Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
Currently enjoying this novel - it's a literary tale of a stalker and the havoc he wreaks in the life of his prey. I enjoyed the movie too, although I know it was largely panned.
Editorial ReviewsAmazon.comJoe Rose has planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States. To complete the picture, there's even a "helium balloon drifting dreamily across the wooded valley." But as Joe and Clarissa watch the balloon touch down, their idyll comes to an abrupt end. The pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope, while the only passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump down. As the wind whips into action, Joe and four other men rush to secure the basket. Mother Nature, however, isn't feeling very maternal. "A mighty fist socked the balloon in two rapid blows, one-two, the second more vicious than the first," and at once the rescuers are airborne. Joe manages to drop to the ground, as do most of his companions, but one man is lifted sky-high, only to fall to his death.
In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. (In one of the novel's many ironies, the balloon eventually lands safely, the boy unscathed.) But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.
Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Thoughts on a Suicide- In Loving Memory of David Toolan 15/10/73-22/11/05
The first thought that struck me at the funeral parlour was that there were so many flies buzzing around the entrance doors. I found this quite unseemly. Someone mentioned that there are racing tracks nearby or at least some kind of fertilizer plant, hence the influx of insects. Apart from irritating me though, the fly situation took my mind off the choking grief that was starting to take over and threaten to panic me into doing something socially unacceptable. Like cry out or run screaming through the streets.
It was macabre for me, worse maybe, that these had been some of the streets of my childhood.
Our childhood. I had sat in the car from the airport with Kate and watched familiar but past-life scenery flash by me. I should have been coming to this place for a celebration. Your birthday, maybe. Not for this.
Kate and I were very early. The funeral attendants milled about, looking more like security guards than anything else. Down the long hall, I could see the coffin, decked with flowers, trinkets, CD’s, a police badge and other memories from this life that people had wanted to send you home with.
The sight of the coffin flawed me. How could you fit in there, I wondered? You were never a tall boy, but you were so large a personality, so exuberant. How could this humble wooden box house someone so mega, so grand? Through burning tears that I willed away, I imagined that really you were not there at all. That soon you would walk in behind me and make some witty but nasty little comment about the poor stiff in the box and we would chuckle wickedly, holding onto eachother for support.
The last time I saw you alive you had just finished competing in some judo championships. You were looking leaner and fitter than I had ever known you. Your complexion was as clear as it had ever been and your repartee fast and furious. We had ordered good Italian food, copious amounts of alcohol as was our want, and laughed uproariously, probably at other people’s expense for the most part.
At the end of the night we had held onto eachpther with that familiar loving embrace and I watched you smiling, perched in the back of a cab, as you were whisked away into the nightscape through Fortitude Valley. If I had known it was the last time I would see you alive I still don’t think I would have said anything more poignant than what I did – ‘I love you’.
There were so many people at the funeral. Almost 80 work colleagues and lots of friends. Your family, your mother crying without end at the front of the room. I was unable to contain myself when the curtains fell and a large photograph of you was revealed.
I had been waiting for you in a restaurant in Sydney the night you had that photo shoot done. You had swept into the room after the session, a-glimmer with bronze paint and your favourite cream polar neck on, and regaled us with tales of the photographer, and the poses. It wasn’t just me who had liked the final result. The photo studio had featured you in their window for over a month so that every morning on my way to work, as the bus shuttled down Oxford Street, I could see you grinning from a billboard. It was one of the photos to feature predominantly at an exhibition at Sexpo, too – how that had made us chuckle! To see that photo, years later, adorning your coffin, it was all I could do not to heave into my handbag.
The eyes still twinkling at me. The smile cheeky and elfin. The hair so giner-golden. Such a wonderful shot and taken at such a happy time in your life. Although after what has happened and the way your life ended, I guess I ask myself if there was ever a truly happy time for you? Did I catch glimpses of the real you over the years and choose to ignore what I saw? Was it all dressed up as something else, to mask the horrible truth?
I would like very much to know what the truth of the matter is. I can’t ask you. I fear I will never get to the bottom of it. I am left with anecdotes and stories from others who knew you, people offering advice, counselors surmising as to why you did what you did, people telling me how you were in the final days. It’s not enough. I know it will never satisfy me as to why it all became so terrible or what triggered the violence, the hopelessness that was the end.
And it wasn’t a coward’s death. I think for me, this makes it all the more unbearable. If you were so desperate to leave this plane, then why didn’t you just pop some pills and down a bottle of your choice and be at peace? It was like you were trying to punish yourself one last time, for whatever transgressions you felt you were guilty of.
