The Chivers Audiobook I listened to was copyrighted in 1981, the same year Ian McEwan's second novel, The Comfort of Strangers, came out in book form.
As McEwan said when he spoke in Vancouver at the invitation of the Vancouver Writers' Fest in 2010, he intentionally set out to push the boundaries of the novel beyond the predictable and expected format.
He certainly did that with this novel, venturing into the territory just beyond the map of normality into the edge of the violence that accompanies sexual obsession, and probing the psychology of those who enjoy it.
Opening scene: a young couple on a romantic holiday in an exotic foreign city. The suspense begins when lovers Mary and Colin venture out after dark mapless, in search of a restaurant.
The moment an overly polite stranger called Robert grasps the wrist of Colin to lead the vulnerable tourists to what turns out to be his bar, he begins to draw them into his orbit. They drink with Robert for most of the night while he tells them stories of his ghastly childhood as the son of an oppressive and dominant diplomat father.
The novel, told mainly from the point of view of Mary, moves forward with slow inevitability. Mary and Colin have chance after chance to pull away from the unhealthy atmosphere of their self-appointed guide and his strange wife.
Yet in spite of increasingly dramatic warning signs that something is seriously wrong about Robert and Caroline, the holiday couple tacitly agree to let these peculiar strangers reel them in.
The scene where Mary swims far out into the sea and Colin follows in a panic is brilliantly executed, as is the unspoken agreement between the two to get off the ferry at a place where they are likely to encounter their alluring tormentors again.
Even though the plot has a certain inevitability, the end is a shock when it comes. McEwan's flawless prose points to the darker aspects of human nature, the primitive association of danger with sexual excitement.
By no means a pleasant story, this is still a fascinating tale that evokes a shudder of recognition: one of the things humans do is to seek out the thrill of danger, often with disastrous results.
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