ARE THE CATASTROPHES OF LIFE TRAGIC, OR ONLY HORRIBLE?

Author: By Nicholas Nesson

Date: SUNDAY, February 8, 1998

Page: G2

Section: Books

``Enduring Love,'' McEwan's latest novel, is as beautifully realized as his others, and every bit as gruesome. In some ways, this new book can be read as a kind of commentary on all his fiction: It's not only a violent novel, but also a novel about our responses to violence. It asks us to choose between competing visions of events, and, in the process, forces us to examine the way we react to both art and life when something terrible happens.

The novel opens quietly, with a man and his wife enjoying a picnic in the English countryside. They have been apart for several months -- she has been in America doing research for her thesis on John Keats, while he has been at home in London writing freelance articles about the history of science -- and they have driven straight from the airport to this quiet spot on the edge of a large meadow. The man, Joe Rose, is just about to open the bottle of wine when he hears a man's desperate shouts, and the cry of a child.

As Joe runs toward the shouting he becomes aware that four other men are also running, from four different directions, toward the center of the field, where a hot-air balloon has descended to the ground. ``We were running towards a catastrophe,'' Joe tells us. ``At the base of the balloon was a basket in which there was a boy, and by the basket, clinging to a rope, was a man in need of help'' in keeping the balloon earthbound.

Note that Joe says he is running not toward a ``tragedy,'' but toward a ``catastrophe.'' Aristotle argued that the difference between horror and tragedy is plot. Horror just happens, and we learn nothing from it; tragedy is morally instructive because we follow the story of the tragic protagonist, and can see where he goes wrong and why. But while Aristotle was making a distinction between different forms of drama, McEwan takes that formulation one step further, by applying it to life.

One of the men involved in the attempt to rescue the boy -- John Logan, a family physician from Oxford -- is braver than the rest, and he pays a terrible price for his bravery. ``The impossible idea,'' Joe later says, ``was that Logan had died for nothing.'' His death was not tragic, but simply horrible.

The vexing moral questions presented in the opening scene of ``Enduring Love'' inform the rest of the novel. After the first chapter, the story takes an unexpected turn and seems to become a kind of parable about obsession: Another of the men who struggled with the runaway balloon, a religious fanatic named Jed Parry, believes that he and Joe have been brought together by divine intervention.

As the two men stand together at the site of the accident, Jed tells Joe that they should get on their knees and pray for God's help. When Joe refuses, Jed pleads with him to take a chance: ``You might see the point of it, the strength it can give you,'' he says. ``Please, why don't you?'' ``Because,'' Joe responds, ``no one's listening. There's no one up there.''

Jed, who reads everything as a sign or portent, becomes convinced that they have been brought together so that he can bring Joe to God. He will stop at nothing to see what he believes to be God's will realized. He calls Joe the night after the accident and tells him, ``I just wanted you to know, I understand what you're feeling. I feel it too. I love you.''

One apparent reason Jed stakes out Joe's home, telephones him 30 times a day, and eventually turns violent is that he is mentally ill. But there is also a difference between the two men that can be expressed in Aristotelian terms: Jed has a tragic outlook, whereas Joe believes that life is sometimes marked by plain bad luck and unredeemed horror.

It's clear that Ian McEwan is not sympathetic to the tragic outlook; after all, he casts as its spokesman a deranged zealot. That is unfortunate, because it robs the novel of much of its effectiveness. For while the opening drama of the balloon is rendered with astonishing power, and while McEwan's prose is both lucid and poetic throughout, the bulk of ``Enduring Love'' remains unsatisfying because Jed's mind and obsessions make him an incomprehensible figure. The absolute love he professes and his reading of events are grounded only in his own narrow and extreme vision of the world.

Yet when Joe points out that his stalker is bound within ``love's prison of self-reference,'' he is also making a point with a broader human application. We all have a tendency to filter events through the narrow lens of self, especially when those events are terrible and seemingly random. We, too, tend to assign a mythic significance to every bad thing that happens, so that we can say, as Jed does, that we have been brought closer to God; or, more likely, that each grievous misfortune brings us more in touch with our emotions.

That's an awfully reductive way of facing loss, even when it's only fictional. For to the extent that we look for redemptive meaning in the horror of ``Enduring Love,'' we are just as solipsistic as the stalker who believes that the balloon accident was heaven-sent. Like him, we believe in better living through tragedy.

Perhaps that's McEwan's main point. We may be made weepy by the terrible things that happen, but we are also secretly pleased by the depth of our sorrow, since we know how much good it does us. We are smug rubber-neckers -- public mourners of the death of saints and princesses who wipe away tears with one hand while patting ourselves on the back with the other.