Enduring Love (McEwan)

Book Reviews 
Ian McEwan's reputation as a writer of small, impeccably written fictions is secure. His gift for the cold and scary is well established, too....But his books are more than tales of suspense and shock; they raise issues of guilt and love and fear, essentially of what happens when the civilized and ordered splinters against chaos. There can be something of Greek myth in his narratives....At the same time he is the quietest and most lucid of stylists, with never a word wasted or fumbled.
Rosemary Dinnage - New York Review of Books

A vibrant and unsettling [novel that] reminds us that normal behavior conceals but does not banish unsavory truths.
Sven Birkets - New York Times Book Review

The opening scene in Enduring Love is absolutely riveting: Joe Rose, who's picnicking with his wife, Clarissa, hears a shout and races toward a helium balloon that's about to crash with a boy trapped in its basket. Joe and four other passers-by attempt to rescue the child by grabbing onto the balloon to weigh it down. But as the balloon suddenly rises, four of the men—Joe included—go; only one man holds on, and he's killed for his bravery. "Hanging a few feet above the Chilterns escarpment, our crew enacted morality's ancient, irresolvable dilemma: us, or me."

In the early chapters, McEwan slows the action and savors the implications of individuals' pulling together or falling apart. But it's soon revealed that the ballooning accident is a bit of clever misdirection, an intense experience that propels Jed Parry, one of the would-be heroes, to fall hopelessly and obsessively in love with Joe. While Joe, a science writer, is prepared to parse out the Darwinian impulses that might explain the ballooning tragedy, he's powerless to make sense of Parry's stalking phone calls and appearances outside Joe and Clarissa's flat.

McEwan is interested in how we construct coherent narratives out of chaos. Eventually, Joe de-mystifies Parry by diagnosing his feelings as a morbid passion called de Clerambault's syndrome. Too bad, because naming and pathologizing Parry's love saps the story of its energy. Instead of confronting Parry, Joe buys a gun and becomes enmeshed in a meandering side plot. And then—unexpectedly, miraculously—the novel comes alive again in its two appendices, one a clinical case study of de Clerambault's syndrome and the other a blissed-out letter from Parry to Joe. McEwan offers these two poles, the scientific and emotional, to frame the range of responses to the inexplicable mystery of love, pathological or otherwise.

Enduring Love gracefully bridges genres; it's a psychological thriller, a meditation on the narrative impulse, a novel of ideas. McEwan's prose is deft, unself-conscious and a joy to read. Here's a book that kept me up all night, mesmerized and entertained. So why am I ingrate enough to complain? For all the wonderful moments, I wish McEwan hadn't dropped the ball, chasing stray plot lines when he could have been teasing out the complexities of the relationships between Parry, Joe and Clarissa. It's because Enduring Love sometimes soars to such heights that I'm disappointed it didn't, in the end, reach greatness.
Elizabeth Judd - Salon

After the calm of a pleasant afternoon picnic is punctured by a terrible accident--a man falls to his death as a hot-air balloon floats away, carrying a child—Joe Rose finds himself imbedded in the aftershock. One of several men who tried to hold down the balloon but eventually let go, he must reconcile his part in the tragedy with the threat posed by a stalker trying to save him through love. In turns obsessively morbid and cunningly funny, McEwan's deftly crafted prose holds the reader with the intensity of a thriller while engaging in a deep psychological exploration of shock, grief, the need for redemption, and, ultimately, the makeup of compassion and love.
Library Journal

A sad, chilling, precise exploration of deranged love. Joe Rose, a middle-aged science writer, takes his wife Clarissa to London's Hampstead Heath for a picnic—and stumbles into a tragedy when a man and his young grandson, on a jaunt by balloon, get into serious trouble. Joe is among the bystanders who race to seize the balloon, which is damaged, close to the ground, and being pushed by high winds toward a precipice. One of the rescuers dies. In the aftermath, Joe exchanges words with Jed Parry, a deeply disturbed young man among those who came rushing to help. Isolated, independently wealthy, Parry has attempted to suppress his homosexual inclinations by immersing himself in a fervent and very personal version of Christianity. Parry quickly fixates on Joe, and, deciding that he is meant to be the means by which Joe, a nonbeliever, will be brought back to God, Parry begins haunting him. He shadows Joe's movements around London, loiters outside his apartment, constantly leaves messages and letters. It's not only God's love that Parry believes he's carrying; he's also, in a confused and only partially conscious manner, convinced that Joe loves him and knows everything about him. Joe's increasingly angry attempts to rid himself of Parry seem to the obsessed man only another test of his devotion, while Joe and Clarissa's marriage begins to crumble under the strain, as do their careers. Finally, a desperate Parry decides he must get rid of Clarissa and, possibly, even Joe himself. In lesser hands, the story might be overwrought and unbelievable, but McEwan's terse, lucid prose and sure grasp of character give resonance to this superb anatomy of obsession and exploration of the mind under extreme circumstance. Painful and powerful work by one of England's best novelists.
Kirkus Reviews