Ian Mcewan's Enduring Love in a Secular Age (Critical Essay‪)‬

"There are always antecedent causes. A beginning is an artifice, and what recommends one over another is how much sense it makes of what follows"--Joe Rose in Enduring Love [1] "[Jed Parry is] dreamily vague on the specifics of doctrine ... a self-made affair, generally aligned to the culture of personal growth and fulfillment." (1) So says Joe Rose, free-lance science writer, about Jed Parry's religion in Ian McEwan's 1997 novel Enduring Love. Although Jed Parry is hopelessly embedded in his erotic fixation with Joe Rose, the quotation aptly describes how many see the contemporary state of religious belief. The encounter between Joe's scientific rationalism and Jed's highly individualistic Christianity seems to summarize the inevitable march of secularization. The novel's conflicts between pathology and rationality, between the theories of evolutionary psychology and Romantic intuitions about truth and beauty, between linear narration and postmodern fragmentation--all show the difficulties in finding adequate and sufficient causes for "enduring love."