It could be claimed that Enduring Love is McEwan's ultimate comment on the nature of love. Through the rational scientific eyes of Joe Rose, McEwan paints a picture of passion, obsession, familiarity and mistrust. We see the `death' of familiarity in Joe and Clarissa's relationship, the endurance of obsession in Jed's insistence of love for Joe, and belief bloom from mistrust in the form of Mrs Logan.

It is interesting to note that it is the natures of Clarissa and Joe that eventually drive them apart; Clarissa, a lover of Keats who is contented and impassioned by her work, with a romanticised view of life, verses Joe, a dissatisfied scientific writer, whose need for rational and logical explanations lead him into an obsession of his own, demonstrates McEwan's intentions of commenting, not on the deterioration of their relationship as characters but rather as the embodiment of tension between...