The Comfort of Strangers

The Comfort of Strangers, a novella of just 100 pages, shows the striking difference between early and late McEwan. His first books, such as The Cement Garden and this particular one, have an edgy, fresh, compelling quality, while the later books are much better-crafted, well-thought-out and concerned with characters rather than relationships. I can’t say one is better than the other; they feel like entirely distinct characters, but The Comfort of Strangers had only one strength – the extremely believable strangeness of Colin and Mary’s love.

Colin and Mary are an English couple on holiday, presumably in Venice (it’s never named, but where else do you get in a boat and call it a taxi?), and while they are in love, they are so familiar with one another, so used to being together that they are both bored. They barely speak, and when they do, they mostly bicker. They sometimes feel as though they are simply the same person.

One day, trying to find a restaurant still open so that they can have a late dinner, they meet a strange man who takes them to a bar, tells them his life story and makes them promise to come and visit him. Only after this, in the middle of the narrative, do we discover that Colin and Mary are not middle-aged and plain, as they have seemed, but a beautiful young couple: Mary has had two children, but still gets attention on the beach, and Colin is a veritable Adonis who looks ‘like a god’ in a woman’s nighty. Indeed, Robert, the strange man from the bar who seems to be keeping his young wife imprisoned and abused in their home, has been taking surreptitious photographs of him…

It’s a rather self-consciously shocking little piece of macabre melodrama, which in its brevity seems almost abortive, but worth reading just for the strange state of entropied love Colin and Mary naturally feel. It’s like watching a guttering candle flame blown by a strange new breeze and glowing brighter for a moment. The story surrounding it may not be especially interesting, but that achingly painful familiarity certainly is.