2007 books

[peteryoung]

81) Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, 1981
McEwan has been a glaring omission from my fiction shelves for far too long, and The Comfort of Strangers is probably a good place to start as it captures that almost gothic, spiking sense of unease for which he's become famous. Set in Venice, the English holidaymakers Colin and Mary encounter the dangerous Robert and his genteel wife Caroline. I found Colin and Mary's initial emotional distance from each other to be brilliantly done, as if McEwan is somehow able to draw the spaces between them, and the way they then get closer to each other after their first encounter with the sadistic Robert becomes the emotional heart of the story before they're then drawn back to Robert's dangerous mind games like moths to a flame. Robert has an unsettling combination of sheer mysogyny and power that overwhelms all other characters; the way in which McEwan takes the wraps off Robert's concealed evil, and by simply discarding all he has created for Colin and Mary, is genuinely unsettling.

Comments

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

Don't ever watch the movie version stoned!

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

No problem there, but why not? I imagine Christopher Walken would make a very good Robert.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

It's unsettling, kitsch, creepy, overly sexualised and... ok, fine, you can watch it stoned as long as you promise to not do it with a bunch of other stoned people.