Metafictional Experimentation in Enduring Love

The publication in 1997 of a novel entitled Enduring Love in England sparked off heated controversy. As a science journalist, the narrator of Enduring Love repeatedly digresses on a host of scientific theories, among them neo-Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, the future colonisation of space, and Einstein's General Theory. The novel also includes two appendices, the first of which is an eleven-page long case study of a patient suffering from "de Clerambault's syndrome", which lists twenty other papers and books on the disorder and which is claimed to have been reprinted from the British Review ofPsychiatry. After the publication of this novel many critics accused McEwan of having yielded to a fashionable trend among many contemporary novelists to incorporate new scientific ideas in their fiction. What McEwan' s reviewers overlooked was the possibility that he was making use of the appendices to enhance the effect of the metafictional aspects of his novel. Even some psychiatrists were taken in to believe that the appendices were genuine scientific papers. It is argued in the present paper that the ambiguity surrounding the authenticity of the appendices helps to draw reader's attention to the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction. The paper concludes that like all metafictional novels, Enduring Love playfully raises the issue of reality and fiction's imitation of each other.