Product Description

One windy spring day in the Chilterns Joe Rose's calm, organized lifeis shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon, Rose reflects,could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Rose, something passes between them - something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Rose's beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love ofhis wife Clarissa and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54335 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .70" h x 5.00" w x 7.60" l, .45 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 247 pages

From Amazon.com
Joe Rose has planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States. To complete the picture, there's even a "helium balloon drifting dreamily across the wooded valley." But as Joe and Clarissa watch the balloon touch down, their idyll comes to an abrupt end. The pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope, while the only passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump down. As the wind whips into action, Joe and four other men rush to secure the basket. Mother Nature, however, isn't feeling very maternal. "A mighty fist socked the balloon in two rapid blows, one-two, the second more vicious than the first," and at once the rescuers are airborne. Joe manages to drop to the ground, as do most of his companions, but one man is lifted sky-high, only to fall to his death.

In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. (In one of the novel's many ironies, the balloon eventually lands safely, the boy unscathed.) But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.

Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye.

From Library Journal
Maxwell Caulfield gives a chilly narration of McEwan's novel about a tragic incident that opens the door to an encounter between a stalker and his victim. Joe Rose and his wife, Clarissa, enjoying a picnic, are interrupted when a hot-air balloon escapes from its moorings with a child on board. McEwan's engrossing account of the event describes in minute detail the moment the balloon takes flight to the death of one of the would-be rescuers. It is during this time that Jed approaches Joe and begins a series of harassing phone calls, letters, and personal confrontations. The first-person narrative by Joe is effective in following the disturbed young man as he drives a wedge between the couple. Caulfield's reading brings out the highly emotional character of the pursuer and the frustration of his quarry. Recommended for fiction collections.?Catherine Swenson, Norwich Univ. Lib., Northfield, VT
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
When reviewing the abridged version of this book (AudioFile, Oct./Nov. l998), Robin Whitten was troubled by "the disruption of McEwan's careful structure by abridgment." Obviously there is no such problem here. As Joe Rose leans over the body of the man who has fallen from an escaping hot-air balloon, he encounters a man, named Jed Parry, who will shadow him relentlessly--haunting his apartment and answering machine, disrupting his work, almost destroying his marriage--until a final, violent confrontation. Since all this is reported in the first person, David Threlfall, the narrator, becomes Joe Rose, the victim. His rational voice and the deranged voice of Jed Parry become locked in an escalating spiral of suspense. It is a powerful performance...maybe even more powerful than some faint-hearted listeners might wish. Can an audiobook be too good? J.C. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine