SOURCE: Johnson, Brian D. “Of Human Bonding.” Maclean's (17 November 1997): 106, 108.

In the following review, Johnson extols the descriptive opening portions of Enduring Love, praising McEwan's ability to delineate events with precision.

As a storyteller, British author Ian McEwan is something of a pathologist. His narratives tend to circle around a single terrifying event, a moment of panic that casts a long and malignant shadow over a character's life. Using spare, ruthless prose, McEwan magnifies the event and dissects it with clinical precision, slowing motion and stopping time to let strange and inappropriate thoughts float to the surface.

In his Whitbread Award-winning novel, The Child in Time (1987), the event is the abduction of a writer's three-year-old daughter in a supermarket, a loss that leaves the man's marriage devastated and sends him reeling back through his own childhood. In the Booker-nominated Black Dogs (1992), it is the ordeal of a woman who...