ENDURING LOVE

The riveting opening chapter of Enduring Love is recommended as a brilliant, self-contained story of a hot air balloon accident. It can be listened to here or in The New Yorker Outloud, produced (Mercury Records) earlier this year with author McEwan reading. It's a stellar example of how good fiction and fine storytelling can combine to be a remarkable listening experience. Maxwell Caulfield is excellent and portrays this confluence of strangers with skillful vocal color and pacing. In the rest of the novel, witnesses to this tragic event--science writer Joe Rose, his wife, fanatic Jed Parry, and others--are thrown together and can never be the same again. Caulfield delivers several highly charged scenes between Clarissa and Joe, and between Parry and Joe, in which the modulation and extravagance of emotion are handled deftly. If any fault in this program exists, it is the disruption of McEwan's careful structure by abridgment. That aside, do not miss the first scene as the accident becomes a catalyst to the lives of each witness. R.F.W. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/NOV 98]