reporter-like detachment makes it difficult for the reader to engage with him or even to believe fully his account of events. Is he a scientist turned frustrated science-journalist? Or is he a bad philosopher? Although he is a scientist by training, Rose's matter-of-factness results in some very flat writing which also jars with the romantic qualities Rose attempts to bring to his relationship with Clarissa, a one-dimensional character who does not seem interested in anything at all.
The hollowness of the prose is remarkable. Rose listens to Clarissa speak about Keats and a love letter the poet had written but had never sent; Rose then reports: "I squeezed her hand and said nothing. I knew little about Keats or his poetry, but I thought it possible that in his hopeless situation he would not have wanted to write precisely because he loved her so much. Lately I'd the idea that Clarrisa's interest in these hypothetical letters had something to do with our own situation, and with her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect."
The narrator describes himself and his wife as being "seven years into a childless marriage of love". A "huge, grey balloon, the size of a house, the shape of a tear" appears. While the pilot battles the gusting winds to bring the thing under control, a young boy is seen to be in the basket. Several figures run towards the balloon, including Rose. They all try to help. "I should make something clear," says Rose the scientist, and goes on: "No one was in charge - or everyone was, and we were in a shouting match. The pilot, red-faced, bawling and sweating, we ignored. Incompetence came off him like heat." This is all excitingly described, as is the freak happening which causes the wind to hoist the basket away, high in the sky, with one man hanging on to a rope which he releases and so falls to his death.
Of far greater importance to Rose than the incident itself is his own role in it. "Like a self in a dream I was both first and third persons. I acted, and saw myself act. I had my thoughts, and I saw them drift across a screen." As he broods on the rescue attempt - "Co-operation - the basis of our earliest hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for language, the glue of our social cohesion" - the rhetorical tone sits awkwardly in the text. This unconvincingly weighty moral debate fortunately yields to the blackly comic image of the doomed rescuer clinging to the rope. "He hung perfectly still along the line of the rope, all his energies concentrated in his weakening grip. He was already a tiny figure, almost black against the sky. There was no sight of the boy. The balloon and the basket lifted away and westwards, and the smaller Logan became, the more terrible it was, so terrible it was funny, it was a stunt, a joke, a cartoon and a frightened laugh heaved out of my chest."
Central to the novel is Rose's self-absorption. It is this quality which facilitates the crazed Jed's pathetic declarations of love and salvation and the subsequent plot. While he is not a humorous writer, McEwan's keen sense of the ridiculous frequently seems set to save this novel. Rose's frantic attempts to elude his devotee brings him to the police, who do not want to get involved, and then to a slightly crooked drug-dealing buddy from the past, and on to a sad group of aged hippies. Best of all are the descriptions of the dead man, "waiting for me in the middle of the field . . . From the base of the neck there was no lateral spread. The skeletal structure had collapsed internally to produce a head on a thickened stick." One can't help wondering how much more J.G. Ballard, with his unsurpassable genius for the offbeat, would have done with the same story. At its clumsy finale, with a pair of cut-out, walk-on caricatures, it seems that McEwan, one of Britain's most celebrated contemporary writers, may well have become almost as bored as the reader.
