A dark novella of love and cruelty, The Comfort of Strangers is set in the romantic city of Venice, Italy. There, an attractive young English couple, Colin and Mary, spend an idyllic vacation. They have had a relationship for some time, and both feel that they need to decide whether they should get serious and make a long-term commitment to each other or perhaps end the relationship so that each can search elsewhere for such a commitment. They do not realize that their decision is about to be stolen from them in an act of predatory cruelty that will lead to one person’s death.
These modern urban liberals cannot comprehend the danger they are in because they cannot conceive of a world where selfishness trumps generosity so completely as to eradicate it; consequently, they are easy targets for the experienced hunters who are already on their trail.
Colin and Mary meet Robert and Caroline, a middle-aged couple with a luxurious villa in one of Venice’s best locations. Although the meeting seems to be the result of coincidence, the young couple has been chosen and stalked: Robert has been following them and photographing them. The appearance of friendship is merely part of the snare that has been painstakingly set to entrap and destroy something genuinely beautiful.
Robert and Caroline enjoy the suffering of others, and in several small ways they arrange to make Colin and Mary suffer without being able to connect the situation to Robert and Caroline. Colin and Mary are open to the world and to the people in it, making no effort to protect themselves or to suspect their acquaintances of being anything other than the somewhat pushy and rather presumptuous new friends they seem to be.
As Colin and Mary learn more about Robert and Caroline, they are lulled into a degree of pity for the older couple in spite of some odd warning signs that might have alerted a more wary pair; their own relationship is reignited as they come to appreciate the youth, love, and beauty they possess that Robert and Caroline have lost in spite of their privileged status. But even this renewed attachment is part of the punishment that has been planned for them. In a shocking and unexpected twist, the innocent fall prey to unimaginable cruelty.
In 1990, this novella became the basis of a film adaptation directed by Paul Schrader, with a screenplay by the noted British dramatist Harold Pinter, and starring Natasha Richardson, Rupert Everett, Christopher Walken, and Helen Mirren. The film has generated as much critical discussion as has the novel upon which it is based, drawing the attention of international scholars to McEwan’s work early in his career.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hall, Ann C. “Daddy Dearest: Harold Pinter’s The Comfort of Strangers.” In The Films of Harold Pinter. Edited by Steven H. Galen. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2001, 87–98.
Richter, Virginia. “Tourists Lost in Venice: Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now and Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers.” In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice. Edited by Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, 181–194.
Seaboyer, Judith. “Sadism Demands a Story: Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers,” Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 957–986.
Categories: British Literature, Crime Fiction, Literature, Novel Analysis
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