Readers Place

1. How do you feel when you read the quote on the film poster for Enduring Love: “even better than the book”. Depressed, indulgent, or cross?

Actually, rather surprised, as was the film’s director, Roger Michell. Use of such a remark was not really in the spirit of the enterprise. The company responsible, Pathe, has apologized, and promised to pull the quotation from future advertising.

What inspired you to write Enduring Love?

Many things, many different strands. An interest in science, especially the biological sciences – and the manner in which they have begun to encroach on what we tend to think of as the novelist’s territory; a sense that rationality gets a ‘bad press’ in literature, romantically associated with cold abstraction, heartlessness; an enduring interest in the random, the chance encounter, how it can transform a life; a wish to write a fast-moving opening; an interest in de Clerambault’s Syndrome which I read about in a newspaper; a desire to write a kind of companion piece to Black Dogs.

2. During the plotting of Enduring Love, did you ever consider resolving things with confirmation of Joe’s madness as opposed to Parry’s?

I don’t consider Joe mad. Frantic, certainly, as anyone in his situation would be. Once he discovers through research just how dangerous Parry might become, he finds that no one, (not Clarissa, or the police, or even, I hope, the reader), believes him. But as it turns out, he’s right…

3. In the film the character of Clarissa is called Clare, is there a reason why her name is different in the film to the book?

I’ve no idea, and I forgot to ask.

4. Would it be fair to say that your project in the novel is more a sympathetic critique of pure reason, rather than an austere dismissal of newageyness?

Yes. Joe tries, and succeeds in reasoning his way out of a nightmare. And there are many situations in life, including humanly close ones, in which it does no harm, and even a lot of good, to try and think rationally, or at least, reasonably. Justice, for example is an attempt to apply logical consistency to human affairs. There’s a warmth to rationality that is underrated. It was an early generation of 19C Romantic writers who pinned this coldness tag on science, and it’s lived on, unquestioned. ‘Frankenstein’ has a lot to answer for. By extension, it’s not always accurate to put ‘intuition’ on the side of kindness and life and love. Some intuitive thinking can be rank, self-serving, plain wrong…

5. What came first, the balloon or the syndrome?

The syndrome. I began writing the novel knowing that I had not yet devised the right opening. I was looking for something fast. I was about a third the way through when I heard of a ballooning accident in Germany, and I saw how I could adapt it to my own ends.

6. The beginning passage of enduring love is incredibly powerful, in fact you are famous for starting your novels strongly (Child In Time, Enduring Love)… Do you ever start from the end and work backwards?

I often have a strong sense of an end, but I try not to examine it too closely until I get to it. I knew The Child in Time would end with a birth, but I was not clear about the immediate circumstances. I knew that in Black Dogs I would finally unwrap the crucial confrontation with the dogs, after all the meanings of that moment had been teased out. I knew that Atonement would end with a staging of the play that Briony had written and abandoned. I sense these endings, but I don’t write them until I’ve written everything else. In that sense, I don’t work backwards.

7. Who let go of the rope first?

No one there could ever know. And I never sent my omniscience into the folds of that question. In short, I don’t know.

8. Does the fact that we only learn of Joe and Clarissa’s reconciliation and adoption of a child in the psychiatric notes in the appendix mean that it is Ultimately Joe’s world view rather than Clarissa’s we are to find sympathy with?

Yes; earlier answers make this clear, I hope. Joe, not Clarissa was right about Parry. But finally, it hardly matters who is right. This couple have to make their peace. As in life, though not usually in fiction, they do not necessarily resolve all the issues between them. They see where their future lies, (accepting each other, adopting a child) and move past their disagreements.

9. Near the end of the book Joe tells a “story” but in fact gives a scientific explanation of a river to children, an explanation made real, accessible and beautiful with some very poetic language: “now imagine a muddy slide reaching all the way to the sea”. What do you privilege more, the poetry in science or the science in poetry?

Interesting question. I was trying to suggest at that point that Joe was finally reconciled to what he did best – explaining science (rather than being a scientist). There is a celebration of the world in the project of science, I suppose, that is a little like love – which has its own poetry.

10. How involved were you in the making of the film? Are you pleased with the end result and are there any plans to make adaptations of any of your other books?

I was involved, though not intimately. I gave notes on various drafts. My notes were sometimes ignored, sometimes accepted. The film is not a close account of the novel – it has a separate existence. Roger Michell is a gifted film maker, and I’m pleased with what he did. At the same time, I know that much of the novel never made it to the screen Perhaps that’s how it has to be.

At present, Christopher Hampton is writing the screenplay of Atonement for Richard Eyre to direct. We hope to start shooting next year.