Amsterdam Novel

[Anush Faigley]

Atthe funeral of photographer and writer Molly Lane, three of Molly's former lovers converge. They include newspaper editor Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley, who are old friends, and British Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony.

Clive and Vernon muse upon Molly's death from an unspecified rapid-onset brain disease that left her helpless and in the clutches of her husband, George Lane, whom they both despise. Neither man can understand her attraction to Julian Garmony, the right-wing Foreign Secretary who is about to challenge his party's leadership.

Shortly after Molly's death, Clive, who is single, begins to ponder what would happen to him if he began to decline in health. He confides in Vernon and asks him to perform euthanasia on him should he ever reach that point. Vernon reluctantly agrees on the condition that Clive do the same for him.

Vernon, whose newspaper is in decline, is given a tip by George, a series of private photographs taken by Molly of Garmony cross-dressing. Vernon decides to use the scandal to unseat Garmony, whose politics he disagrees with. He faces pushback from his editorial staff and the board members of his newspaper about publishing the clearly private pictures. Seeking comfort he brings up the matter to Clive who vehemently disagrees with Vernon's decision to publish.

After their argument, Clive, who has been commissioned to write a symphony for the forthcoming millennium, takes a retreat to the Lake District which has inspired him before. While hiking he comes across a woman being attacked by a man. Rather than intervene, Clive leaves the scene to finish composing the end melody of his symphony. He then returns to his hotel and abruptly leaves for home.

The day that Vernon's paper is due to publish the pictures of Garmony, Vernon reaches out to Clive and the two have a brief conversation where they forgive their differences and Clive tells Vernon what he saw in the Lake District. At work, during an editorial meeting, Vernon realizes that one of his journalists is tracking the story of a rapist in the Lake District and realizes that this is who Clive must have seen. He calls Clive and attempts to force him to go to the police, though Clive declines as he is working on his symphony. Their conversation is interrupted by Garmony's wife holding a press conference where she calls Vernon a flea and calls the pictures a private personal matter, while pretending that she was aware Molly took them. Public opinion turns against Vernon and his paper and he is forced to resign.

Angered by their conversation, Clive sends Vernon a note telling him he should be fired, which Vernon sees after he is fired and views as Clive gloating. He then calls the police to force Clive to give information about the Lake District rapist but is disappointed that Clive will not face criminal charges. Inspired by an article on euthanasia that he sees in his old paper, Vernon decides to lure Clive to Amsterdam and murder him under the grounds he is mentally unwell. Meanwhile, the composition of Clive's symphony is interrupted by the police calling him to the Lake District. With the symphony permanently ruined, Clive also makes the decision to try to lure Vernon to Amsterdam, where he is rehearsing his symphony, to euthanize him on the grounds he is mentally depraved. Both of the murders go through and each man last hallucinates seeing Molly Lane.

Garmony and George Lane are sent out to retrieve the bodies, Garmony on behalf of the government for Clive and George on behalf of Vernon's widow, Mandy. They are under the impression it is a double suicide, caused in part because Clive's symphony was a dud and ends on a heavy plagiarism of "Ode to Joy". Garmony learns it was actually a double murder and informs George, who is pleased. George reflects on the fact that two of Molly's former lovers are dead and Garmony, despite having weathered the scandal, will never be able to rise in the party. He contemplates asking out Vernon's widow Mandy.

Upon release, Amsterdam was generally well received.[2][3][4][5] According to Book Marks, the book received, based on American and British publications, "positive" reviews based on 13 critic reviews with 4 being "rave", 4 being "positive", 4 being "mixed", and 1 being "pan".[6] Globally, Complete Review says "No consensus. All grant that he writes well. Considerable (but not unanimous) disappointment regarding the last part of the book.".[7]

In The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani called Amsterdam "a dark tour de force, a morality fable, disguised as a psychological thriller."[8] In The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard wrote, "Slice him where you like, Ian McEwan is a damned good writer" and discussed "the compulsive nature of McEwan's prose: you just don't want to stop reading it."[9] In The New York Times Book Review, critic William H. Pritchard called the book a "well-oiled machine, and McEwan's pleasure in time-shifting, presenting events out of their temporal order (flashing back in Clive's mind, say, to a conversation he had the day before) is everywhere evident. Vladimir Nabokov, asked whether sometimes his characters didn't break free of his control, replied that they were galley slaves, kept severely under his thumb at all times. McEwan follows this prescription in spades."[10]

