SOURCE: Sayers, Valerie. “Up, Up and Away.” Commonweal 125, no. 9 (8 May 1998): 24-6.

In the following review, Sayers offers a positive assessment of Enduring Love, but notes that the novel's philosophical ideas and thematic tensions ultimately give way to the demands of narrative movement.

Ian McEwan's elegant, unsettling novels seek out the dangers that lurk, waiting to disrupt everyday lives: child snatchers, accidents, vicious animals, stalkers. These threatening motifs are connected, often implicitly, to questions of political and philosophical belief. In Enduring Love this connection is explicit: from the opening scene onward, it is clear that McEwan means to balance his usual Gothic elements with complex explorations of the ideas they represent. The novel opens in a field in the Chilterns, where five men see a balloon descend and race to help the inept pilot anchor it. Inside the passenger basket crouches a terrified young boy who may be swept...