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February 1999

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Book review for Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Amsterdam*** by Ian McEwan. Jonathan Cape, London, 1998. Ian McEwan’s most recent venture into the darker recesses of the soul is a trail well worth following. Amsterdam, awarded Britain’s illustrious Booker Prize for fiction last November, has garnered high praise for the crafty wit and murky machinations of its two protagonists. Clive Linely, an esteemed composer, and Vernon Halliday, the editor of a tabloid paper struggling for readership, are prominent Londoners guardedly entering late middle life. Old friends and confidantes, they have pulled each other through a fair share of life’s trials, the grimmest of which opens the novel. A woman central to both their lives, though the wife of neither man, Molly Lane has just succumbed to a voracious degenerative disease. The once vivacious Molly’s consumption by this unnamed illness prompts thoughts of their own mortality. The results are at once comic and disasterous. During the dimmest hours of desperation – Clive’s struggle to put the finishing touches of brilliance on a symphony for the millenium, and Vernon’s decision whether to publish sensational photographs of a government minister in compromising poses – the two friends agree to a mutual mortality pact. Should either become incapacitated before the other, the healthy one will do the sick one in, sparing him pain and humiliation. At the moment of signing, neither realizes that they have just signed the other’s death warrant. And when circumstances conspire to put the two men in the city which gives the book its title, arsenic and irony seal their fates. McEwan draws readers in with engaging language and trim, elegant sentences. Through efficient scene setting and well-sketched characters, he coaxes us deeper into his den of neatly plotted and highly alarming mischief. We are gently shuttled back and forth between the shining past of the characters’ youth and the dulled present of their middle years. The sixties, the “Augustan age of rock and roll,” the Soho scene, experiment, achievement and promise, are when Clive and Vernon and Molly forge their friendship. The late-Thatcher period, when all the lush hope of youth has withered to sere cruelty and abandonment, sees that friendship founder on disappointment, failure and death. Despite the grim subject matter, this slim novel is great fun – a dark lark for the long mid-winter nights now upon us.

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