Enduring Love.

Ian McEwan's elegant, unsettling novels seek out the dangers that lurk, waiting to disrupt everyday lives: child snatchers, accidents, vicious animals, stalkers. These threatening motifs are connected, often implicitly, to questions of political and philosophical belief. In Enduring Love this connection is explicit: from the opening scene onward, it is clear that McEwan means to balance his usual Gothic elements with complex explorations of the ideas they represent. The novel opens in a field in the Chilterns, where five men see a balloon descend and race to help the inept pilot anchor it. Inside the passenger basket crouches a terrified young boy who may be swept away at any moment. The men grab ropes and are themselves carried off, dangling from the balloon, by a violent gust. In the agonizing seconds that follow, they must decide whether to hold on together or to save themselves by dropping, singly, to the ground. The narrator and protagonist of the novel, Joe Rose, explores the accident's connection to notions of selfless love, community, and self-preservation. The balance between dramatic scene and philosophical narrative, between exterior reality and interior struggle, is beautifully achieved; this is as stunning and promising a novel opening as I have read.

Joe is one of the men who chooses to drop to the ground, and so must face his own ordinary cowardice, but that is only the beginning of his dilemma. As the plot progresses, it appears that so, too, will the tensions between the rational and the irrational. Joe is a science writer who has abandoned the academic world for the life of the free-lance popularizer. His belief in the rational is absolute. His wife Clarissa, a Keats scholar, is more interested in the intuitive and the emotional. ("You're so rational sometimes," she tells him, "you're like a child.") This standard assigning of sex roles might be irritating were it not for the casting of Keats's long romantic shadow in the novel - and were it not for a third principal character, Jed Parry, who disrupts all notions of assigned sex roles. Parry is another of the men who drops to the ground with Joe Rose in the failed rescue attempt. At the scene of the accident, he falls instantly and pathologically in love with Joe and begins to disrupt his life: phoning, writing, stalking, and finally attacking him.

Part of Jed Parry's disturbance is religious belief, and one of the novel's early promises is the possibility that Joe's rationalism will be seriously challenged by religious faith. But Jed's religion, as Joe points out, is "dreamily vague on the specifics of doctrine.... a self-made affair, generally aligned to the culture of personal growth and fulfillment." It is also the belief of a madman, and as such Parry's challenges are hardly taken seriously, either by Joe or by the novel. Parry's affliction is identified as de Clerambault's syndrome, in which the sufferers believe that the objects of their desire return the love and send secret signals of reciprocation. Parry's religious belief, as hopelessly deluded as his erotic fixation, is a variant of the syndrome.

It's an interesting notion, this coupling of erotic and religious delusion, but because the religious aspect is expressed only in Jed Parry's melodramatic pronouncements, it can't be explored physically (or for that matter philosophically) in the same way that the idea of human love can be. One of the principal tensions of the novel, then, is eased out early, and it becomes clear that rationalism will not be tested by religious faith but by faith in human love, the possibility of "enduring love" that Joe Rose believes he and Clarissa can achieve.

Clarissa, though, is seriously disturbed by Joe's response to Parry. At first she believes Parry's only a pathetic character; later she wonders whether Joe is in fact inventing his obsessive presence. The novel moves from another interesting tension (why can't the sensitive, intelligent Clarissa understand that Joe's terror is in fact a completely rational response?) to a more predictable movement of plot (will she believe him in time to save them from Parry's violence?). Clarissa's role in the novel, though key, is not explored in nearly as much depth as Joe's or Parry's. She is sketched, believably, as Keats scholar and as a maternal figure who cannot bear children (the motif of children especially as objects of selfless love is one of the most successful), but her lack of faith in Joe is not entirely convincing. It seems more plot-driven than it does character-driven: it is necessary for the story to progress, therefore it exists.

The same complaint might be made of the last scenes of the novel, thrilling, amusing, and unsettling though they are. Joe buys a gun in a funny and depressing scene that seems to come out of another (naturalistic) novel, then sets out to rescue Clarissa. The story has begun, of course, with a bungled rescue, and one of the novel's concerns is the strange movement of narrative itself: narrative in science, narratives of grief, narratives of the imagination. It is fitting, then, that narrative might loop back on itself this way, but the story floats away as quickly as the balloon which set Joe Rose's ordeal in motion, and the current carrying it is plot. The ideas trying to anchor that plot drop one by one to the ground. Some of its most disturbing suggestions (this is not the first time McEwan has used homosexual desire as his central threat) are never fully explored. The story ends with the notion of forgiveness, but it's a partial resolution, for poor Jed Parry is locked away with his delusions, and neither narrator nor narrative is concerned with what forgiveness or peace might be offered him.

This is not to say that Enduring Love is not engaging throughout - it is more than engaging, it is clever and compelling - but rather that it is considerably lightened at the end of its journey, that its balance tips, finally, toward the pleasures of unburdened plot.

Valerie Sayers is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent novel is Brain Fever (Doubleday).