Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

Dear god man, get to the point!

That's basically what I was thinking the whole time I was reading this. Well, that and various, barely funny variations of the title which fully expressed my rage. Enduring Yawn? Boring Love? Who dies in a hot-air balloon-related accident anyway?

There's no question about it, this is a bad book. Unfortunately it's based around a good premise which only makes it all the worse. The main problem of this book is that it takes forever to go anywhere. Just as the plot is about to kick off and things are starting to get interesting, the author will interrupt the story for a five-page lecture on science. Don't get me wrong, I love science. But this isn't supposed to be a book about science, it's supposed to be a book about a crazed stalker. You can analyse until the cows come home about what the science lectures are supposed to represent but screw that, I want story damn it.

Okay, so let's put my issues with pacing aside for now...and move onto my issues with characters! Firstly, the narrator. As mentioned, he's pretty boring due to said lectures. But hey, he doesn't have to be interesting. The main star is surely the stalker right? Except...well, Jed is sort of flat. He has a motive I guess (yay for more negative portrayals of religious people being fanatics -_-) but no real depth to him. My most-hated character however was, without a doubt, Joe's 'loving' wife. Seriously, what kind of woman would respond in the way she did when she found out her husband had a stalker? Worst still, she never gets called out on it, leaving me with the uneasy impression that we're supposed to agree with her actions.

I'm not saying I hated this book completely. Like I said at the start, it is based around a good premise. The whole hot-air balloon thing is ridiculous but everything else has promise. Sadly anything good just gets drowned in a sea of endless rambling and never-ending tangents.

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