Rating: 
Summary: A Big Waste of Time
Review: This is one of the worst novels I have ever read in mylife. The plot is totally unconvincing and extremely boring, and thereis no character development. The British couple cannot find a bottle of water to drink in the whole city of Venice, they wake up naked in a strange place and do not wonder where they are, the reader has no clue why they are bored with each other until they meet the sado-masochistic couple, endless and wordy descriptions of Venice, a woman who enjoys it when her husband breaks her ribs. Give me a break! If you want to read good modern British fiction writers, try Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Martin Amis, and of course, Salman Rushdie. McEwan is a waste of time, including his Amsterdam in which it is not difficult for the reader to guess the ending and again there is basically no character development.
Rating: 
Summary: Dark, dangerous, twisted
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: WORDY, IMPLAUSIBLE WASTE OF PAPER
Review: UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE AUTHOR, I READ THIS BOOK IMMEDIATELY AFTER FINISHING "A TALE OF TWO CITIES." COMPARISONS ASIDE, I GUESS THE MOST SUCCINCT REVIEW I CAN OFFER IS THIS: UPON REACHING THE DEPRESSING FINALE, I TOSSED IT INTO MY OFFICE WASTEBASKET. UNLESS THE CLEANING PEOPLE FIND IT, THIS COPY WILL REMAIN UNREAD BY ANY OTHER HUMAN BEING. I DO NOT WISH THE PAIN THAT THE CHARACTERS IN THIS BOOK SO ENJOYED TO BE VISITED UPON ANYONE THAT I KNOW.
Rating:
Summary: Awful
Review: Well at least it's short. It's true that if you read just a few sentences you can appreciate the prose style. But after 50 pages you might wonder why the author needed to spend that many pages just showing an aimless couple wandering around on vacation. None of that prose adds up to a thing.
Around page 50 they meet a mysterious man. It's all very crassly done, like something written by a student. No character feels remotely real.
Then for forty pages the main characters wonder about this mysterious new friend and his wife or girlfriend or whatever she is. Forty more pages to yawn through.
Then at page 90 an odd discovery, and then the bizarre, unrealistic, unbelievable, and gross, ending. An ending that has nothing to do with anything really. It's just very sick and violent. It comes from nowhere and leaves you dissatisfied.
I suppose Ian McEwan thought he was making some point, something about power relationships (oh very trendy!), but it's pretty thin. I've noticed that several bad authors do the following: they take a wisp of a philosophical idea that they haven't really thought out, and so they know they could never really write an essay or a non-fiction book about it. The ideas are too thin and incomplete. But then they hit on a brainstorm. They can write a novel that puts forwad this philosophical idea and they'll be forgiven for not having thought it through because, after all, it's only a story. Don Dellilo's "White Noise" has been accused of this. Italo Calvino makes a living off of it as does Mulan Kundera. Anyway, the consequence is a very manipulative plot-based novel or worse, a bad essay disguised as a novel, with little to no character development.
That is exactly the case with "The Comfort of Strangers". Let's put it this way, if Ian McEwan didn't already have a huge reputation he never could have gotten this published.
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