The Nature of Love Theme Analysis

At the heart of Enduring Love is the question of whether love is something that endures or that must be endured, and the double meaning of the novel’s title suggests that both answers are correct. This is consistent with McEwan’s larger project: asking the reader to consider love in all its complexity. Love is not merely a force for good, McEwan seems to be arguing, but a biological and neurological fact that manifests in ways both good and evil. For Joe and Clarissa, love is a potentially healing force and a prize to be reclaimed if at all possible. For Joe and Parry, however, love is a destructive delusion. Yet, in both cases, love seems to exist beyond the realm of total human control. The novel’s characters experience it but cannot quite harness it, which suggests that love’s power—good and bad—is beyond the reach of reason.

The most important love in the novel is the love shared by Joe and Clarissa. Though their love is challenged over the course of the book and appears not to escape entirely unharmed, it is nevertheless a crucial example of marital harmony: an illustration of what love can be in a best-case scenario. Early in the book, Joe recalls that Clarissa’s letters to him, in the first days of their relationship, were “passionately abstract in their exploration of the ways [their] love was different from and superior to any that had ever existed.” Joe, meanwhile, finds it miraculous that a “beautiful woman loved and wanted to be loved by a large, clumsy, balding fellow who could hardly believe his luck.” In these passages, love is portrayed as a life-altering stroke of luck. That Joe and Clarissa have stumbled upon it, and each other, is a thrilling accident that only they can fully appreciate.

Similarly, when Clarissa insists, after the ballooning accident, that she and Joe “have to help each other” by behaving in a loving way, Joe realizes that, in his rationalist insistence on talking through every moment of the tragedy, he has “been trying to deny [himself] even the touch of her hand.” Clarissa, on the other hand, has “effected a shift to the essential” by leading Joe to bed: she is helping him remember what really matters. The reader sees here that McEwan has love in mind as a potential antidote for sorrow. This is love at its most beneficial: it makes tragedy bearable by providing an alternative emotional realm into which to escape. This, for McEwan, is the kind of love that might have a chance at enduring, and whose endurance would be a purely positive phenomenon.

The novel’s other primary example of love, on the other hand, is far more sinister: the one-sided love that joins Joe and Parry. Like the love between Joe and Clarissa, however, the love that Parry feels for Joe has simply happened, without planning or resolve. Parry is as much a victim of it, arguably, as Joe is, and luck is at work in this negative love as much as in Joe and Clarissa’s positive love.

When Joe recalls the scene, in the novel’s first pages, in which he and Parry both run toward the hot-air balloon, he imagines them “rushing toward each other like lovers,” a deeply ironic statement that illustrates the novel’s ideas about love. Neither Joe nor Parry knows what he is “rushing toward”—neither can anticipate or control the force of what is about to bind them—and, as a consequence, both are subject to love as an uncontrollable force. Furthermore, after attempting to murder Joe and while holding a knife to Clarissa’s throat, Parry tells Joe, “I love you” and “it’s wrecked my life.” Clearly, this is a kind of love that inflicts hardship. Both Parry (who is destructively beholden to his emotions) and Joe (who cannot dissuade Parry from his obsession) are forced to endure this terrible love.

McEwan also stresses on several occasions the idea that love is, in a sense, biologically programmed, not only in the case of Parry’s disorder-driven affection, but in healthy human beings, as well. McEwan first establishes this idea in the novel’s early pages. As Joe is witnessing various happy reunions at London’s Heathrow Airport, he notices that “the same joy, the same uncontrollable smile” can be seen “in the faces of a Nigerian earth mama, a thin-lipped Scottish granny, and a pale, correct Japanese businessman.” For Joe, this proves “Darwin’s contention that the many expressions of emotion in humans are universal, genetically inscribed.” In other words, love is biological, rather than rational. Ironically, Joe encounters the results of this same evolutionary programming when it is his turn to greet Clarissa, despite his ability to recognize and diagnose that programming in others. “Immediately my detachment vanished,” Joe tells the reader, “and I called out her name, in tune with all the rest.” In this moment, Joe’s behavior is beyond his immediate control.

Finally, near the end of the novel, when Parry has been disarmed and led away, Joe confesses that he and Clarissa would have immediately embraced and reconciled with one another had they lived “in a world in which logic was the engine of feeling.” Reconciliation makes sense given what they have suffered together and the fact that the central point of contention between them—Is Jed Parry dangerous?—has been definitively answered. Yet the two do not immediately reconcile; “such logic would have been inhuman,” McEwan writes. Instead, their emotions and behavior are, as always, just beyond their ability to master. Even here, love cannot be commanded.

Taken together, these relationships and feelings reflect the novel’s ultimate statement about love: it has the power both to heal and to destroy, and, in either case, it is often beyond human reason or control. No other force in the book has anything like love’s impact on the characters’ motives, attitudes, and behaviors. It is, simply put, the reason Enduring Love exists.