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Summary: "PLAY MISTY FOR ME"
Review: The real Terror of this book begins at the End of the book. Those of us "OLD" enough can now appreciate "Play Misty for Me"
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Summary: It took forever for the narrator to tell this story
Review: I read it because it was situationally compelling but I wasn't interested in the narrator, his girl friend was a bit too self centered...and the bad guy was a boring bad guy. Only a few things surprised me. Then, the appendix I found so much more interesting. I liked the case study with just the initials and the 'Sergeant Friday" narrator. The case study was like watching a really good stripper who reveals nothing. The story from the case study did not put life where it was intended. If you are going to take us on this ride, give us an interesting narrator.
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Summary: Excellent writing, great plot, in-depth characterizations
Review: What more can you want? This author in just 250 pages manages to tell a story of real passion. I especially liked the detailed descriptions of the interactions between the husband and wife, Joe and Clarissa. That so much remains unresolved between them is completely realistic. Marriages between people who love each other go on despite these issues, as I think theirs will. I also liked the minor characters in this novel, for instance, the old hippies Joe visits in the country. Each is specifically described. Plus all of his writing makes it extremely easy to visualize the events in the novel. The novel had plenty of tension and in the end, I was left with Joe and Clarissa's differing views of the situation, never really knowing which was "right" and I liked that ambiguity. In fact, oddly enough, ambiguity is what made most of this novel so satisfying. I also thought the details about the dead man's life were excellently put together. Overall, a great read.
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Summary: Not as advertised
Review: I must disagree with everyone's adulation of Enduring Love. It was difficult to care about any of the characters. Parry's obsession comes out of the blue. The balloon accident means nothing to the real point of the story. Really, I hated these characters. Is this any achievement in writing? I think not.
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Summary: worth a read
Review: I bought this book based on the reviews of others. I was not disappointed. The relationship between Joe and Clarissa certainly is a central focus of the book. The calm, rational journalist/educator turns into a man neither he nor Clarissa recognizes. He turns human! A man frustrated because there is no one to believe his story, not the police, not Clarissa. The quest that Jean Hogan sends him on also seems irrational. I wonder what is reaction would have been had he not been stalked by Jed? The violence that results from Jed's fixation on Joe is foreshadowed throughout the book. Nothing is quite what it seems. I felt sorry for Joe that after the accident, everything he did seemed so completely out of character that even he did not recognize himself. I agree with one of the other people who wrote a review of this book. It did read like the movie Pulp Fiction. You get the end, the beginning and the middle in no particular order at times.
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Summary: Many treasures, small and large, in this heartfelt novel
Review: None of the published reviews of "Enduring Love" I have read mentions some of the finest treasures of this novel, and I would like to add them to the other positive reviews here. 1. The NY Times reviews discussed the juxtaposition of the case-history Appendix with the fictional elements of the novel, but only from the standpoint of the fictional Joe's observation on "the death of anecdote and narrative in science". Yet the Times reviewers fail to mention that the real end of the "fiction" (what happens to Joe and Clarissa after the ambiguous end of the novel) is to be found only in the last paragraph of the "scientific" appendix. Throughout the novel, in fact, Mr. McEwan continually counterposes the "rational" and the "artistic" -- Joe/Jed, Joe/Clarissa, Joe/police, Joe/JohnnyBWell, Jocelyn/Clarissa, Steve-Xan/Daisy, .... He also makes clear that no one important really fits the stereotype of either extreme: on the serious side, Clarissa is right-brained, but she's just as busy chasing down some details of Keats's correspondence as any genome-project guru is worrying about a particular base-pair; on the lighter side, the gun dealers are supposed to be "intellectuals" and "big-questions" people, but in the event they turn out rather different. John Logan, doctor and mountaineer, is perhaps the most important of these hybrids: while his wife later says he always calculates the risks first (and as a physician he is a "scientist"), he joins the rescue team in an uncharacteristically foolhardy act of bravery, then dies because he is the last to think of "me" before "us". And his story ends with another such balance -- between the professor of logic and his young student, between them and the Logan family, and between the Logans and Joe and Clarissa. 2. Chapter 9 -- Joe's third-person narrative of the events leading up to his first serious split with Clarissa -- is the most honest, selfless, and heart-breaking portrayal of a man's understanding of his lover and himself that I have ever read. That chapter alone is worth the Booker. 3. I must say that I found all of Jed's letters, and all of his behavior, completely unbelievable and off-putting throughout my reading. In other words, Mr. McEwan achieved what I believe to be his intended effect: to portray Jed as deranged, and to impart something of the feeling of being the object of his attention.
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Summary: A gripping, panoramic drama of the mind
Review: Reading an Ian McEwan novel is a rare privilege, because he wisely rations his output to two or three a decade. By the time a new one appears, his desperate fans are ready to die for the latest novel, and probably have impossible expectations. But somehow the author always delivers and creates a new beast, to the delight of his hungry readers. I say "beast" because there is always an underlying violence lurking in an Ian McKewan novel, especially when the weather's good. Sure enough the first chapter begins with an innocent picnic between lovers. It swiftly turns sour as Joe, the main character, witnesses a shocking incident in the Chiltern hills. The powerful, panoramic description of a fatal ballooning accident swings effortlessly around the action like a moving camera. As Joe documents his actions and those of the other witnesses, you soon feel as if you are in the front row at an IMEX screening, breathlessly viewing from all angles. Though the perspective shifts frequently that day, you come to rely on good old Joe's rationalisation of this freak event. Surely his wife Clarissa is being unfairly sceptical? Soon, however, Joe's guilt at not saving the victim of the disaster seems to be verging on paranoia. Jed, a religious fanatic and one of his fellow witnesses, is beginning to stalk him ..or is it just Joe's alter ego running wild?? The screw starts to turn...McEwan style.
