Synopsis: The calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he sees a man die in a freak hot-air balloon accident. From the Publisher:īook Description Soft cover. 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.
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. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. 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. If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport. 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.Īpart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals-the contingencies-that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. (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. In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach.
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. "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. Mother Nature, however, isn't feeling very maternal. As the wind whips into action, Joe and four other men rush to secure the basket. The pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope, while the only passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump down. 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. Joe Rose has planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States.
0 kommentar(er)
