Enduring Love by Ian McEwan might be the most pretentious novel I’ve ever read.

At face value, it begins with promise: a gripping hot air balloon accident in rural Oxfordshire, dramatized with a cinematic edge. But McEwan doesn’t want to tell a story—he wants to preach. What follows is less a novel and more a pseudo-intellectual monologue against religion, all wrapped in the gauze of middle-class English liberal smugness from the 1990s.

The protagonist, Joe, is insufferable. He’s the unholy offspring of Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins—every irritating tic of theirs jammed into one man. A man who, within pages, makes you wish he had been the one to plummet from the balloon.

The tragedy sparks the arrival of Jed Parry, a devout Christian who prays with Joe at the scene. Joe, of course, is far too brilliant and rational for such primitive nonsense. What could’ve been an exploration of grief and human connection instead morphs into a cat-and-mouse chase with religious overtones and bizarre homoerotic tension.

Parry suffers from de Clérambault’s syndrome—obsessive love wrapped in religious delusion. Joe, ever the armchair scientist, diagnoses him like a DSM-addicted podcast host. McEwan, through Joe, treats religion not as belief or culture but as a clinical disorder, an evolutionary relic best discarded.

But here’s the rub: McEwan’s argument isn’t new. Nor is it deep. He weaponizes scientific jargon and evolution as dogma, wielding it like holy scripture to replace the very religious structures he mocks. He thanks Guardian journalists and quotes scientific papers in the acknowledgements as if trying to sneak his book into Nature.

This isn’t bold atheism. It’s cocktail party cynicism. The kind you hear from red wine-swilling guests at Maida Vale dinner tables who still refer to “the Crimea,” “the Lebanon,” or “the Empire,” as if British colonialism were an inside joke they’re in on. McEwan’s protagonist lives, breathes, and sermonizes in that rarefied air.

Oxfordshire picnics, secular psalms, encyclopedic ramblings on fossils and molecules—it’s the literature of smugness. His character doesn’t wrestle with belief. He dismantles it with the certainty of someone who’s never had to think too hard about anything outside his own worldview.

Even Nietzsche—one of my favorite philosophers and no friend to organized religion—would’ve scoffed at the shallowness of McEwan’s intellectual scaffolding. Where Nietzsche was daring, McEwan is safe. Where Nietzsche was philosophical, McEwan is pedantic.

The tragedy of Enduring Love isn’t the man who falls from the sky—it’s the novel’s descent into one man’s dreary crusade against faith, dressed up as literary fiction.

It may be dated now, but there’s something enduringly irksome about the book. A time capsule of self-satisfied secularism, puffed up with borrowed science and dripping with condescension.