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Tainted love >> Ian McEwan on love and movies
It might have been a good thing for Ian McEwan that Montreal had to be dropped from his North American reading tour. There's a coincidence in his latest novel, Enduring Love, that may have sparked a bad case of de Clerambault syndrome. This is the mental illness that afflicts Jed Parry, a young man who has fallen obsessively in love with McEwan's heterosexual narrator, Joe Rose. Parry believes Rose, a happily married, successful, popular-science writer, is sending Parry secret coded love messages through his writing. Last week McEwan confirmed in a phone interview from New York that he'd never heard of Montreal's non-fictional Joe Rose (the young gay victim of a brutal homophobic gang murder in the early '90s). But this is just the kind of unrelated coincidence that an obsessive Ian McEwan fan with de Clerambault syndrome might misinterpret as a coded come on. "De Clerambault syndrome is a total monomania, a complete obsession. It can last a lifetime," McEwan explains over the phone from New York. "And a sufferer could be completely sane in all other quarters of their life. In some ways it represents a kind of distortion, an exaggerated state of what we would think of as that wonderful thing called falling in love. It is, I guess, the irrational incarnate. I was looking for something that would disturb the calm, organized life of a rational man. Also, in reading about it, I noticed that the love objects themselves get rather crazy. It's very isolating. A lot of marriages break up if one of the partners becomes the object of a de Clerambault sufferer. It puts the marriage under great stress. Almost as though the object is having an affair." Enduring Love is not the first time McEwan has put a strong relationship through a horrific endurance test. In A Child in Time (possibly being adapted into a film for Ralph Fiennes), he explored the disintegration of a marriage traumatized by a missing child. In The Comfort of Strangers (adapted by Harold Pinter a few years ago), a couple on vacation in Venice are destroyed by a seemingly chance encounter with a helpful stranger. Nor is it the first time McEwan has examined distortions of love. Many will be more familiar with the film version of The Cement Garden than with his short novel about teenage brother-and-sister incest. But to hardcore McEwan fans, distortions of love are preferable to a celluloid version of that wonderful thing, an Ian McEwan novel. No matter how good a film of his work may be, readers enamoured with McEwan's brilliance for emotional detail will cringe at characters who seem half alive without their interior consciousness. Film just won't satisfy the well-rounded voyeur who also wants to know what a character is thinking. "The novel is a form of higher gossip," says McEwan. Although a reputable screenwriter in his own right, he says he would rather adapt other people's work than his own. "Adapting your own work is faintly boring. Nothing new is revealed. And you're never quite free and brutal enough with your own writing." Though recently he seems to be on a general strike from screenwriting. "I'm currently sulking," he states after explaining how his screenplay for the sequel to The Fly, intended as a vehicle for Geena Davis, got shelved after "something happened between the studio and Geena." "Last year, after finishing Enduring Love, I might normally have looked around for a screenplay to do. But then I decided not to--for the same amount of effort I could write a short novel. And I'm really pleased I made that decision. The novel is much more lighthearted than anything I've ever done. It's about a newspaper editor who has been brought in to boost the circulation of a broad sheet in Amsterdam. It's kind of my tribute to Evelyn Waugh. It'll be out in Britain in September." Good news for enduring McEwan fans. Enduring Love by Ian McEwan, Knopf, hc, 247 pp. $32.95
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by JULIET WATERS