![]() ![]() But when one of them drops off, it rapidly becomes a race not to be the last one holding on, the one who will not have time to jump before the ascent of the balloon makes escape impossible. If they all hold on, their combined weight will keep the basket's occupant, a 10-year-old boy, safely aground. To introduce at this late stage an unreliable narrator is perverse: it recapitulates on the level of gimmick, the novel's central theme, that unreliability is an ineradicable part of what we are.Įnduring Love starts with a set-piece, a ballooning accident whose most agonising aspect is that five men - Joe being one of them - are for a moment hanging by ropes from the wind-buffeted basket. McEwan is anything but a crude writer, even when he chooses extreme subject matter, and such a sharp-elbowed nudge to the reader is out of character. ![]() Immediately before he lies to the police, or to himself, or merely the reader, Joe has been thinking about a truth free of self-interest, doubting whether a willed objectivity can save us from our engrained habits of mind, and has even asked explicitly, in a sentence standing alone as a paragraph: 'But exactly what interests of mine were served by my own account of the restaurant lunch?' ![]()
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