Enduring Love: A Novel (Paperback)

by Ian McEwan (Author)
Key Phrases: Jean Logan, John Logan, Jed Parry (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
After the calm of a pleasant afternoon picnic is punctured by a terrible accident?a man falls to his death as a hot-air balloon floats away, carrying a child?Joe Rose finds himself imbedded in the aftershock. One of several men who tried to hold down the balloon but eventually let go, he must reconcile his part in the tragedy with the threat posed by a stalker trying to save him through love. In turns obsessively morbid and cunningly funny, McEwan's deftly crafted prose holds the reader with the intensity of a thriller while engaging in a deep psychological exploration of shock, grief, the need for redemption, and, ultimately, the makeup of compassion and love.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (December 29, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385494149
• ISBN-13: 978-0385494144
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (171 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #65,622 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An engrossing, beautifully written book, January 14, 2000

By	Marion D. Lefrancois (Providence, RI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Many have praised the opening of this novel, and rightfully so, but that is only the first step in Ian McEwan's masterful creation. Told from the perspective of Joe Rose, a frustrated scientist turned journalist, the story captures our attention and never lets go. We share Joe's despair as the balloon rocks in the wind in the opening scene; we shiver as he finds himself being stalked by a delusional, obsessive intruder who thinks Joe is the love of his life. But Joe doesn't seem to trust himself entirely, and McEwan gives us plenty of reasons to distrust him even more, creating a tension in the narrative that makes us read on with a growing sense of impending calamity. In-between, McEwan explores the dichotomy of science and religion, logic and intuition, sanity and delusion. The writing is beautiful, as sharp and witty as we've come to expect of McEwan, but far more intricate and thoughtful. All that and a page-turner? It's a near-perfect read.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hitchcock would love this book, April 23, 2000

By	Ian Muldoon (Coffs Harbour, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

A very well crafted tale of horror, suspense, and an understanding of the psychological minutia of relationships which I read in one sitting. If you, dear reader, are interested in psychiatry, the place of scientists and science in the modern world, scientific fashion, obsessive behaviour, religious faith, love, jealousy, murder, moral choices, guilt, and fear then this is the book for you. It's also funny eg, '" I'll tell you in four words and nothing more. Someone wants to kill me." In the silence everyone, including me, totted up the words.'(p216) But if there is a common theme binding all these elements together, it's that no matter how well educated or intelligent you are there is no escaping the strait-jacket of your feelings, and its these feelings, of cowardice, of guilt, of fear, of the protaganist, Joe Rose, which propel the story forward in true Hitchcockian manner. The effects of love going sour, the hilarity of buying a gun from ex-hippies, the strangeness of an ordinary day turning weird are some of the many highlights of this book.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Enduring Impression, August 22, 2000

By	Bryan Bickford (Grand Rapids, MI United States) - See all my reviews

What strikes me about this book is the lasting impression it's left on me. I read it last summer and still find myself thinking about it and talking about it a year later. I recently finished another book and my wife asked me to compare it to any two others as a point of reference. Better than one book we'd both read, I said, but not as good as Enduring Love. For contemporary fiction, this one sticks with you.

McEwan does a fine job in painting the lead character Joe Rose, as well as the secondary players. His use of language is clear and simple, yet never elementary. The opening chapter is as powerfully imagined as any other I've read. The reader is literally hanging by a rope at the suspense of the scene. And it sets the tone for the psychological terror to come.

More than a summer read, Enduring Love explores corners of our psyches and personalities that we don't often come face to face with. Suspense, terror, humor, and the very real idea of love and romance are alive in this book, which I reccommend as enjoyable to readers of any of these genres.