Like much of McEwan’s fiction, we are confronted at the outset with an extraordinary event (in this case, the death of a person falling from a hot-air balloon) that brings profound upheaval to a life that seemed quiet and settled: the couple’s relationship enters a crisis, an undercurrent of paranoia and instability emerges within the protagonist, and his professional choices are called into question.
And up to a point, the novel follows this trajectory, with some truly fine and effective pages on the breakdown of the marital bond; it almost seems as though everything the protagonist endures (in particular, his harassment at the hands of a religious fanatic) were a figment of his imagination, the result of an increasingly pronounced depressive and paranoid spiral.
The protagonist discovers himself to be different from who he thought he was.
Then, just as the story seems to have reached an impasse, a happy ending emerges—almost worthy of a detective story—but along with it comes the reader’s disappointment.
McEwan writes very well, in an English that is simple, fluid, and yet richly expressive: individual pages are remarkable, the whole somewhat less so.

Enduring Love