And yet– I won’t say standing because I could barely support my own weight- at the funeral; I realized that in so many ways you had surrounded yourself with people who didn’t really know you. People who either couldn’t be bothered to get to know what lay at the heart of you, or people who were too shallow to grasp the essence of you. They were all sad of course and a small few, deeply. Most of the congregation, however, offended me by their off-the-cuff remarks, their blasé attitude to a life lost. My friend. A shining star.
One friend of yours in particular appalled me. He was supposed to have been this amazingly close and supportive feature of your life over the last few years. I met him for the first time at the wake and hated his guts. He was joking about how he still owed you money! He was making banal quips about times you had shared. In my opinion, they seemed mostly meaningless epithets.
Is that, however, an unfair observation of others expressions of grief? Was I so caught up with my own pain, that I expected everyone to respond as I did? If people weren’t going to miss you as much as me or in the same way as me, had I simply deemed them to be not worthy of you? Perhaps, although deep down I will forever negate this.
I wonder, too, what I must have looked like to others? How my grief may have been seen to express itself. Surreally, I could see myself, just as a dumb mute, wandering silently and ceaselessly between rooms at the funeral parlour, speaking with few, standing nervously in corners. Watching Kate, immersed in her grief and yet managing to operate on some robotic mode, moving between the family members, the colleagues and doing a good job of holding herself together, I admired her, and felt acutely my own inability to speak properly or to react with anything more than a nod or one-word responses.
At the commencement of the service, a CD was played and Alex Lloyd’s “Amazing” piped through the room. It was a wonderful choice and a song I have always liked. Now that it has become your swan-song, I will never be able to listen to it again.
To tear more emotional strips off those of us who were feeling on the verge of entirely losing it, scenes from your life were flashed upon a large screen. Baby pictures, toddler shots, boyhood pictures and many taken by me or others we had known, in various places I have lived over the years. The images were there for all to see but they felt to me as if they were capable of transgressing the general message and speaking privately to me about your life and the times we had shared.
It was during the start of this sequence that I lost control of my emotions and called out. It sounded more like a whimper than a scream and I scared myself. I clasped my hands quickly to my mouth, for fear the grief would pour unstoppably.
For the first time in my life I felt fearful of my own reactions and emotions. I didn’t trust myself to behave accordingly. I couldn’t envisage being able to see out the rest of the service at some points. I imagined that soon, two kindly attendants would do their professional duty and usher me out.
Listening to the story of your life – hearing some things I had never known – about your childhood, your teen years, etc; I suddenly wondered why any of us who really felt intense pain, should try and quell the emotion? Why do we feel a need at funerals and in other social settings where mourners are gathered, to stifle our grief behind handkerchiefs or sob into our partner’s shoulders? Why had my own mini outburst, freaked me out so much and caused others to stare at me momentarily as if my reaction was entirely out of place? What I really wanted to do, and I am sure it would have been more befitting than the rigid way in which I sat in the pew, was to howl in pain.
Why when the service was over and we were all gathered around hot urns of tea and silly sandwiches, did we feel the collective need for restraint? Yours was a glorious life, you were someone who gave so much and laughed so hard. How could it possibly be the case that your passing, the end of you on this planet, was marked by hushed tones and sniffling, as people held half-eaten finger food and avoided eye contact?
I forced myself to join the gathering queue to speak with your father. No matter what part he may have played in the way things panned out, I knew that at the bottom of you, you must have loved him and I had watched you seek his approval for years. Maybe, like me, you never completely grew beyond little child lost to shake off the limitations that are and were, our parents’ failings.
I think I must have spoken to your father as much for you as for him. My words may not have registered at the time but later he may think about it and maybe, draw some comfort from the fact that one of your closest friends did not turn their backs on him entirely, in his grief.
Some days I regret that decision. Some days I wake and wonder if you were watching and will eternally blame me for not grabbing the man by the scruff of the neck and shouting obscenities at him at his son’s funeral. If that be the case, then forgive me and know that I will not forgive myself.
On the cream polar neck that you loved so much – you were wearing that jumper the day you and I became real friends. We had been starting to slide into a firm friendship over a long time but that day, leaning into the car and making arrangements to see me later, I knew we had become true friends. Friends of true grit. I don’t know exactly what it was you said, perhaps more the way you said it or how you looked at me at the time, that made me realize what had happened. Little did I know what close friends we would become. How unshakablely strong the bond would be that we cemented that day. How much you would mean in my life.
