No redemption in objectivity

I recently started reading Enduring Love* by Ian McEwan and got through more than half of the book on a 6 hour cross-country flight a few weeks back. However, although I was gripped by the novel, I did not get back to it until this past weekend. McEwan is one of the best writers I have read -- have read Amsterdam & Comfort of Strangers before this (and also started Black Dogs but do not remember much and know I did not finish it..so I count it as unread) and hope to read Atonement next. But now, instead of a review of the books, at which I would be no good at, here are some excerpts from the book for your enjoyment.

First up is a well-written and quite insightful paragraph about memories, half-truths, perceptions and objectivity.

No one could agree on anything. We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense of data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favour and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy. We’re descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track – when it didn’t suit us we couldn’t agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes, and wars, and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature. Disinterested truth. But it couldn't save us from ourselves, the ruts were too deep. There could be no private redemption in objectivity.

A couple other random sentences from across the book that I liked..

Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.

A man who had a theory about pathological love and who had given his name to it, like a bridegroom at the altar, must surely reveal, even if unwittingly, the nature of love itself. For there to be a pathology, there had to be a lurking concept of health. De Clerambault's syndrome was a dark, distorting mirror that reflected and parodied a brighter world of lovers whose reckless abandon to their cause was sane.

And many gems in chapter 5, some of which I reproduce here..

The relentless plainsong of the divorce novitiate - the pained self-advocacy that hymns the transmutations of love into hatred or indifference. ..... To calm myself I turned to that evening clinic of referred pain, the TV news... What soothed me was the format's familiarity: the war-beat music, the smooth and urgent tones of the presenter, the easeful truth that all misery was relative, then the final opiate, the weather.

Within twenty minutes I had drifted into the desired state, the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought. It doesn't always always happen to me, and I was grateful that night. I didn't have to defend myself against the usual flotsam - the scraps of recent memory, the tokens of things not done or ghostly wrecks of sexual longing. My beach was clean.

So the meanderings of narrative had given way to an aesthetics of form; as in art, so in science.

Work had settled on me a veil of abstracted contentment...

There are times when fatigue is the great aphrodisiac, annihilating all other thoughts, granting sensuous slow motion to heavy limbs, urging generosity, acceptance, infinite abandonment. We tumbled out of our respective days like creatures shaken from a net.

And quoting Keats from one of his last known letters written almost three months before he died to an old friend, Charles Brown.

I'ts rather stately in tone and typical in throwing out, almost as parenthesis, a brilliant description of artistic creation: "the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach."

And these two excerpts are wordy but real good examples of how descriptive and evocative words can be. I do not have an eye for details and could never write like this!

I loved the pitch and roll of the fields and their scatterings of chalk and flint, and the paths that dripped across them to sink into the darkness of the beech stands, certain neglected, badly drained valleys where thick iridescent mosses covered the rotting tree trunks and where you occasionally glimpsed a muntjak blundering through the undergrowth.

and this description of a person..

It wasn't the pallor that was repellent, it was the puffy, inhuman geometry of its roundness. A near-perfect circle was centered on his button nose and encompassed the white dome of his baldness and the curve of his fattened chin. This circle was inscribed on the surface of a barely misshapen sphere. His forehead bulged, his cheeks rolled out tightly from below his little gray eyes, and the curve was picked up again in the bluish undimpled bugle between his nose and his upper lip.

I am through to about page 200 of this 248 page novel and am sure there are a few more gems to find in the last fifth of the book, not that I have transcribed all the beautiful writing here from the first 200 pages. The beauty and joy in reading an McEwan novel - based on all three I have read so far - is that the language is so beautiful (and difficult at times) but at the same time the story itself is unique and gripping. Both Amsterdam & Comfort of Strangers had very unexpected turn of events at the end, disturbing in the latter case, and I look forward eagerly to finishing this novel tonight.

* What a great title. What a great pun on the word "Enduring".