Rating: 
Summary: A Glance of the Eye
Review: I think the opening pages of Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love" are among the finest in all of literature. "We were running towards a catastrophe," says one of the characters. We know about the catastrophe and we know it is about to happen, but McEwan doesn't let us witness it...yet. A few pages later, we encounter a hot air balloon carrying a small boy careening out of control. Several people witness this most unusual sight: Joe Rose, science writer and broadcaster, and the protagonist of "Enduring Love;" his longtime girlfriend, Clarissa Mellon; a doctor who happens to be driving along near the scene of the accident; two farmhands working in the fields; and, most importantly, Jed Parry. As the balloon lurches toward this small group of people, their lives will be forever changed. One man dies in the rescue attempt, but more importantly, an infatuation begins, an enduring love that is different from the enduring loves most of us have known or are at least familiar with, for this love concerns the love of Jed Parry for Joe Rose. The fact that Joe did nothing to encourage Jed's love is not important to Jed. And why should it be? Our world is one that both celebrates and idealizes romantic love...in songs, in poems, in novels, in supermarket tabloids. Jed is suffering from an actual aberrant mental condition known as de Clerambault's syndrome, a syndrome named after the French doctor who first identified it during the reign of King George V. However, lest you think this a book about aberrant behavior, better think again. Jed's love for Joe, and the beautifully romantic letters he writes him, seem as normal and as "real" as those of Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning. We come to believe in this love of Jed's...until his behavior tumbles into threats and over-the-top melodrama, perhaps the books's only (small) fault. But just perhaps. All of the characters in this lovely but disturbing book are well-drawn, complex and believable. It's very easy to care about them and wonder who, exactly, they are. The subplots are also wonderfully contrasted and braided. Joe's rationalism is contrasted against Jed's fixation...and Clarissa's romantic obsession with the letters of the poet, John Keats. Letters are central to the plot of "Enduring Love," both Jed's letters to Joe and the letters of Keats that Clarissa studies with such intensity. In a line that sums up the thrust of the entire book, Joe says, "Lately I'd had the idea that Clarissa's interest in these hypothetical letters (of Keats) had something to do with our own situation, and with her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect." Although Joe and Clarissa love each other with a love that they feel is destined to endure, neither one comes close to equalling the love of Jed Parry. The strange love of Jed for Joe and its seeming normalcy are what make "Enduring Love" so special, what sets it apart from other novels of love and romance and what makes it linger in both the mind and the heart. As always, McEwan is masterful when creating suspense or when lingering on detail. He seems to have an uncanny knack of knowing exactly what to describe, of knowing exactly when to reveal. Both of these strengths are showcased to perfection in "Enduring Love." Those who require happily-ever-after endings won't find one here, but neither will one find a wholly tragic conclusion. "Enduring Love" concludes exactly as it should conclude: most satisfying, though a bit unusual. "Enduring Love" is a beautiful, though disturbing novel. It is a book that shows how fragile, yet how strong, the bonds of love can be and how lives can be changed with one glance of the eye.
Rating: 
Summary: Neither suspenseful nor engaging, but beautifully written.
Review: This is a well-written book, in fact a superbly written book, with McEwan demonstrating his considerable narrative and descriptive skills. Problem is, the story doesn't hold water, and the links are too tenuous.
The whole psychological roller coaster that McEwan took me on just wasn't there. I was neither worried nor concerned; I never got involved with the characters. Is there any point in a book where you just don't care and the panic and fear in the voice of the narrator is incredulous because it just isn't scary? There is no suspense, no reason to be afraid in this book. Everything Joe does seems to be a gross over reaction or another act of self-indulgence. I want to like it, I ought to like such a fine well-crafted book, but I just don't.
McEwan is a great writer but needs a more complete story to fill 200 odd pages. What we are given here is a shorter story that got over inflated to 245 pages.
Rating:
Summary: The Angry Young Man Matures
Review: McEwan has aged well and in "Enduring Love" his razor-edged prose is still chilling... The book is, at once, a dazzling meditation on causality and circumstance, science and metaphysics, epistemology, and exsistential thought. The first chapter on the balloning accident, stands on it's own merits, as a novella length fable which explores applied Darwinism... McEwan ratchets up suspense, by only providing details of an unfolding horror on a "need-to-know" basis. The balloning accident serves as the platform of a story which is thriller, with the irony and plot reversals of a postmodern noir novel. The chapter on the derranged hippies living in rural Britian, is an example of McEwan's adroit skill at black humor... "Enduring Love" made a splash in the media when "De Clerambault's Syndrome" which McEwan linked to the events in the book, turned out to be a sly hoax...
