getting lost before getting started

Ian McEwan’s novella The Comfort of Strangers takes place in what may or may not be Venice. The ambiguity regarding location serves to provide a sense of displacement that manifests itself in the ironically uncomfortable way the characters navigate the city and their own lives. Neither Colin nor Mary are satisfied with their lives, merely existing together as one entity rather than two due to the longevity of their relationship, which spanned seven years. They meander around the city, unnamed, armed with maps either too generalized or too specific, and little desire to explore. Both of them blow off their mistakes by reminding each other that they’re “on holiday” (24), resulting in their blasé attitude to what they were actually doing.

Colin and Mary are drifters, through and through. They are fairly unaware of their surroundings and seem to be merely coasting through their vacation, minds full of the people they left back home and the state of disrepair their relationship had fallen into. Colin goes so far to say “the thing about a successful holiday is that it makes you want to go home” (106), giving way to the assumption that the two of them getting away to a foreign land was a means for them to mend whatever they had between them and return back home a whole, unbroken unit. Due to their unawareness regarding the perils of travel and whatever is going on around them, they fall prey to the plotting of Robert and Caroline and, in true Travel Fictions fashion, die (Colin) and lose themselves (Mary). Much like the desert in The Sheltering Sky, the unknown location of their story (presumed to be much like Venice) serves to exemplify the way that neither Mary nor Colin had a chance at finding their way out of the city from the very beginning when they got lost in the city, which resulted in their meeting Robert.