also cannot stay in full control of the narrative and he therefore falls short of
achieving that purpose. Nevertheless, because Joe is sometimes able to step
outside his own perspective—as in the beginning and middle of chapter 9—
and sometimes able to see things more clearly from his perspective at the
time of writing, McEwan also suggests that Joe’s narrative is a step in the right
therapeutic direction. In that regard, McEwan may even be suggesting that
Joe’s telling the tale helps him in his efforts to reconcile with Clarissa.
What, then, of McEwan’s purposes? Why have Joe narrate on this temporal
occasion rather than after he and Clarissa reconciled? A fuller answer depends
on an analysis of the Appendices, but by the end of Joe’s telling, McEwan has
clearly established his thematic interest in the vexed relationship between love
and logic.
Jed’s erotomania is the extreme example of that vexed relationship, since it
arises and continues without any encouragement on Joe’s part. McEwan fur-
ther underlines the gap by foregrounding Jed’s belief that his love will lead Joe
to God: love, like religious faith, always exceeds reason. In addition, the way
in which McEwan uses the trajectory of Joe’s telling to suggest that there’s a
contagion between Jed and Joe provides another dimension to the novel’s the-
matics. Moreover, McEwan extends his thematic exploration well beyond Jed’s
obsession with Joe. Clarissa searches for a possible lost letter from a dying
John Keats to Fanny Brawne on the assumption that he loved her so much
that he would have wanted to express his feelings even if he couldn’t see her;
Joe thinks it is just as likely that Keats’s love would have kept him from writ-
ing the letter. Joe extends these reflections to the “miraculous” quality of his
relationship with Clarissa: “a beautiful woman loved and wanted to be loved
by a large, clumsy, balding fellow who could hardly believe his luck” (7).
Finally, the most compelling example of how McEwan guides his audi-
ence’s interest in the thematics of love and logic is his development of the
subplot about John Logan and his widow, Jean. John died in the balloon acci-
dent that opens the novel and that provides the occasion for the first meeting
between Joe and Jed. Jean develops a perfectly logical explanation of why John
was the last man to hold on to the balloon when it was swept up into the air
by a sudden gust of wind, thus letting himself be carried too high to survive
his inevitable fall. Examining the woman’s scarf and the picnic lunch found in
John’s car near the scene of the accident, Jean painfully concludes that John
was showing off for a woman with whom he was having an affair. But Jean’s
logical conclusion turns out to be completely wrong, because the scarf belongs
to the Oxford undergraduate Bonnie Deedes and the lunch to Bonnie and her
much older professor James Reid. John had given them a ride to the Chilterns,
but they had fled the scene because they were not yet ready to go public with
246 • CHAPTER 1 3