The Moebius Strip concerns two men who lead opposite but parallel lives, Ėtienne a sensualist in the south of France, and Matthew a cerebral minister with a parish in New England. Ėtienne orchestrates his household in Cap d’Antibes for his sexual satisfaction – a household consisting of a Sybaritic girl, a housekeeper, and a young Moroccan gardener. However, he reaches a point of satiation, and gradually finds himself unmoved by any desire.
Matthew meanwhile loses his faith, through reflection and traumatic experience, which has repercussions for his marriage and for him as a cleric. What’s more, he cannot discover any other basis for his life. He will not act without good reason but he cannot find any good reason for acting and so becomes neutralized and disaffected.
Both Matthew and Ėtienne are visited by recurrent memories of Sibyl, an English girl they shared at Oxford twenty years previously, and there are flashbacks to the vital lives they led with her. Sibyl had gone on to become a (minor) London playwright, while Matthew had taken a church in Massachusetts and Ėtienne returned to a dissolute life on the Riviera.
When both men are summoned by Sibyl’s daughter to attend her funeral, they are given a second chance to take the path she opened to them, to heal their different wounds and touch life more directly. A breakthrough occurs for both of them, and there is the promise of redemption. Religion will be less of an abstraction to Matthew, his wife more real, and Ėtienne will regard women more personally, treating sensuality as part of a human relationship.
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