Ian McEwan
Never accept hospitality from strangers on holiday, at least, not if you’re in an Ian McEwan novel. “When you are tired, a hotel is not such a good place. I will make you so comfortable you’ll forget your terrible night…” says Robert, a stranger (Christopher Walken, above, in the film version) whom Mary and Colin encounter in what might be Venice, were McEwan to grace the setting with anything as reassuring as a name. Holidays are journeys into the unknown, and this compelling, driven, sadistic novel explores what it might be like to lose yourself for ever Photograph: Rex Features
LP Hartley
It’s 1900 and Leo is about to turn 13 when he is invited to Brandham Hall, a grand estate in Norfolk, by a school friend. There is a heatwave that summer and the rising temperature is symbolic, as Leo becomes a parched messenger – a go-between – for Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie, above, in the film version), his friend’s attractive older sister, and her lover, Ted Burgess, a local tenant farmer. What is to prove humiliating and emotionally catastrophic is Leo’s realisation that he has been used and was willing to be used, his “holiday” the end of innocence Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Jacques Tati
Jacques Tati (above) brought Monsieur Hulot tripping into life in 1953, with his vacation in St Marc sur Mer, a charming seaside resort near Saint-Nazaire. Everyone in the film has trouble relaxing: complacent capitalists, Marxist intellectuals and Hulot himself, who is clumsy with his crabbing net, fails to shut the hotel’s door and cannot make himself understood because of the pipe in his mouth. Nowadays, a bronze statue of Hulot overlooks the beach where the film was made – a challenge to holidaymakers to try to enjoy themselves Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
Henry Hathaway
Doomed holidays dominated the silver screen in 1953. While M. Hulot did his worst in France, director Henry Hathaway chose the Niagara Falls as the backdrop for his film in which Ray and Polly Cutler (Max Showalter and Jean Peters) take a delayed honeymoon. They show up at the falls to find their cabin already occupied by George and Rose Loomis (Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe), and Monroe (above) is about to reveal herself as a force of nature to rival Niagara. Her murderous love life comes close to sending everyone, unlucky lovebirds included, over the edge Photograph: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis
Thomas Mann
“What he felt was no more than a longing to travel; yet coming upon him with such suddenness and passion as to resemble a seizure, almost a hallucination.” Beware wanderlust: Gustav von Aschenbach’s holiday is disturbing and Venice is perfect as the sinking setting for a nightmare vacation. Aschenbach (played by Dirk Bogarde, above in the film) becomes unhealthily obsessed with a beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, staying at the same hotel. When cholera consumes the city, it seems no worse than the love-sickness afflicting his lonely heart Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Kazuo Ishiguro (above)
What is the opposite of a honeymoon? Ishiguro, in a virtuoso short story, lets us know. This sickening mini-break involves a famous American crooner who pays a guitarist (we’re in Venice again) to go out in a gondola and jointly serenade his wife. This might be sweet were it not that the songs are about travel, farewells and “an American man leaving his wife” and that is precisely what Mr Gardner is planning, after 27 years of marriage, to do. His tribute produces the expected effect. Mrs Gardner retreats into the hotel room and sobs as her soon-to-be ex-spouse sings on Photograph: David Levene
Alex Garland
“Beaucoup bad shit” is the catchphrase in this 1996 novel – and it’s something of an understatement. Richard hears of “the beach” when he’s given a map by a Scot on Khaosan Road, Bangkok. What follows is a grown-up, backpacking, Thai version of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a story about what happens when people make their own rules on a “paradise” island. Their diet includes poisonous squid, fermented coconut juice, a rice supply infected by fungus – and that’s just the food. Ironically, Garland’s novel (also a 2000 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, above) is a popular holiday read Photograph: Allstar
Kingsley Amis (above)
Garnet Bowen is a journalist who wants to be a playwright and is scraping together a living reviewing books. When he’s asked to do a travel piece by See magazine that involves a visit to Portugal, Bowen is dismayed: Amis’s hack is rather like Malcolm Muggeridge, who once declared that: “travel, of course, narrows the mind”. Moreover, this looks set to be a most troublesome working holiday, because Bowen is given another assignment – to track down an elusive author by the name of Wulfstan Strether, the sort of man who might make JD Salinger seem gregarious Photograph: Daniel Farson/Getty Images
Edward St Aubyn
Patrick and Mary Melrose spend fraught family holidays in Provence, in a beautiful house belonging to Patrick’s mother, Eleanor, who is threatening to leave it to Seamus, new-age Irish healer and charlatan. St Aubyn’s high-functioning prose is in brilliant contrast to the dysfunctional family he describes. There is no hope that a holiday will rescue Patrick’s underpowered marriage, especially as he is keen to rekindle an old flame while his wife withdraws into tense, all-consuming motherhood. St Aubyn also throws in a ghastly lunch in Saint-Tropez – “world-famous joke of a town” Photograph: Public Domain
Anita Brookner
Edith Hope, whose name is the most upbeat thing about her, is taking a solitary holiday on the shores of Lake Geneva. This may be mournful but it’s not a disaster. There are no man-eating sharks, no Marilyn Monroe, to spoil her holiday – yet this is a novel about disappointment, a melancholy reckoning. The late Anna Massey (above) played Edith in Christopher Hampton’s BBC adaptation, opposite Denholm Elliott’s Mr Neville, her dubious suitor. Neville proposes marriage but Edith completes her miserable holiday with the realisation that he is far from being a happy ending made flesh. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
