Enduring Love: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Joe Rose and his wife, Clarissa Mellon, are having a picnic. They’ve journeyed to the Chilterns, a hilly region in southeast England, to celebrate Clarissa’s return from a long trip abroad. Joe hears a shout and a child’s cry from across the field, and he immediately begins to run toward the source of the noise. As Joe recounts this story for the reader, he imagines not only his own figure, but also those of the four other men who run with him toward the shouts and cries. Joe envisions the five of them converging on the center of the field as if viewing them from the perspective of a buzzard flying overhead.

As Joe recalls this moment, he pauses to consider what Clarissa is doing at the same instant. Joe reveals that Clarissa walks (but does not run) toward the field’s center and is thus “well placed as an observer” of what happens next.

After setting the scene in such a way, Joe finally reveals what the characters are running toward: a massive hot-air balloon in whose basket a boy, Harry Gadd, is trapped. Joe describes the balloon as a “furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes.” From its basket dangles a series of ropes, and clinging to one is Harry’s grandfather, James Gadd, who is trying desperately to prevent the wind from carrying the balloon away.

Here, Joe pauses, explaining to the reader that he is intentionally holding back information for a time in order to first recount the circumstances that brought him and Clarissa to the Chilterns in the first place. Clarissa, the reader is told, has been in America for six weeks researching the poet John Keats. Joe recalls picking up food and wine for the picnic, taking delivery of Clarissa’s belated birthday present, and journeying to the airport to get her. “Less than an hour later,” the pair have made their way to the field where they intend to picnic. Having never been apart for so long before, the two of them are thrilled to be reunited.

As Joe describes unpacking the picnic lunch, he summons again the moment in which he first hears the cries for help. The balloon from which those cries issue is “the size of a house,” and the man trying to secure it, James Gadd, is being “half dragged, half carried across the field.” As Joe springs into action, running toward the balloon, the wind drops for a moment, and Joe slows his pace. Yet John Logan, another of the men rushing toward the balloon, continues running at full speed. John Logan knows something, Joe alerts the reader, that Joe doesn’t yet realize. What Joe does understand, however, is that a “whole stage” of his life is closing as he makes the decision to run toward the balloon.

Sure enough, the wind “renew[s] its rage” before Joe can take too many more steps. Joe begins to run again but is beat to the balloon by John Logan, who takes hold of another of the dangling ropes. When Joe finally arrives at the center of the field, he is met by the remaining men: Jed Parry and two farm laborers, Joseph Lacey and Toby Greene. The four men join John Logan and James Gadd among the ropes, and each takes hold of one of them as James Gadd shouts orders.

Though James Gadd attempts to direct the men to whatever strategy he has in mind, he is “exhausted and emotionally out of control,” and the others ignore him. Instead, they begin to pull “hand over hand” on the ropes in an attempt to bring the basket to the ground. Beside them, however, is a dramatic slope, in which the field “drop[s] sharply away at a gradient of about twenty-five percent” before “level[ing] out into a gentle slope toward the bottom.”

Throughout these pages of recollection, Joe is clear that the men are “never a team”: the situation is too chaotic, the group has no clear leader, and each man attempts to tell the others what to do. Making matters worse, the endangered child, Harry Gadd, has ceased to respond to instructions and has instead entered “a state known as learned helplessness.” Terrified and paralyzed, the boy is unable to participate in his own rescue.

As the men bicker and curse, a great gust of wind cuts through the air again. Once more, Joe pauses his narrative to set the scene more precisely. According to his telling, the men have come to the edge of the slope. Beside Joe is John Logan, whom Joe now reveals to be “a family doctor from Oxford” and a member of a mountaineering club. Further along is Joseph Lacey, an older farm laborer, and beside him is his friend Toby Greene. The next man in the makeshift semicircle is James Gadd, and immediately next to him—across from Joe—is Jed Parry.

Joe emphasizes the chaos with which the attempted rescue is proceeding. The men are “breathless, excited, [and] determined on [their] separate plans.” Joe explains that while he, Joseph Lacey, and Toby Greene are trying to pull Harry Gadd from the basket, James Gadd is trying to climb over them, and Jed Parry and John Logan are shouting their own suggestions. As the great gust of wind arrives, James Gadd is knocked from the basket, and his “considerable weight” no longer contributes to the work of keeping the balloon anchored to the ground.

As a consequence of James Gadd’s being knocked aside, the balloon begins to rise into the air, taking the five remaining men—Joe, Jed Parry, Joseph Lacey, Toby Greene, and John Logan—with it. Joe recounts the infinitesimally brief moment of thought that follows: either he must hang on to his rope and hope that his weight (and that of the others) brings it down, or he must let go immediately.

Joe realizes that “every fraction of a second that passe[s] increase[s] the drop” and that the drop will eventually be fatal if he holds on too long. Though he doesn’t believe that he is the first to do so, he lets go of his rope and falls to the ground, as, around him, do Jed Parry, Joseph Lacey, and Toby Greene. Only John Logan continues to hang on, and with only his small weight to hold the balloon down, the man and basket begin to rise farther into the air.

By the time Joe regains his footing, the balloon, and John Logan, are “fifty yards away” and very high in the air. Unable to believe what is happening, Joe states that he expects some “freak physical law” to intervene on John Logan’s behalf, and he is surprised when “only ruthless gravity” asserts itself. Joe watches as John Logan slips down to the end of his rope, hangs on for a final moment, and then falls the terrible length to his death. The chapter ends with Joe confessing to the reader, “I’ve never seen such a terrible thing as that falling man.”