Enduring Love - Softcover

McEwan, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099780917 ISBN 13: 9780099780915

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Synopsis

This story begins on a windy summer's day in the Chilterns when the calm, organised life of Joe Rose is shattered by a ballooning accident. What happens is shocking and tragic, but strangely inconsequential. The consequences come after, for that fatal accident brings Joe together, briefly, 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 take desperate measures merely to stay alive.

About this title

Review:

Joe planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States. The perfect day turns to nightmare, however, when they are involved in freak ballooning accident in which a boy is saved but a man is killed

In itself, the accident would change the couple and the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. 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 de-familiarisation. 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. --Alex Freeman

Review:

" A remarkable novel, haunting and original and written in prose that anyone who writes can only envy."
--Washington Post
" Impeccably written--[McEwan] is the quietest and most lucid of stylists, with never a word wasted or fumbled."
--New York Review of Books
" A timeless tale about the way fate and faith shape our relationships--part existential fable about the human desire to control fate, [Enduring Love] is also, most affectingly, a story about the strength and fragility of married love."
--Glamour
" Eerie, slow-paced suspense worth its weight in caffeine for keeping you up all night."
--Entertainment Weekly
" [A] beautifully realized--novel about our responses to violence. It asks us to choose between competing visions of events, and, in the process, forces us to examine the way we react to both art and life when something terrible happens."
--Boston Globe
" McEwan's writing--is unflaggingly poised and, as usual, capable of excavating deep, painful trenches in the back corridors of the psyche and the heart."
--Miami Herald
" Cleverly imagined, beautifully executed --Mr. McEwan
has few peers."
--The Wall Street Journal

"A remarkable novel, haunting and original and written in prose that anyone who writes can only envy." --The Washington Post

"Impeccably written--[McEwan] is the quietest and most lucid of stylists, with never a word wasted or fumbled." --The New York Review of Books

"Eerie, slow-paced suspense worth its weight in caffeine for keeping you up all night." --Entertainment Weekly

"[A] beautifully realized--novel about our responses to violence. It asks us to choose between competing visions of events, and, in the process, forces us to examine the way we react to both art and life when something terrible happens." --The Boston Globe

"McEwan's writing--is unflaggingly poised and, as usual, capable of excavating deep, painful trenches in the back corridors of the psyche and the heart." --Miami Herald

"Cleverly imagined, beautifully executed--Mr. McEwan has few peers." --The Wall Street Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0099780917
• ISBN 13: 9780099780915
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256