Intimacy

How much does she know?

In Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, the protagonists Mary and Colin are in a foreign city, surrounded by the unfamiliar, but manage to remain inward. They do not truly interact with Venice, the probable setting for the novel, and instead maintain a comforting routine. Although they “set out each morning after breakfast with their money, sunglasses, and maps” and “dutifully fulfill[] the many tasks of tourism the ancient city imposed,” there is no sense of engagement with Venice (12). For example, they “had yet to enter a shop,” a place of social interaction where they would be forced to communicate with others (12). They have trouble finding restaurants and frequently get lost, demonstrating their difficulty adapting to a tourist lifestyle. Though they are “on holiday,” they don’t seem to enjoy their vacation or Venice but wander the city more out of tourist’s obligation than out of pleasure. They continually use the term “on holiday” as an excuse for everything that goes wrong, as though it can justify their discontent.

Being “on holiday” appears to make them unhappy, as they seem ill suited for the tourist lifestyle. Traveling forces one to explore the unfamiliar and step outside one’s comfort zone, which scares Mary and Colin. As a result, they become more inward, only really talking and engaging with each other until they meet Robert and Caroline. Their intimacy becomes a burden, “a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches” (13). McEwan writes that alone “they could have explored the city with pleasure, followed whims,” could have acted like normal tourists (13). Their intimacy, however, forces them inward and away from the city, as “with each step the city would recede as they locked tighter into each other’s presence” (13).

This closeness with each other presents a problem when other people enter their realm. Take the maid, for instance, who parallels and even foreshadows Robert and Caroline in her familiarity with their behavior. She comes into their room while they are out, lines up their shoes, folds their dirty clothes, and arranges loose change in little stacks, touching and reordering all their personal objects. She closely knows their personal belongings yet she is a total outsider to them. At first, this makes Mary and Colin uneasy and they are “inhabited by this intimacy with a stranger they rarely saw (12). But they slowly grow accustomed to it and even begin to depend on her.

Similarly, Robert and Caroline are strangers who know intimate details of Mary and Colin’s lives. Though Robert and Caroline only learn about the couple through stalking, there is still a parallel between them and the maid; both are strangers who are familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Mary and Colin’s lives. Robert takes dozens of candid pictures of Colin, which together freeze “every familiar expression, the puzzled frown, the puckered lips about to speak” and each photograph appears “to celebrate a different aspect of that fragile face” (115). The pictures paint an intimate portrait of Colin, one that allows Robert and Caroline to feel like they really know him. The characteristics of his face lend insight into his behavior just as the personal objects the maid rearranges indicate details about Mary and Colin’s life. In both situations, a stranger grows acquainted with the couple without direct human communication. This even parallels Mary and Colin’s own reluctance to engage in social interaction, perhaps suggesting that their inwardness made them more vulnerable.