After seeing the new Bond film, I’ve just noticed on IMDB that Ben Whishaw, who plays Q, was in the film of Enduring Love, which also starred Daniel Craig.

This caught my attention mainly because I developed a very slight fixation with Enduring Love after seeing the trailer as a teenager. Fixation is of course a rather appropriate response to have to Enduring Love, but I didn’t know that at the time because I didn’t have any lasting impression of what the film was about. Despite that, it somehow caught my attention, even as I completely failed to fix in my memory what it was called. I remembered the scene with the hot air balloon, and (entirely mistakenly) that it featured Jim Carrey in a rare serious role. The first of these might just have been enough for me to track down the film; the second neatly sabotaged my efforts.

Nothing came of this until I found a copy of the novel on one of my parents’ bookshelves. It had a balloon and a reference to a major film on the cover, which was basically enough to confirm that this was the book on which the film I had sustained a nagging interest in for a few years was based. By this time, that interest had decayed into curiosity about what the film was. The cover was enough to resolve that, and some rudimentary Googling was enough to disabuse me of my notion that the part of the mentally ill stalker was played by Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. Some time later, I finally got around to reading Enduring Love, and found it OK.

I still haven’t seen the film, but this tiny coincidence brought it to my mind. That coincidence is of course slightly boosted by the fact that the plot of Enduring Love is driven by someone falling out of the sky. I looked up the trailer on YouTube. At the very start of it, Daniel Craig puts a lot of emphasis on the word ‘bond’, and then Rhys Ifans (who looks nothing like Jim Carrey) says ‘Everything happens for a reason’. I feel this final brace of coincidences, together with the manifest untruth of the latter statement, brings this minor obsession to a close, and I can safely never think about it again unless I decide at some point to actually watch the unremarkably-received film of a novel I enjoyed a bit.

Incidentally, the trailer I’ve linked above features the name ‘Rhys Ifans’ in large capital letters, and doesn’t feature the name ‘Jim Carrey’ in any letters at all. I have decided that this is not the trailer I saw.

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