I. INTRODUCTION

Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love opens with a scene as powerful as any novel has given us in recent years: The pilot of a hot-air balloon, down in a field, is struggling against a sudden gust to get control; the balloon’s basket contains a child, perhaps the pilot’s son. The novel’s narrator, lunching in the countryside, realizes with horror that the pilot cannot gain control, that the balloon will be lifted up by the wind and almost certainly blown into high-tension lines nearby. Fortunately there are some others who have also spotted the problem, and the narrator and they converge on the balloon to help the pilot secure it. They are eager but uncoordinated; as McEwan says: “There may have been a communality of purpose, but we were never a team.”