Reflections: The Comfort of Strangers

Ian McEwan's short novel The Comfort of Strangers reads like an exercise in suspense-creation. The book opens with a liberally minded couple on holiday drowning in the lazy pleasures of taking one another for granted while disengaging from all social interactions except for with one another. They stay in bed napping and making love until driven from the sheets by hunger. Then, they walk together, dine together, and return to the room together, following the form of the perfect romantic getaway. Their relationship rests on the foundations that most modern readers will find familiar: they share ideas, bury disagreements behind the assumption of agreement, and take pleasure in discussing the strength of their bond, especially comparing it to that of other couples they know. The seemingly pointless length of the descriptions of their days foreshadows an impending end to them.

Wandering the streets of an unnamed foreign city (presumably Venice, or some fictional approximation of it), they meet a local couple whose perverse attachment to one another provides a carnival mirror reflection of their love, exaggerating the grotesque consequences of the social isolation that is normal to holidays but dangerous as an everyday practice. Drawn out of their isolation and into this couple's orbit by the rules of polite society, they make themselves vulnerable to a blood-chilling attack on their relationship and on their assumption that immoderate love is a boon.

McEwan allows no escape from the story's horror, and no redemption from its persistent and lingering misanthropy. He paints a portrait of human nature at its worst, and at its most self-indulgent, and asks the reader to decide on which she can pin her sympathy.

Reflections: The Woman and the Ape

Peter Hoeg's The Woman and the Ape flirts with many complex social issues, and yet at every turn dodges the  responsibility of turning social critic. Hoeg is, first and last, a storyteller. In this tale, Hoeg introduces us to Madelene, a woman who escaped her family through marriage, and her marriage through drink. Only when her husband, a behavioral scientist, starts experimenting on a curiously man-like ape, does Madelene find reason enough in the world to push through her alcoholic haze into the depressing realities of post-industrial London.

Madelene is an extraordinary character. She can never be pinned down by simple adjectives, as she changes dramatically--and yet never unrealistically--from page to page. Mistress when we meet her of the craft of hiding behind artfully applied make up, she masters as we get to know her the craft of hiding behind the expectations and assumptions of others. She sneaks into office buildings, terrorizes veterinarians, crashes exclusive galas, and passes a shaved ape off as her ailing grandmother all because those around her believe her to be utterly incapable of doing anything at all besides artfully applying that make up.

Hoeg's writing is as nimble as his heroine, and one's emotions are wholly involved in the story telling. He shares Carl Hiaasen's outraged sense of humor and brisk narrative style.

While this book does have an almost fatal flaw (which a distaste for spoilers won't allow me to go into), it remains an example of smart, imaginative fiction, and an enticement to look into more of Hoeg's novels.

With Thanks

The book blogging world is peopled with lovely inhabitants. Members of the community united to create a 400 person secret Santa gift exchange. My secret Santa sent me a book I've long been looking forward to reading: Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country. I raise a glass to my Santa, and wish her and all readers a wonderful holiday season.