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Summary: Enduring Love by Ian McEwen
Review: Enduring Love focuses on the mad obsession one Jed Parry has for his victim Joe whom he meets whilst also witnessing and trying to prevent a ballooning accident. What follows is a fascinating and chilling tale of deceipt, love, neurosis, betrayal and an overwhelming sense of disbelief on all sides. The narrator Joe, takes us with him on his range of emotions and we feel profoundly sorry for him as he is treated with an increasing fear by those around him.. Ian McEwen's writing is superb, I found myself unable to put this book down and I also found myself pleading his case and feeling the terror and frustration that the pursuer evoked. I highly recommend this book and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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Summary: Passionate exploration of revelation and chance
Review: Revelation. When that which we thought we knew becomes that of which we knew naught. The Book of Revelation, a fiery cauldron of image and prophecy, is a compilation of a series of visions had by the gospel writer John. Revelation comes from the Latin 'revelatio' which means to reveal or unveil that which has previously been hidden'. Ian McEwan's newest book revolves around the idea of revelation, dangerous, personal, political, mistaken, perceived. According to futurist intepreters, we have yet to see whether the Johannine vision of the Final Reckoning will come to pass as he saw it; revelation anticipated, revelation unfulfilled. However, according to various other interpreters of the Book of Revelation, its prophecies have already to come to pass or are in the process of occurring. For example, the Preterist school believes that the prophecies were fulfilled with the conversion of the emperor Constantine. Another characteristic of revelation; it has considerably different meaning for different people. One person's revelation is another's madness. And this is the theme of McEwan's novel; the subjectivity of revelation and interpretation. No two characters in the book view any of the events they witness or in which they participate in the same light. Plot developments manifest themselves, then are subject to twists and turns of new information which demonstrate how quickly the superficiality of what we 'know'; the fallibility of 'fact'. McEwan's book is also an exploration and , in part, an attack on scientific rationalism. It is a detective story in which the logical deductions are made based on evidence, and later proved to be wrong. Catastrophic events befall the characters in the novel; the death of a man in the first chapter in the novel is recounted with immense skill, eliciting flinches and horror. The story revolves around a young couple who witness and become involved this accidental death, and the strange, surreal consequences of that involvement. The book also turns on the pivot of coincidence, but not the kind of convenient coincidence which make mass-market movies so difficult to digest. These are the kind of bizarre coincidences which seem impossible (and are in fact on occasion proved to be impossible), the quirks of fate which both plague and delight us in everyday life. The main character in the novel is a scientific journalist/researcher, and the novel also looks at the validity of scientific method and rationalism as ways of examining how the events of our lives unfold. McEwan takes a couple who are convinced that the foundation of their lives is solid and unshkeable, and then shows us just how quickly, by contrivance of fate, that foundation can break apart and the relationship founder. Though rationally there are no problems, no issues, other factors result in the questioning of a man's most basic ideas about sanity and love. The structure of the novel is comparable to that of another recent major novel out of Britain, A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower, where a shattering first part of the novel is followed by an considerable slowing of the narrative. Though there is the traditional climax and relieving of tension in Enduring Love, it occurs more as a afterthought, and the coherence to traditional plot formulae at this point causes the novel to lose a little of its power. The events of the first chapter shadow the entire novel, but the subsequent plot twist is so sharp that there are, in fact, two distinct narratives which develop into a novel which is as unpredictable and erratic as, well, life. I wonder if Mr. McEwan has been watching Tarantino movies; the structuring of the plot is similar to that of Pulp Fiction. Specifically I am thinking of the scene where the bloodied boxer played by Bruce Willis finds himself in the basement of a gun shop rescuing the previously vengeful Marsellus Wallace. The relationship of the characters fluctuates from crisis to crisis, and each development changes our interpretation of what has gone before. McEwan is again experimenting with unconventional plotting, and it works very well with his explorations of character and theme. This is not a nice tidy novel, it leaves things in sad disarray. In contrast to the deliberate evil manifest in Black Dogs, McEwan's last novel, there is no definable force which contrives to bring about the events which result in such misery; there is only the crisp meaningless zigzag of chance.
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Summary: Here's a Plot Twist and Surprise...
Review: Whoa! Here goes a first chapter that has you gasping at the edge of your seat. Yikes! Then there's a fatal attraction 'of sorts' with some additional spice to a story filled with curiosity, mayhem, suspense, attempted murder, love and more. I think it has a lot of psychological thrilling moments. What a clever and very 'well-written' novel. This was recommended to me by Trina Owens, a very sweet English Schoolteacher that I met on the island of St. Lucia in April 2004. I'd definitely recommend this one. I bet it would make a great movie, too!
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