What he is describing here is “an enormous balloon filled with helium,, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including ourselves and all our thoughts.” A child is trapped in the gondola, his grandfather, the pilot, is outside the balloon, on the ground, struggling to control its movements, and four other men run to the rescue, try to grab onto ropes hanging from that runaway balloon to pull it down. The protagonist and narrator makes his living writing articles and books on science. The encounter that would unhinge us was minutes away, its enormity disguised from us by the colossus in the center of the field, which drew us in with the power of a terrible ratio that set fabulous magnitude against the puny human distress at its base.” To the buzzard, Parry and I were tiny forms, our white shirts brilliant against the green, rushing toward each other like lovers, innocent of the grief this entanglement would bring. Knowing what I know now, it’s odd to evoke the figure of Jed Parry directly ahead of me, emerging from a line of beeches on the far side of the field, a quarter of a mile away, running into the wind. the motorist, John Logan, whose car was banked on the grass verge with its door, or doors, wide open. “I see us from two hundred feet up, through the eyes of the buzzard we had watched earlier, soaring, circling, and dipping in the tumult of currents: five men running silently toward the center of a hundred-acre field. And there, suddenly, from different points around the field, four other men were converging on the scene, running like me. There was the shout again, and a child’s cry, enfeebled by the wind that roared in the tall trees along the hedgerows. What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak. The transformation was absolute: I don’t recall dropping the corkscrew, or getting to my feet, or making a decision, or hearing the caution Clarissa called after me.

We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. “This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man’s shout. The protagonist Joe Rose, a science writer, and his wife Clarissa Mellon-a university professor who has just returned to London from the U.S., where she was doing research on the poet John Keats-are about to have a picnic.

The beginning of this novel (Random House, 262 pages), pervaded, as one reviewer writes, with “dazzling cinematic bravura,” is worth citing at some length.

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan