The same constraint is felt, at times, about the developing situation: it is so unusual that it seems to lack some of the hard granularity of true invention.

Interesting and credible though Joe and Clarissa are, there is some way in which they don't seem thoroughly known, as if McEwan didn't trust that he had permission to imagine them all the way into existence. Impressive, but also curiously ballasted, as if by hewing to the highly eccentric contours of what really happened, the novelist were tethered on some deeper level. is an impressive transformation, the rearing up of a fictional world around summary notations from the realm of the actual.

has not lost his knack for intimating the unconventional - his dark glance reminds us that normal behavior conceals but does not banish unsavory truths. Which may explain why Claire weirdly doesn’t look out the window when Joe tells her that the creepy Jed is looking at their apartment from a park across the street. Is Jed attracted to to Joe? Is he a Jesus freak? Or is he just a crazed fan? Michell doesn’t seem to think it matters, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if he also didn’t strongly imply that Joe’s strange relationship to Jed may be a figment of the author’s metaphysical imagination. Then, a horrible death, which resigns Joe to a life of could-have-beens and should-have-happends, a ritual of grief that’s speciously amplified by cloying callbacks to the hot air balloon accident and further distorted when Jed (Rhys Ifans), who’s similarly linked to the death in the field, begins to stalk the author.

A hot air balloon hauntingly glides into frame and the life of a young boy literally dangles in the hands of a group of strangers. The opening scene, an evocation of untainted bliss between a bestselling author, Joe (Daniel Craig), and his sculptor girlfriend, Claire (a wasted Samantha Morton), in an empty field, is a triumph. Director Roger Michell understands the questions that McEwan raises about love in his novel Enduring Love, but not unlike his film The Mother, the director shoots the thing like a soulless spread for Modern Living. From The Cement Garden to his brilliant Atonement, Ian McEwan picks at the wounds left by terrible events, linking death to desire in ways that both challenge the nature of art and illuminate the difficulties of modern living.

Enduring love book review