The Temptation of Eileen Hughes
The Temptation of Eileen Hughes ( english The Temptation of Eileen Hughes ) is a novel by Brian Moore , the original 1981 at Farrar, Straus & Giroux published in New York.
The richest Catholic on Lismore , 34-year-old Bernard McAuley, falls madly in love with 20-year-old Miss Eileen Hughes, a tall, skinny teenager. Eileen is able to free herself from this grip.
time and place
The novel is from August 25th to December 30th of an unnamed year in modern times, mainly in London, but also on Lismore.
action
The Irish businessmen Bernard and Mona McAuley, who have been married for four years, take their young employee Eileen on vacation to London. The McAuleys stay in a first-class hotel and frequent the best restaurants. There the couple are extremely picky and show the finest taste. As a side note, the reader can guess that Mona is against taking her friend Eileen to London. During the course of her vacation stay, Eileen realizes why Mona regularly stays away from the theater visits et cetera, for which Bernard has obtained three tickets in advance. The stupid Mona sleeps with total strangers. So it happens that Eileen often speaks to her boss Bernard in private. On such an occasion he confesses his love to her. Bernard worships Eileen, has already bought a love nest and makes the girl a generous job offer. When Eileen, who registers the hint of madness that hovers over Bernard's declaration of love, rejects the boss, the latter withdraws immediately. Although he will never touch her, he will always love. In the days that followed, Bernard does indeed appear concerned and is nice and helpful to his young employees. He reacts "not angry and mean like Mona". Eileen can empathize with Bernard, can imagine what it is like when you love and this love is not reciprocated, but she repeatedly eludes her boss's stalking. She is helped by the American Earl Webster, who teaches her to smoke marijuana and deflowers her while intoxicated .
Desperate Bernard takes a lethal dose of sodium amytal . Eileen and Earl save Bernard's life while Mona roams the City of London. Mona finally regrets her sin of multiple adultery and fears for her husband's life in the waiting area of the London intensive care unit where Bernard is lying. During this excruciating waiting time for Mona, she confesses the story of the story to the reader. Mona is innocent. From the day that Bernard first saw his new employee Eileen, he had been transformed. From then on he treated his wife like a servant and asked her, among other things, to take the three of them on vacation to London. Mona played because she wanted to help Bernard and save her marriage.
Eileen separates from both Earl Webster, who wants to continue smoking marijuana, and the McAuleys. She takes a job as a doctor's office assistant and wants to become a nurse.
Twists
- "Old man"
- Sometimes the narrator lapses into a slang slang tone: "She ... approached him in bed so that he would get a hard-on ..."
filming
Tristram Powell filmed the novel with Ethna Roddy as Eileen, Jim Norton as Bernard and Angharad Rees as Mona in 1988 for television. The score was written by John Du Prez .
Web links
- Filming in 1988 on the IMDb
German editions
- source
Brian Moore: The Temptation of Eileen Hughes. Novel. Translated from the English by Nikolaus Stingl. 251 pages. Diogenes, Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-257-22734-5