love remains was an impulse purchase. my mother had given me a book voucher she had received from her company. i bought two books, one of which was this. i thought it would be a fun kind of tragic modern love story, floaty and faux-dramatic like the cover.

look, i don’t want to be too crushing about. plenty of online reviewers have liked its ‘gritty’ tone and subject matter. i just found duncan’s writing pedestrian and the plot skeletal. things happen but the overwhelming feeling i got from this book was perhaps the feeling that glen duncan was holding up a placard and waving it around. the placard says:

I AM TELLING YOU A STORY.

he is rather earnest.

i’m not going to say that it’s not a very good story. but i will say that as a writer, duncan makes a reader work too hard. and i don’t mean in a good way. you have to work hard to read plenty of good non-fiction, as you must with shakespeare if you are not good friends with him already. i’m an easily pleased reader, i think. but i found as i progressed through the book i was granting love remains too many concessions. i was having to construct some special excuses and it got tiring.

it makes a pretty picture, but it is a tiresome book.