Enduring Love (Canada ed)

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. 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.

Considered by many critics to be the novel that should have won Ian McEwan the Booker Prize, ENDURING LOVE is an extraordinary exploration of love, faith, and obsession, the story of two delicately ordered lives thrown out of balance by a desperate, deranged passion. Joe Rose is a scientist by training and a science writer by trade. Though he has a secure, loving relationship with his wife, Clarissa, the stillborn specter of the scientific career he might have had still haunts him. Clarissa also has her ghosts -- those of the children a medical mishap has left her unable to bear. Despite these disappointments, they have established a careful emotional equilibrium between themselves and their professional lives. But while hiking through the Chiltern Hills one windy spring afternoon, Joe and Clarissa become unscripted players in a hot-air balloon tragedy that leaves one would-be rescuer dead and saddles Joe with the ardent and unwanted attentions of a disturbed young man.

Journal of the American Medical Association

The novel is lyrical and engrossing. Episodes have an emotional impact that forges associations (I will always remember of a piece the opening chapter and the setting in which I read it). Readers of JAMA will find pleasure and provocation in Enduring Love.

On a windy spring day in the Chilterns, the calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he witnesses a tragic accident: a hot-air balloon with a boy trapped in its basket is being tossed by the wind, and in the attempt to save the child, a man is killed. A stranger named Jed Parry joins Rose in helping to bring the balloon to safety. But unknown to Rose, something passes between Parry and himself on that day--something that gives birth to an obsession in Parry so powerful that it will test the limits of Rose's beloved rationalism, threaten the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drive him to the brink of murder and madness. Brilliant and compassionate, this is a novel of love, faith, and suspense, and of how life can change in an instant From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—a brilliant and compassionate novel of love, faith, and suspense, and of how life can change in an instant. The calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he sees a man die in a freak hot-air balloon accident. A stranger named Jed Parry joins Rose in helping to bring the balloon to safety, but unknown to Rose, something passes between Parry and himself on that day—something that gives birth to an obsession in Parry so powerful that it will test the limits of Rose's beloved rationalism, threaten the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.Don't miss Ian McEwan's new novel, Lessons. The calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he sees a man die in a freak hot-air balloon accident. A stranger named Jed Parry joins Rose in helping to bring the balloon to safety, but unknown to Rose, something passes between Parry and himself on that day—something that gives birth to an obsession in Parry so powerful that it will test the limits of Rose's beloved rationalism, threaten the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drive him to the brink of murder and madness. From the Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement, here is a brilliant and compassionate novel of love, faith, and suspense, and of how life can change in an instant. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREI cannot remember the last time I read a novel so beautifully written or utterly compelling from the very first page' Bill Bryson, -Sunday TimesOne windy spring day in the Chilterns, Joe Rose's calm, organized life is 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 of his wife Clarissa and drive him to the brink of murder and madness. A homosexual attempts to lure a man away from his woman. It happens in England after the two men meet in a balloon accident. When the straight man declines the advances, the homosexual begins stalking him, contemplating ways to get rid of the woman. By the author of The Innocent The bestselling author of "The Innocent" spins a tale of life intruded upon. After attempting to rescue a child from a runaway hot-air balloon, Joe Rose finds himself part of a living nightmare of suspicion and obsession