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What Happens At The End Of The Comfort Of Strangers?

2026-03-25 01:12:14
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5 Answers

Simon
Simon
I spent ten minutes or so staring at the wall after finishing The Comfort of Strangers. That ending is dreadful, but in a very specific and painful way. Robert’s obsessive desire for Colin is finally fulfilled in a murder of unforeisclosed kind (is it a knife? hands?) but it is the fate of Mary that is perhaps most disturbing. Is she dead or not? She seems completely broken or resigned but you can’t quite tell. What is disturbing and even horrible about this is how believable it all is. Any of us could take a wrong turn and end up here.
2026-03-28
Gavin
Gavin
Robert’s last gesture to Colin is to suffocate him in a twisted attempt at intimacy. And it shocks Mary to her core. But what’s so horrific about this act of violence is that it feels completely normal and even logical given the couple’s weird dynamic of intense love/hate that often descends into ROB’s controlling obsessions. Yet McEwan’s demonstrated so clearly in the novel leading up to this moment that ROB controls Mary through their ‘love’ too in many, many ways. The ending is a gut punch, yet delivered as a whisper. The only thing one needs to realize about these two is that by the time you’ve grasped the extent of their joint psychological trap in the quirky, convoluted and seemingly endless streets of Venice, it’s too late. There’s no need for blood and gore to convey horror in this novel. The horror is always mere. It’s a psychological, tug-at-the-heart-strings-only kind of thing. In this case it’s the gentle collapse of all boundaries between two people.
2026-03-29
Jack
Jack
I read this yesterday. It was a real slow-motion car-crash experience, awful but you couldn’t look away. The ending was absolutely terrible. Unbelievably, awful. Colin and Mary, naive tourists, get drawn into the games of Robert and Caroline, a ‘hospitality’-obsessed local couple, and in the end Colin is probably murdered by Robert in some sort of sick ritual. Mary is left a traumatized shell of a person. It’s incredibly powerful and the horror lingers long after you’ve finished reading it, partly because McEwan has left so much unsaid and it’s up to your imagination to fill in the gaps.

But what is really uncomfortable is how the “comfort” of the title becomes a bad thing for the two strange tourists. Their comfort is warped into something evil. A reader fears the two strange tourists’ safety in the strange locale of their vacation. Robert’s, Caroline’s hospitality is not just physical, it can also be psychological and it is something that can make two ordinary people unravel slowly but surely. A very uncomfortable read. It makes one a little wary of overly friendly local personnel when one travels.
2026-03-29
Samuel
Samuel
I’ve always been a fan of ambiguous endings and ‘The Comfort of Strangers’ is a great example of how to write them well. We never actually find out what happens to Colin but Robert’s obsessions are taken to a violent end. It’s possible that Mary is a victim but in large part her acceptance of her husband is passive. It’s a strange and rather repellent aspect of human nature and McEwan writes it beautifully. He also describes a decaying Venetian setting which perfectly conveys a sense of foreboding and the contrast between the squalid underlying reality and the surface beauty of the city is a masterclass in tension. The real horror of what is happening is how easily these are just two ordinary people who are being manipulated into hell.
2026-03-29
Owen
Owen
This book messed with me for days. I can reveal for you that Colin gets stabbed by Robert, and then Mary does nothing and lets him die. Or perhaps she is just unable to stop it from happening. Some of the details in this book are so beautiful, and so genius from McEwan. The way Robert’s ‘affection’ for Colin turns to predatory interest is sublime, and Caroline’s encouragement of this is strangely detached. The end of the book is cold and abrupt, like a door slamming in your face. There’s no explaining away of what’s happened. Instead there’s this awful silence. A very powerful and strange story, which has left me feeling grossly soiled. I need a shower.
2026-03-31

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