`Enduring Love' - Or Obsession? -- A Chance Encounter Escalates Into A Disturbing Pursuit

------------------------------------------- BOOK REPORT

"Enduring Love" Ian McEwan reads from his new book, "Enduring Love," at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Elliott Bay Books, 101 S. Main St., Seattle; 206-624-6600. -------------------------------------------

There's a deceptive coolness about the fiction of Ian McEwan. His prose is severely chiseled, and his strong interest in science lends a clinical air to his narratives, but this must not distract the reader from the deep vein of feeling that runs through them. Certainly it has never been more powerful than in "Enduring Love" (Doubleday, $23.95), a novel that is at once an ingenious and formidably intelligent study of one form of mental illness and a wrenching evocation of the risks to which love can be put.

It begins with an extraordinary scene. "The best description of a reality does not need to mimic its velocity," we are told by the narrator, Joe Rose, who spins out over many pages his account of something that happened in a few horrifying moments when an idyllic countryside scene was interrupted by a freakish accident in which a "senseless" death occurred.

A balloon, with a young boy in its basket, is suddenly swept into the air by a strong wind. The boy's grandfather is joined by a few men in trying to get the balloon, but the gusts are too strong. The balloon sails away, with one man, John Logan, still clinging to a rope. At last he can no longer hold on and falls to his death. The dreadful irony is that the boy soon overcomes his terror, lets the air out of the balloon and drifts safely to earth.

As Logan lies crumpled on the ground, Joe races to him. He looks up into the eyes of another man, Jed Parry, and says something relatively innocuous. Parry responds with a strange intensity, urging Joe, an agnostic, to pray. Later, when Joe is back in his London apartment, Parry calls. "I just wanted you to know," he says, "I understand what you're feeling. I feel it too. I love you."

With that Joe is launched on an expedition into the unknown. He is "seven years into a childless marriage of love" with Clarissa Mellon, who returns his intense devotion with her own, but the stability of their union is shaken to its roots as Parry telephones at all hours, stalks Joe through the city streets, lurks outside his apartment building and stares into the windows behind which Joe and Clarissa live. Joe is nearly paralyzed:

"I possessed a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and I was looking for its word. As guilt was to the past, so, what was it that stood in the same relation to the future? Intention? No, not influence over the future. Foreboding. . . . Guilt and foreboding, bound by a line from past to future, pivoting in the present - the only moment it could be experienced. It wasn't fear exactly. Fear was too focused, it had an object. Dread was too strong. Fear of the future. Apprehension, then. Yes, there it was, approximately. It was apprehension."

The precision and clarity with which Joe reasons through that passage reflect his life's work; he is a scientist by training who fell somewhat accidentally into writing about science for the lay reader and has made a highly successful career out of it. Clarissa by contrast is a scholar specializing in the work of John Keats. "A genius no doubt," Joe says of the poet, "but an obscurantist too, who had thought science was robbing the world of wonder, when the opposite was the case."

As Parry's intrusions into Joe's life become ever more troubling, the conflict this poses between scientific rationality and pure emotion - love, wonder, fear, apprehension - becomes more dangerous. Joe fears that Parry, his overtures repeatedly rebuffed, intends violence against him. Clarissa thinks it is all in Joe's mind. As Parry draws closer, the couple move farther and farther apart.

The rest of the plot will not be revealed here, for it is a fine, mesmerizing story that McEwan must be allowed to tell. It is also an exploration of a strange affliction that causes a person to direct his or her passions toward another for no apparent reason, to fall in what that person calls "love" but is, in fact, a bizarre perversion of the word. This may seem unlikely material, but out of it McEwan has fashioned a remarkable novel, haunting and original and written in prose that anyone who writes can only envy.