So you see, when I rage against the other mourners, the other token payers of respect, I do have a reason. You knew as well as I did, that very few friendships ever reach the heights and depths that ours managed. So much forgiveness, so much unconditional love and acceptance on both sides. Solid as a rock. You were my friend, David.
I always knew somehow, that I would be at your funeral. I don’t know why I thought this, but I had often thought over the years that there would come a time when you would be taken from me, from the world. There would be a day when you were gone because you had simply run out of space. That I would wait and cry for you to come out and play in your empty garden.
I was out when someone telephoned with the news. I got a message saying that I must come home at once as a mutual friend had called asking to speak with me. I thought at first that something had happened to Kate and then wondered why you hadn’t phoned me yourself. Maybe you were grief struck, I thought? After all, your bond with Kate also, had been so intense and other. Maybe you had designated the phongin around to others? See? I was already thinking catastrophic thoughts about the telephone message itself. Maybe because there had been a certain urgency to the message, it gave the game away, I don’t know. I also didn’t really believe that anything had befallen Kate. Strong and logical Kate, sensible, even-headed.Please not Kate. No, it couldn’t be Katie.
Initially I refused to contemplate that it was you that something had happened to, which is silly because I had lived with this unexplainable half-expectation for years. I treated the mere idea as preposterous. I even stopped at a petrol station and like a zombie, mindlessly filled the car, as if this ordinary everyday activity would ensure normalcy and change fate.
It wasn’t until I drove the last street before my home that the panic started to grip me round the throat and make the blood pump loudly in my ears. It was like a tidal wave was in the distance about to wipe me out and I was foolishly thinking I could out-run it. I almost fell from the car when I got to the house and I ran the last few steps inside with heavy legs to make the phone call that would end this precious chapter of my life, forever. That would take you away once and for all.
As I listened to the words on the other end of the phone, I felt like I might completely breakdown. Certainly I fell to the floor and screamed as if I had been kicked. I could feel my breathing starting to do strange things. I kept repeating cries of disbelief over and over like some horrific mantra. I recall shaking my head vigorously and then violently as if I could cast off the news and make it go away.
And do you know, crazily, I had the thought of calling you to tell you what had happened! The insane idea came to me that I could ring you and tell you of your own death and that you would say something to make it all right. You always said I was never in my right mind. I certainly checked out of Hotel Reality that terrible afternoon. Even the world looked different – everything seemed atmospherically altered as if on some weird tilt.
And now the news has been borne, the funeral attended, the enquiries made. What is left of our friendship now? Is it over? Does a friendship or love cease to be because one party has a new address and the other doesn’t know where that is?
It will never be like it didn’t happen. It will never be the case that I don’t remember you or the things we did, the places we went to, the laughs we roared, the hijinx we performed. The pain you soothed, the trials we bore, the life-changing, all-encompassing, intesnity of our collision on earth. The mischief that was us.
And e-mails and telephone calls aside, the last thing you said, standing before me?
I love you, honey. Always.
Always.
Women Who Love to Shop
The other day I met someone who spent most of her time discussing shopping trips. She managed to start off wiht her opinion about shopping in Queensland, moved onto Sydney and Melbourne and then started on stories of international shopping trips she had undertaken.
She told me that she is planning to take her husband on a trip to Hawaii next year. As a fan of Hawaii and local Hawaiian culture, I became animated at this point and started giving her tips about places to visit - the Polynesian Cultural Centre, Pearl Harbour, The Aloha Stadium, Waimea Falls Park etc. This information fell on deaf ears as all she wanted to hear about was where she could go shopping.
Personally, I am not a fan of shopping. My style is to get in and get out as quickly as possible. I am not big on browsing - unless of course it's in bookshops and then I could stay all day - but as far as clothes, cosmetics and shoes etc are concerned -I am really not that interested. I find shopping, including trips to warehouses and all day events, not only amazingly boring, but terribly vacuous.
I would rather be in an art gallery, cinema, the beach, a park, reading, conversing over a nice meal, writing or even driving! than shopping for hours on end. I find the fluro lights, the mad gleam in people's eyes when they spot a bargain and the beep beep of the cash registers, quite stressful.
For this woman to then be able to speak ad nauseum about shopping, for two hours plus, alarmed me. Apart from trips to Westfields and other mega plexes, I wondered what else she has in her life. What lies beneath the empty endless parade to the shops? I felt that really her stance was that of a "having mentality" a grasping desire to get acces to more and more material things.
