Enduring Love (Ian McEwan)

"I had fallen into a life in which another man could be saying to me, We can't talk about it like this, and, My own feelings are not important."

Enduring Love on Amazon

In Ian McEwan's lightweight 1997 novel, which was apparently made into a film of the same name in 2004 with Daniel Craig, a man in a happy heterosexual relationship acquires a fanatically religious male stalker after a tragic freak accident briefly unites them.

It all plays out sort of how it sounds. Ian McEwan has a lovely, languid prose style that slows what could be a thriller-paced plot down to an almost meditative pace. He also has a keen eye for the emotionally grotesque that made the stalking itself quite amusing.

But I had high expectations that were somewhat disappointed: the only other book I've read of McEwan's is Atonement. And where that seemed to me a work of art, this is kind of just a book. It was fun to read because it was exciting, story-wise, but didn't stick with me.

What I did get out of it was a sense of, not skepticism exactly, but interrogation of the established idea of romantic love. What do we share with the other person? How much of it is mere projection?

In Summary: Insightful, but not extraordinary.