Translated material
Picnic on the Ruins of the Mind
On the eve of the release of the film “Atonement” (based on the novel of the same name) and Ian McEwan’s almost one hundred percent receipt of the second “Booker” (for the novel On Chesil Beach), Russian publishers unanimously began to republish his previous creations. Following “The Consolation of Pilgrims,” published in Rosman, a ten-year-old novel called “Unbearable Love” appeared on the shelves. This title may confuse the reader, and he will not immediately realize that under the cover hides “Picnic on the Ruins of the Mind,” which had already been published in the same Eksmo about five years ago.
In the original version, the novel is called Enduring Love, so the version with “Unbearable Love” is closer to the text, but not to the content. And let no one buy the glamorous cover with a woman in white depicted on it: McEwan’s novel is not about romantic relationships, but about the so-called Clerambault syndrome - homoerotic obsession with ideological overtones. In general, if we analyze McEwan’s favorite plot scheme, “the lives of ordinary people collapse due to the invasion of an irrational factor,” then in this context, the novel Enduring Love is the most successful and revealing.
The chamber story of Enduring Love somehow got lost in the gap between the international success of the novel “The Innocent” and the book-winning “Amsterdam”. In the late 90s, it was fashionable to predict the end of the era of positivism. Millennial sentiment fueled emotions, and the experience of 9/11 was still unknown. One could freely theorize and make the most gloomy forecasts, secretly hoping that they would remain only words on paper. It was during this period that Enduring Love was written, in which McEwan made a disappointing diagnosis of European rationalism, frightening readers with the approach of a time when the complacent Western world would howl at the invasion of religious fanatics. Like looking into the water.
Despite the front-page theme, the plot of Enduring Love is very well tailored and visually thought out. A journalist who writes popular science articles for glossy magazines about black holes, the theory of evolution and other positivist rubbish goes to the airport to meet his beloved wife. The wife is obsessed with the work of John Keats and teaches English Romanticism to students. Returning home, both witness a tragedy: a man dies after falling from the ropes of a balloon. Further - more: during this incident, a religious madman falls in love with the journalist, who pursues him, urging him to leave his family and rush with him to the Lord. The distraught lover does not react in any way to persuasion and admonitions, and interprets any most insignificant gesture of the protagonist as a sign of special affection.
Family life is falling apart, popular science theories are bursting at the seams. A person who just yesterday was confident in himself and in the prospects for the exploration of Mars, loses all the threads of controlling the situation. The bookish romanticism of the wife, who palms off intuition and sensations instead of a rational way out of the situation, is annoying. The familiar world is going to hell, and no one can urgently invent an antidote to madness. The rationalist hero tries to protect himself from uninvited invasion in the most predictable way: he pretends that no abnormality exists and continues to live according to the laws of Newton and Archimedes. But this ostrich method only makes the situation worse: a fanatical lover mutates into a raging hater.
McEwan leaves the ending open-ended, indicating a conflict that has no resolution. The naive advice of surrounding experts offering “negotiations”, “moving towards” and other peaceful ways of coexistence no longer work. The sudden crash of a hot air balloon turns into a metaphor for a global catastrophe: the old world has collapsed and free ballooning - without metal detectors and life jackets - is no longer possible.
Subsequently, in the mid-2000s, McEwan would return to the same theme in the novel “Saturday” (Rosman, 2007), where a balloon turns into a falling plane, a journalist turns into a neurosurgeon, and Clerambault’s private syndrome turns into a global terrorist threat. But in “Saturday” McEwan will cut some slack, reassuring the reader with the possibility of “resurrection,” a new “tomorrow.”
Enduring Love does not guarantee anything to anyone. Its slender geometry and external clarity of the facade hide behind itself, as in Chirico’s canvases, the true confusion of a person before the mystery of someone else’s mind, inaccessible to the logic. “I will never cease to feel gratitude and quiet pride from the fact that a child takes my hand,” McEwan ends his story with an episode where a child asks the hero a question about the properties of water, to which he receives no answer.