Enduringly Bad (Enduring Love - Ian McEwan)

Member Name: Attacksushi

Product:	Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
Date:	14/04/04 (115 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tension between main couple is good

Disadvantages: Science passages, Stalker is unbelievable

I'll admit that I had high expectations of this. Two of my friends loved it. I kept reading reviews describing it as a modern classic. Which means that, now that I've finished it, I can't help but think that there's either something wrong with the rest of the world, or with me. And because I'm a raging egomaniac, I'm going to guess that it's the former.

What's bad about Enduring Love? Maybe it's my own fault for going into it expecting something great, but it's too long, it drags, there are far too many sections that one finds oneself skim-reading, and it could be seen as rather offensive.

I'd heard about this great opening scene, but even that didn't impress. It's somewhat interesting - the novel's narrator and his common-law wife witness a ballooning accident in which a man is killed - but it doesn't really command attention. What follows sounds like it'll be good. I really liked the premise behind the book: the protagonist gets stalked by another man who saw the accident. But it didn't work out here, possibly because McEwan's too busy trying to cram Big Ideas into his novel.

So here's the main Big Idea behind the book: it deals with the struggle between science, religion and art. Now that could be good, right? But on such a small scale, it can't work. Here, McEwan uses one character to symbolise science, one for religion, and one for art. Such a large idea needs a wider scope, especially as the character symbolising religion is the crazy stalker. I don't know if McEwan was setting out trying to offend the enormous amount of religious people in the world or not, but there's no way that one could describe the struggle that takes up most of the book as balanced.

Besides, making this character a devo
ut Christian ruins the suspension of disbelief necessary to read this book. I can buy the fact that people get stalked nowadays, but when the stalker's sole motivation is his religion, it starts looking shaky. His suspected mental illness starts to feel rather dubious after a while, too.

The other reason that Enduring Love is tough going is the long science-based passages, which often feel out of place. I could deal with them, though, were it not for the fact that after the first couple of chapters, nothing happens. There's the ballooning incident, then the protagonist starts getting stalked. The stalking continues. And continues. And continues. And cont - yeah, you get the idea. There's a subplot involving the widow of the man killed in the balloon which goes nowhere because McEwan doesn't give it enough room to go anywhere.

The conflict between the protagonist and his partner is the only part of this novel that feels real, and even then only at times. But really, the worst thing about this book is the fact that it's so forgettable. Within a day of finishing it, I stopped thinking about Enduring Love. A lot of the time, reading it felt like a chore - especially when, at times, I was struck by what a good book this COULD have been.

Summary: