摘要：Horton's objective is to clarify the significance of scientific ideas in two of Ian McEwan's most successful novels: The Child in Time (1987) and Enduring Love (1997). No one has ever doubted that theoretical physics and evolutionary psychology are crucial to each novel respectively, but there has been sustained critical debate about the extent to which McEwan relativises, or even undermines, scientific facts and arguments with narrative sleights. Joe Rose, for instance, the narrator and protagonist of Enduring Love, is a science writer whose 'diagnosis' of a homosexual stalker, Jed Parry, is informed by evolutionary psychology and clinical psychiatry. His fears are ultimately vindicated by Parry's terrifying behaviour, leading critics such as David Malcolm to read Enduring Love as a paean to scientific rationality. On the other hand, Rose's narration is self-qualifying and, in minor respects, factually unreliable, as well as being counter-balanced by the questions and criticisms of his literary wife Clarissa. The limitations McEwan imposes on Rose's narration have led critics such as Jago Morrison and Sean Matthews to assert that the novel ultimately, as Horton puts it, "reconfirm[s] the instability of evolutionary psychology as a credible mode of personal and social analysis" (706). Given that McEwan's public pronouncements favoured the first position over the second, the emphasis on the novel's scepticism required far greater trust in the tale than the teller. Horton's achievement in this essay is to have negotiated brilliantly between the opposing positions regarding each novel, whilst demonstrating equal facility with the texts of both Ian McEwan and his mentors in popular science. In the case of Enduring Love, she is inclined to split the difference between the critics who (to put it crudely) side with Clarissa or with Joe. She acknowledges, with the first group, that the novel's gestures towards narrative unreliability relativise those assertions Rose grounds in 1990s evolutionary psychology, but admits the key point of the second camp: that Joe is much more right about Jed than Clarissa, who doubts his very existence until he invades her home with murderous intent. Horton concludes that "McEwan leaves the ending open, positioning the narratives against each other and showing how each invokes a different (and differently problematic) form of reason" (707). Being of the party of Joe myself, I am obviously unsatisfied with this conclusion, not least because it underestimates the extent to which admittedly unreliable narration actually strengthens our confidence in a narrator (a fact of human nature discussed in William Flesch's superb treatment of Darwinism and literature, Comeuppance (2007)).
