The Comfort of Strangers, Ian McEwan

Steven Klein, Stefano + Domenico "Dolce Vita"

(May 30) This is a take on an Edgar Allan Poe story, somewhat longer and totally modernized. (Specifically, it reminds me of “The Cask of Amontillado” -- they have slightly different plots, but they end similarly and create exactly the same eerie mood and creepy-Venetian atmosphere.) I kind of wish I’d known this going in -- I find it easier to stomach gruesome action when I’m expecting it.

Having read only Atonement and Enduring Love, I didn’t realize McEwan was well known as a writer of the macabre. I see now that Enduring Love has a creep factor, but, when I was reading it, it just seemed to be about the vagaries of perception, like Atonement, with maybe just a little extra psycho twist to it.

Now that I look up media reviews, I see that the echoes of Poe / Pinter / Kafka are taken for granted in McEwan: “McEwan, that master of the taciturn macabre…” (Observer); “In the U.K., … he's long been dubbed Ian Macabre” (Salon); “His gift for the cold and scary is well established, too: among the critical praise that festoons his book jackets, the word 'macabre' crops up more than once” (New York Review of Books).

So I was obviously missing a big piece of the McEwan picture and this Goth tendency has come as a nasty surprise. I was also disappointed once again by lapses in coherence such as I saw in Atonement and Enduring Love. Richard P. Brickner summed it up perfectly in the New York Times:

The book, as it develops, requires the reader to accept a questionably large amount of innocence and acquiescence in Colin and Mary, and what almost seems like a careless overdose of perversity in Robert and Caroline. On the literal level, while not actually unbelievable, ''The Comfort of Strangers'' is hard to go along with at every moment.

Brickner goes on to say that all this is forgivable: “As a nightmare, however, it is convincing and clinging. Its details are so imaginative and precise as to be a source of delight,” but I'm really offended by the lack of artistic harmony. It’s the difference between literature and vividly told newspaper stories. There’s nothing in all of The Comfort of Strangers to suggest that Colin and Mary are subconsciously looking for the kind of experience they get, or that they deserve it because of blindness or recklessness on their part, nor any forewarning whatsoever, so the ending just seems sort of random, and cheap, even.

Altogether, I’m put off binging any further on McEwan books.