Rating:
Summary: Great writing, page-turner plot
Review: The first chapter of this book, describing a ballooning accident, is one of the best openings I've read in modern fiction in a long time. The chapter was published as a short story on its own in the New Yorker several years ago, and it truly stands on its own in terms of originality, suspense, and fine writing. But this novel goes on in true McEwan style to develop the chance meeting of two bystanders to the accident into a creepy, frightening tale of obsession. I won't give away more, but if you haven't read McEwan you're in for a treat.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding in so many ways.
Review: I'm astounded that there are reviewers here who disliked this book so passionately! I was absolutely enthralled from Chapter One and didn't put it down until I'd finished. What a terrific study in how tenuous life's conditions are, among other things. Not only was this an outstanding story of suspense, but also a story of how one's life can change in an instant and what the implications of those changes can be. A large part of the narrative being the "if onlys" and "what ifs" that we all have experienced. What grabbed me from the beginning was the eloquence of this author. His language flowed in such a way as to really set the scene and bring you into his embrace. This was the first novel of Mr. McEwan's that I've read, but I assuredly will being going back for more.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't Put the Book Down
Review: Very entertaining and very well written. I didn't expect the ending which is great. I couldn't believe the 1st chapter.
Rating: 
Summary: HE RAN OUT OF WIND
Review: Great start but lost himself. The problem with McEwan is that he pictures a scene writes it out and then builds a story around it. The whole thing then shuffles along like some old drunken bag lady. Very silly bits in this story: gay obsessed stalker; husband and wife fall out because of gay obsessed stalker; attack in a restaurant; a couple in a car - with dark undertones, but whoopee that didnt have dark undertones after all(had me worried there for a bit). The ending is pretty pathetic, but it was an ending and I was glad for it.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant. Unputdownable!
Review: I approached this with some scepticism as it's a book commonly viewed as Big Literature (which usually means a wordy exercise of very little point, in my experience). Not so. This was absolutely amazing. I literally could NOT put it down, to the point of being annoying while on the beach and friends wanted to chat. Chat? I couldn't get my head out of this fantastic book! It was so suspenseful. Brilliant characterisation (I presume we're MEANT to think Rose a bit of a middle-class British tosser) and so well-researched/invented. As soon as I'd finished it I turned back to the beginning. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who's logged on and is wondering whether to buy it. Scary, but so engaging.
Rating:
Summary: I was never completely captured...
Review: "Enduring love" was my first McEwan novel, so I did not know what to expect. But the author came highly recommended from my friend so I expected to be in for a treat. This novel has a fantastic opening - the protagonist Joe Rose, a journalist, has brought his girlfriend/lover Clarissa, to the countryside to celebrate her return from the US. While they are there, enjoying their picnic, they witness a tragedy, as a man falls dead to the ground from a helium balloon. Jed Parry, one of the other witnesses to the tragic accident, becomes obsessed with Joe. Jed starts to stalk Joe, believing that they share some extraordinary link and that the two of them are bound by love. So, what started out as a tragic accident is soon turned into familiar McEwan style, with relationships, science, religion and psychological obsession as some of the elements he touches upon. Unfortunately, this novel doesn't keep up with the expectations brought upon us from its amazing opening. Fair enough, I found "Enduring Love" at times unbearable in its suspense and hard to put down, but I was never completely captured by the characters. More strongly recommended are the other McEwan novels "The innocent" and the Booker Prize winning "Amsterdam".
Rating:
Summary: Once Bitten
Review: Enduring Love was truly a mesmerizing experience from the beginning. The plot was absolutely engaging, but this is the least of the novel's attractions. Throughout the story McEwan delves (either consciously or unconsciously) into difficult and intruiging philisophical issues. To what extent is God a product of our evolutionary history? Is belief in a higher power based in reality, or simply a desire to fend of feelings of loneliness, or (as McEwan terms it) to create some form of "intra-psychic" communication. This is a touchy issue, and McEwan faces the paradox with an uncommon intellectual bravery. He deals with the problem of human relationships. To what extent may we find the path to social and emotional health through an examination of the root causes of psychological illness. The characters in the novel are both alive and honestly portrayed. This is difficult for any author to do, and McEwan succeeds without losing the reader's interest. His descriptions of nature and the English countryside are unparalleled in brilliance. The majority of contemporary authors could not hope to compare. Perhaps the feature of the novel by which I was most impressed was McEwan's ability to inject a subtle humour into such a painfully forbidding narrative. The scene in the coke-dealers den where Joe Rose struggles to contain his laughter (supposedly induced by ammonia fumes) is one of the novel's most brilliant. Overall, Enduring Love is a novel I can wholly recommend without hesitation. Intelligent, meaningful, humourous, and emotionally engaging; Enduring Love is easily one of the years most important works.
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