Enduring Love

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   主人公のジョーは、恋人のクラリッサと出かけたピクニックで、気球事故に遭遇する。その場にたまたま居た何人かの男たちが救助に駆けつけた。乗組員は無事だったが、救助にあたった男のひとりが、死んでしまう。その事件後のある夜、1本の電話がジョーのもとにかかってくる。「あなたはぼくを愛している」と。声の主ジェッド・パリーもまた、あの事件現場で救助にあたった男たちのひとりだった。彼はジョーと出会ったことを単なる偶然と片付けられずに、「神の意思」と解釈するが、それ以降、パリーのジョーへのストーキングが始まる。クラリッサは一笑に附し、警察も取り合わない。だがパリーの一方的な愛は、次第に脅迫へとエスカレートし、ついには現実の暴力となって、ジョーやクラリッサに襲いかかる。

   パリーの愛は「ド・クレランボー症候群」と名づけられる。ある人物が自分を愛していると思い込む妄想症の一種である。しかし妄想に陥るのは、彼だけではない。ジョーはクラリッサがパリーのストーキングに無関心なために、ほかに男がいるのではないかと想像し、彼女を難詰する。事件現場で死んだ男の妻は、その男がピクニックに別の女を同伴していたと思い込んでいる。

   退屈な日常では、ほんのささいなことで現実から足を踏み外すことができる。巻末に掲載されたド・クレランボー症候群の実症例を眺めて、この小説が遠いかなたの出来事ではないことに気づいたら、もうマキューアンの術中にはまっている。（文月 達）

Product Description

One windy spring day in the Chilterns Joe Rose's calm, organized lifeis shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon, Rose reflects,could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Rose, something passes between them - something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Rose's beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love ofhis wife Clarissa and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.

Amazon.com Review

Joe 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.