The title of Ian McEwan's 1998 novel, Enduring Love, invites images of a romantic relationship surviving adversity with the rich resources of sentimental intensity. But those images are qualified severely when the story gets under way. First, the love portrayed is unrequited; second, it is pathological; third, it is homosexual (in a markedly heterosexual world); fourth, it is a manifestation of Christian fanaticism. The word ‘enduring’ in the title becomes menacing, suggesting obsession. It also reflects back on the object of the love who must ‘endure’ the menace such ‘love’ presents.

The unrequited, pathological, homosexual, Christian-fanatic lover is called Jed Parry; his beloved, the novel's protagonist, is Joe, through whose first-person narrative the novel mainly proceeds. Until Jed comes along, Joe, who writes popular science articles for magazines, has an enduring love of his own, of a conventional, secular, bourgeois and heterosexual kind, with Clarissa, a lecturer in English literature. Although Joe and Clarissa's relationship gets derailed by Jed's obsessive love for Joe, the couple ultimately reconcile, with Jed by then securely cordoned off in a mental asylum. The structure of the novel provides a fairly obvious defence of such Gemütlichkeit as lived by Joe and Clarissa, with the outsider banished from their world after a kind of trial by otherness. Joe and Clarissa's love endures, but so does that of Jed who for years continues undeterred to write Joe impassioned letters from the asylum – letters which the staff do not pass on, in the interests of protecting Joe and, in effect, the values he represents.