Amsterdam received the 1998 Booker Prize. Announcing the award, Douglas Hurd, the former British Foreign Secretary who served as the chairman of the five-judge panel, called McEwan's novel "a sardonic and wise examination of the morals and culture of our time."[12]

A chilling little horror story, easily read in one enjoyable gulp, "Amsterdam" is by no means McEwan's finest work: It is less ambitious than "Enduring Love" (1998) and "Black Dogs" (1992), and less resonant than "The Innocent," his 1990 masterpiece of Cold War suspense. One can only hope that this small, perfectly fashioned novel -- novella, really -- will send readers back to the rest of the talented McEwan's oeuvre.

Like so many of the author's stories, "Amsterdam" concerns the sudden intrusion of violent, perverse events into his characters' mundane lives, events that cruelly expose the psychological fault lines running beneath the humdrum surface of their world. In "The Comfort of Strangers," a pair of middle-class tourists fall prey to a Machiavellian sadist during a trip to Venice. In "The Cement Garden," a group of children are orphaned and bury their mother in the basement. And in "The Child in Time," a man's 3-year-old daughter is kidnapped during a trip to the supermarket.

In the case of "Amsterdam," two old friends -- one a famous composer named Clive, the other a mercenary newspaper editor named Vernon -- enter into a strange euthanasia pact that will determine both their fates and send shock waves through their privileged world.

Clive, who regards himself as Vaughan Williams' heir, has been commissioned by the government to write a Millennial Symphony; in his more optimistic moments, he dares to think of himself as a genius, an artist worthy of comparison to Shakespeare.

Vernon, who has become editor of a tabloid paper by default, is decidedly less confident: There are moments, alone in his office, when he wonders whether he even exists. All the exchanges in which "he had decided, prioritized, delegated, chosen or offered an opinion" made him feel he was "infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all the people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all."

Back in their impoverished, bohemian youth, Clive and Vernon had been lovers of a "restaurant critic, gorgeous wit and photographer" named Molly, a daring, glamorous woman who also had an affair with Julian Garmony, a conservative, xenophobic politician who would go on to become Britain's foreign secretary. Molly would eventually marry a rich, stuffy publisher named George Lane, who detests (and is unanimously detested by) her former lovers.

When a sudden illness leaves Molly delirious and incompetent, George seizes control of her life, forbidding her old friends to visit her sickbed. In the wake of her funeral, Clive and Vernon not only commiserate over her death but also make a pact with each other to avoid ever suffering such an undignified end: Should one of them become as sick and incoherent as Molly, the other will help him finish things off.

Writing in his usual spare, evocative prose, McEwan deftly conjures up the glittering London world Clive and Vernon inhabit, and he also does a nimble job of depicting them at work, showing us how Vernon is trying to boost his paper's falling circulation with trendy, tasteless stories, how Clive is trying to create an ending for his symphony commensurate with his ambition to commemorate the millennium.

Though there's a faint satiric edge to McEwan's portraits, he uses his psychological insight, as he's done so often before, to create sympathy for some decidedly unsavory people. Indeed, we find ourselves rooting for Clive and Vernon, even as it becomes clear that both of them -- much like James Penfield, the hero of "The Ploughman's Lunch," a movie written by McEwan back in 1984 -- are conniving opportunists, willing to use virtually any means necessary to achieve their ends.

Within days of each other, Clive and Vernon are both faced with moral dilemmas that will test just what sort of people they are. Clive must decide whether to put aside his beloved symphony to help a woman who may be in trouble, while Vernon must decide whether to publish some compromising photos of Julian Garmony that could end his political career. Their respective decisions will forever alter their careers, and imperil their decades-long friendship.

For all the appeals to high-flown principles like art and freedom that Clive and Vernon make in coming to their decisions, their problems do not really open out into the sort of weighty philosophical debates that animated "Black Dogs" and "Enduring Love." Nor, given the predictable outcome of the story, is there the sort of grisly narrative tension that made "The Innocent" so suspenseful to read. Instead, there are the simple pleasures of reading a writer in complete command of his craft, a writer who has managed to toss off this minor entertainment with such authority and aplomb that it has won him the recognition he has so long deserved.

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