Ian McEwan (post 2): Unreliability of “Enduring Love”

In yesterday’s post, I quoted McEwan as saying that in his novel, Enduring Love, he intended to mislead readers into doubting the protagonist’s claim that a man he hardly knew had a fixation on him, a rare delusional disorder called de Clérambault’s syndrome.

McEwan said he would have been happy for readers to think that the protagonist might be crazy, and that it was even possible that the other man was imaginary (an alternate personality?).

But in the end, the protagonist would be proved right, and the other man would be psychiatrically hospitalized.

McEwan said that he did not think of the beginning of the story, a key to much of what will happen, until he had written about half of the novel.

He also said that the greatest pleasure he has found in fiction-writing is that he is surprised by what happens. See yesterday’s post for the quote.

Without explanation, he said that his enjoyment in writing entails “Making something that seems to come from a mind that is better than your own.” What mind it that? His alternate personality?

If McEwan had been inspired by reading an article about de Clérambault’s syndrome, why did he write a novel in which a man has a fixation on a man? In most reported cases of de Clérambault’s syndrome, the delusion is heterosexual.

And it would have been a nice trick to fool the reader if the protagonist’s credibility problem had been unfair. But the protagonist’s actual unreliability appears to have been pervasive (1).

I plan to read Enduring Love.

1. Sean Matthews. “Seven types of unreliability.” Pages 91-106, in “Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love” [1997], Edited by Peter Childs. London, Routledge, 2007.