Product Description

As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though someone is waiting for them who cares deeply about how they appear. When they meet a man with a disturbing story to tell, they become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137594 in Books
• Published on: 1994-11-01
• Released on: 1994-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
"As the best young writer on this island, McEwan's evocations of feeling and place and his analysis of mood and relationship remain haunting and compelling."?The Times

"As always, McEwan manages his own idiom with remarkable grace and inventiveness; his characters are at home in their dreams, and so is he."?Guardian

"His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing."?The Times

"The Maestro."?New Statesman

"McEwan has?a style and a vision of life of his own...No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him."?John Fowles

"A sparkling and adventurous writer."?Dennis Potter

?Haunting and compelling.? ?The Times

?McEwan, that master of the taciturn macabre, so organizes his narrative that, without insisting anything, every turn and glimpse is another tightening of the noose. The evils of power and the power of evil are transmitted with a steely coolness, and in a prose that has a feline grace.? ?Observer -- Review

Review
"As the best young writer on this island, McEwan's evocations of feeling and place and his analysis of mood and relationship remain haunting and compelling."—The Times

"As always, McEwan manages his own idiom with remarkable grace and inventiveness; his characters are at home in their dreams, and so is he."—Guardian

"His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing."—The Times

"The Maestro."—New Statesman

"McEwan has—a style and a vision of life of his own...No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him."—John Fowles

"A sparkling and adventurous writer."—Dennis Potter

“Haunting and compelling.” –The Times

“McEwan, that master of the taciturn macabre, so organizes his narrative that, without insisting anything, every turn and glimpse is another tightening of the noose. The evils of power and the power of evil are transmitted with a steely coolness, and in a prose that has a feline grace.” –Observer

From the Inside Flap
As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though someone is waiting for them who cares deeply about how they appear. When they meet a man with a disturbing story to tell, they become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.

Customer Reviews

Dark, dangerous, twisted
This is probably the most effective horror novel I've ever read. Not that there are demons, monsers, or flying body bits, but in that it lays bare some truly horrifying facets of human nature, and what they can cause people to do. It's haunting and not for the timid. Or the weak of stomach.

Colin and Mary are lovers on vacation in Italy, increasingly bored and uninterested in one another. They amble around hotels and tourist streets without any genuine interest. Then they accidently bump into Robert, a seemingly friendly man with an unhappy family history and an initially harmless attachment to the couple.

From there, Colin and Mary stay with Robert and his crippled wife Caroline, who seems friendly but oddly insistent that they stay for awhile. Colin and Mary rediscover their physical attraction to one another, but they also are increasingly uneasy with the forceful friendship of Robert and Carllin. And soon that friendship is revealed as terrible, erotic, and violent.

Ian McEwan's books remind me of those movies where the skies are cloudy, the alleys are dank, and everybody is hiding secret motives. There is a sort of dark aura from the beginning on the book onward, as if tragedy is creeping up from page one onward. Despite this gradual buildup, and the increasingly horrific life stories that Robert and Caroline tell, the climax is a horrible shock.

McEwan's writing swings freely between oddly dreamlike and shockingly vivid -- if anything, the vividity of his writing is more so because the weird stuff is written in such poetic prose. His dialogue is mostly good, except when the characters launch into philosophical ramblings about women and men and whether women want to be dominated. He is extremely talented in portraying the few characters -- Colin and Mary are bland but essentially harmless, while Caroline and Robert crackle with energy, but, they are extremely frightening. This book is not one for kids, it has a lot of sexual content, including some really twisted, frightening stuff. Heck, some adults may not like it.

It's a quick read, took me only half an hour to read it. But it's dark and haunting, and not for thw weak of heart.

Good Early McEwan
Many of the trademarks we have come to expect in McEwan novels are already here in this early novel published in the U. S. in 1981, the ironic title, the complexity, the psychological tension, the ambiguities, the questions left unanswered. I was handicapped in reading this novel in that I had already seen the movie so it was impossible not to see Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson getting lost in those maze-like alleys in Venice. (Nowhere in this slim novel, however, does McEwan name the city where the sinister action takes place.} On the other hand, since I knew the outcome, I could look for and admire the clues the author gives as to what will happen. McEwan does an excellent job of setting the tone for what ultimately occurs early in the novel. As early as page 17: "Colin and Mary had never left the hotel so late, and Mary was to attribute much of what followed to this fact." There are lots of references to the sexual tension between men and women in addition to many homoerotic allusions throughout the book that prepare you, at least in part, for the shattering climax of this horrific little novel.

McEwan always gives the reader a story that appeals both to the intellect and the emotions. As usual, he doesn't disappoint us. One of the joys of living in these times is awaiting a new McEwan novel.

Atmospheric and haunting
I should start out by saying that I was not among those who felt that the novelist's later work, "Amsterdam", lived up to the hype and acclaim that it received. I enjoyed that story, but I am sure there were other works that were more deserving of the Booker Prize. That said, I was more absorbed by this story, finding it both suffocating and intense.

McEwan gives a very graphic and descriptive sense of a city, presumably Venice, where a bored couple, Colin and Mary, find themselves for a languorous vacation, filling in the days with aimless wandering, pot-smoking and sex, on occasion. The street sounds, the high-walled, narrow lanes and alleyways, add to the sense of entrapment that gradually makes its way into the emotional state of the main characters. Their encounter, which they later come to realize was by design, with the jovial but intense Robert, leaves them non-plussed but curious. Their time with Robert, and then his wife Caroline, brings them almost unconsciously under an unspoken kind of spell that results in a rediscovery of passion bordering on obsession for eachother. Perhaps more rational people would have fled much earlier from Robert - of course, if they had, there would be no story, or perhaps a different story to tell here. Colin and Mary, both blinded by their idealism, allowed themselves to be manipulated by a person with a deeply obsessive personality, who embraces fantasy with a dangerous exuberance. The story leaves questions where we look for answers, raises doubts when we think we have it figured out, and through it all, McEwan writes with a kind of macabre relish that is at times discomfiting, but left me impressed by the storytelling.