The Comfort of Strangers

The Comfort of Strangers starts with an epigraph from Cesare Pavese, "Travelling is a brutality," it claims.  This isn't the best thing to read at the beginning of two days journeying.  Even if the ultimate destination is family.  In fact, if you pair this with my general mind-set that agrees with Douglas Coupland's claim that, "All families are psychotic" you have a pretty accurate picture of my feelings as I embarked upon the book and upon my travels.

Now, I actually quite like Ian McEwan.  There are definitely issues with his writing and they crop up again in The Comfort of Strangers but in all, I like the man.  This book is about Colin and Mary, a couple on holiday in an unnamed city who meet Robert and Caroline, natives of said unnamed city who go in for the Kathy Bates in Misery type of hospitality.  At just 100 pages it's a short book but it says everything that it needs to.  At times it even feels as though McEwan's added in descriptions of just everything and political arguments to reach the magic 100 pages that define a novel.  (I expect you're all confused about this.  In retrospect, I know the "it's not a novel unless it's 100 pages long" rule is a lie, but it's a lie that was told to me by a teacher when I was very young, so it stuck).  I know I've said that with Pat Barker's short books you're left wanting more, but that's not the case with McEwan.  I felt exactly the same way about Amsterdam.

Colin and Mary are very typical McEwan characters.  They're very Guardian.  The only real difference is that Mary hasn't actually succeeded in her painfully middle class, high-paying artistic career.  The heroes of Amsterdam and Enduring Love would weep.  It's Mary's former job in an all female theatre company that brings up one of the more interesting conversations, in a book littered with half formed discussions of feminism.  Caroline is appalled at the idea of all female plays and asks incredulously that without a man, "what could happen?"  I know I work feminism into this blog a fair amount but it's an important issue and it's important to me, so when I'm dealt a book like this that shows the difficulties of women who enjoy a subservient role I should be over the moon.  Instead, I'm a little disappointed.  The book's not long enough to do any more than identify that there is an issue and doesn't begin to touch upon all the complexities.  Robert becomes a caricature at times, spouting of speeches reminiscent of the verses of It's a Man's Man’s Man’s World.  Robert and Caroline remain two dimensional villains, so the debate is lost.

This is a good book and a good story.  My only issues with it are the slightly niggles that crop up in almost all of McEwan’s books: silly stuff like the amount of times he uses the phrase “love-making” or a derivative of it. It’s like he’s never heard of another euphemism for sex.  For some reason, McEwan’s refusal to name the city annoys me too.  I know he’s going for mystery, but it’s feels like such a clunky device by which to achieve it.  I can’t help but think he could have found a more subtle way to unnerve his audience.

My next blog will be all about Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.  I’ve actually already finished it, so it should be up soon.