Enduring Love Isobel Manley.
6RCR.
How effective is chapter 1 as an opening chapter?.
Consider the 3 main characters and talk about developing relationships between them.
Chapter 1.
Enduring Love starts with 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. If they all hold on, their combined weight will keep the basket's occupant, a 10-year-old boy, safely aground. 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.
Ian McEwan's choices of words in his novel Enduring Love', especially in the first chapter are extremely significant to the progression of the storyline.
The first sentence of chapter one:.
The beginning is simple to mark', is an unambiguous yet curious commencement to the novel.
McEwan refrains from a long descriptive first sentence as expected in many novels, instead, leaving the reader already speculating on how, as the plot progresses, the story may not be so straightforward.
The transformation was absolute'.
This is a powerful sentence, already demonstrating the quickly progressing storyline present in the novel.
Many novels have at least two pages of descriptive text setting the scenes and introducing the reader to the story. McEwan however regards this as unnecessary (as in many cases, it is) and plunges into the heart of the action merely three sentences into the chapter.
This conveys an urgency that enthrals the reader in the first paragraph, which is sometimes difficult to achieve.
Knowing what I know now, it's odd to evoke the figure of Jed Parry, directly ahead of me'.