I meet a latter day George and Martha in the Carib

Becoming Strangers ***1/2
Louise Dean

Annemieke wishes her husband, Jan, would die faster. His original "six months to live" prognosis has dragged on to six years, and their jaunt to a resort on a tiny, unnamed Caribbean island will be (she hopes) their final one.

But Annemieke’s feelings for Jan are complicated. She sets out to make this vacation as miserable for him as possible, stirring up lies and sexual dramas that become ever more devious and destructive. After all, he'll be dead soon, and then whom will she torture?

Jan has put up with this behavior for years. He's sympathetic. Long suffering. He reads the Bible and long historical treatises. He also knows that total passivity bugs the hell out of Annemieke, driving her to ever more reckless behaviors.

Classic Edward Albee George-and-Martha stuff so far.

But instead of pairing Annemieke and Jan with young guests who will eventually become like them, as Albee does in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," Dean introduces an octogenarian duo. George is spry, physically and mentally. Dorothy prefers to spend most of her time drinking tea in their room.

George meets up with Jan, complains about Dorothy, about her reading, her secrecy and furtiveness. He begins to admit to more intimate things--affairs and flings, hankerings. He wonders where his life took wrong turns. Jan murmurs consoling words.

The claustrophobic and contained world of the resort magnifies tensions, enmity, resentments, illness, both physical and mental. Love and hate are served up in equal measures. Which will each character choose?

It's not hard to guess, and the last 50 pages require the reader to flog his interest somewhat to stick with the end, in which each of the characters “gets theirs” in somewhat anti-climactic fashion.