Translated material
Remote access to eternity
The plot is the most McEwan-esque. A British couple (seven years of relationship: passions have subsided, common themes have evaporated) are vacationing in Venice. The name of the city does not appear anywhere in the novel, but its topography is outlined with precision. A dedicated reader can easily recognize the landscape, the semantic center of which “is a low island half a mile from the shore, entirely reserved for a cemetery,” as the embankment of the Incurables and San Michele, shrouded in legends, and the “colossal square” on which “everywhere people were crowding, fussing and shitting pigeons”, like the famous San Marco. Venice in the novel is deprived of its usual romantic flair: McEwan describes an “ever shaking” unreliable city, confusing and giving the tourist neither support nor guidance. “By definition, there was no traffic in the city, and therefore tourists gained the freedom to get lost where and how they pleased. There were no signs on the walls. Visitors, if they were not going to some predetermined goal, chose the road in much the same way as choosing a color when shopping, and even the way they usually got lost in the city was the result of their free will.”
The changing landscape that gives people apparent freedom turns into a dangerous trap. A typical McEwan collision: Western people, convinced of the inviolability of everyday norms, capitulate to the invasion of the irrational factor. British tourists lost in the maze of streets are captured by a strange man with the habits of a pervert - either a mafioso or a bar owner, who follows them everywhere. The city surrounded by water turns into a claustrophobic nightmare, but at the same time as the feeling of danger grows, the heroes return to their long-lost passion.
McEwan explores the hidden nature of desire, where pleasure coexists with humiliation, and the insatiable thirst for union turns into a desire for death. Danger excites the imagination of the heroes. Having abandoned the role of tourists imposed by guidebooks, they lose interest in museums, restaurants and ancient monuments and find themselves in a gloomy world where the boundaries between water and land, sleep and reality, normality and madness are erased. We must pay tribute to the author, he copes excellently with the atmosphere - sticky fear does not leave the reader somewhere from the middle of the novel, but it does not cause discomfort, but is perceived as a consequence of increased air humidity and the suffocation of the urban environment. McEwan handles the plot much worse, becoming hostage to a carefully constructed irrational factor. The actions of the heroes do not receive a logical explanation: the motives for their actions float and tremble like reflections in water, and psychoanalytic supports collapse as easily as rotten Venetian piles. The end of the novel frankly reeks of a cheap thriller, leaving an unpleasant feeling of forgery and deception.
The early McEwan (“Consolation...” written 26 years ago) does not yet know how to drive the plot balls into deep holes with one blow, but his inexperience reveals feelings that he will later deftly drape with his writing skills. As the epigraph to the novel, he puts a quote from Ciazzare Pavese: “Travel is cruelty. It forces us to trust strangers and not to look for the usual peace of mind in friends and home. We are losing our point of peace. There is nothing left around us, except for the simplest and most essential things: air, sleep, what we see in our dreams, the sea, the sky - that is, everything that gravitates towards eternity.” Later, McEwan will learn to control himself and abandon the vicious practice of killing heroes. But in “Consolation...” the voice of the confident narrator breaks into a sharp falsetto, in which one can feel shock and fear. The invasion of spontaneous madness into the measured life of ordinary people will become Ian McEwan's signature plot. But only in “Consolation...” he could not resist warnings: “never talk to strangers,” “don’t leave the room, don’t make a mistake.” For McEwan, it is physically necessary to return to a “resting point” (later his heroes will invariably return to the usual state of affairs), removed from eternity at a saving distance.