Enduring Love [Signed 1st Printing]

McEwan, Ian

ISBN 10: 0224050311 / ISBN 13: 9780224050319

Published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1997

About this Item

1st printing of the first British hardcover edition SIGNED by the author on the title page in black ink. Bound in grey cloth with black endpapers. The book is tight with sharp corners. The heel of the book's spine has softened. The jacket is bright, crisp and price intact. There are three long, shallow grooves in the surface of the creme-colored back panel. It's unobtrusive, and there are no corresponding marks on the book.

Seller Inventory # 002245

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Enduring Love [Signed 1st Printing]
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224050311
• ISBN 13: 9780224050319
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • British Fiction, Autographed

About this title

Synopsis

This story begins on a windy summer's day in the Chilterns when the calm, organized 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. Totally compelling, utterly and terrifyingly convincing, ENDURING LOVE is the story of how an ordinary man can be driven to the brink of murder and madness by another's delusions.

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