AMSTERDAM
By Ian McEwan
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 193 pages, $21
In the 23 years since Ian McEwan published his first collection of short stories, “First Love, Last Rites,” he has proven himself to be one of Britain’s most distinct voices and one of its most versatile talents. He is notable among his contemporaries–the Brit pack that includes Martin Amis and Julian Barnes–for having made his early reputation as a writer of stories. Over the years he has turned his hand to scripts for TV, radio and Hollywood, children’s books, even an oratorio, while producing a distinguished and varied body of novels, from the early domestic Gothic of “The Cement Garden” to last year’s “Enduring Love.” His new Booker Prize-winning work, “Amsterdam,” (he has previously been short-listed for “The Comfort of Strangers” and “Black Dogs”) returns to territory he hasn’t charted since his acclaimed 1983 screenplay for “The Ploughman’s Lunch”: political satire.
British politics of the last 5 to 10 years, particularly during the waning years of Conservative rule, has been rife with embarrassing peccadilloes, and McEwan in telling his story slyly mines this territory.
“The Ploughman’s Lunch” was so cutting-edge realistic that it was filmed in part on the floor of the Tory Party Conference, with actual speeches as its backdrop, but here McEwan, by cannily and fastidiously avoiding restricting himself to one scandal or another, manages to allude to several. In doing so he achieves a tone approaching political fable, conjuring a sense of an alternative British zeitgeist, not the clenched optimism of Tony Blair’s new Labor but the unraveling of a declining generation, the victors of the ’80s, now victims of the ’90s.
The novel revolves around the friendship between two men, newspaper editor Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley, both former lovers of the recently deceased Molly Lane, critic, wit, photographer and bon vivant, dead at 46 of an unspecified degenerative brain disease. Molly’s illness is reminiscent of Alzheimer’s disease but, this being McEwan, also suggests anything from AIDS to syphilis. Certainly her former lovers–apart from Vernon and Clive, they include Julian Garmony, the foreign secretary, and her surviving cuckolded husband, George, a publisher bent on revenge–are all complexly infected by her death.
George discovers compromising photographs of Julian in his wife’s files and offers them to Vernon, whose ailing newspaper, The Judge, can use a cross-dressing politician to help boost circulation. Clive, meanwhile, in the midst of his “Millennial” Symphony and feeling intimations of mortality–a tingling in his left hand–prevails upon Vernon to enter into an assisted-suicide pact. If either of them finds he can’t go on, the other promises to spare him the misery Molly experienced in her last days, dying ” `with no awareness, like an animal. . . . (R)educed, humiliated, before she could make arrangements, or even say good-bye.’ ” They fall out shortly afterward over the propriety of using Molly’s private photographs for political and commercial ends, but we sense that as each pursues his own professional suicide (Vernon on the eve of his coup is outflanked by public opinion and disgraced; Clive in a moment of musical inspiration ignores a woman’s cries for help, a corrupting moral choice that taints his masterwork) they will finally be reunited in Amsterdam, euthanasia capital of Europe.
The novel is slim, but rather than thin it feels sharp, quick on its feet. There’s a precipitousness, a turn-on-a-dime quality to the fates of Clive and Vernon that is plausible, chilling and darkly comic in its haplessness. McEwan nicely skewers the skewerers in his deft treatment of the newspaper world, particularly the hypocrisy of a quality newspaper trawling the depths for a quick circulation fix. The British paparazzi have rarely been so effectively exposed: “Large-faced, jowly, pushy men in leather jackets who spoke with the same accent, an odd blend of fake Cockney and fake posh, which they delivered with the same pleading, belligerent whine.”
But the real revelation here is the description of Clive’s creative process, which manages to ride the waves from the sublime to the bathetic with great nimbleness:
“It was only a bridging passage to the finale; what fascinated him was the promise, the aspiration–he imagined it as a set of ancient worn steps turning gently out of sight–the yearning to climb on and up and finally arrive, by way of an expansive shift, at a remote key and, with wisps of sound falling away like so much dissolving mist, at a concluding melody . . . of piercing beauty that would transcend its unfashionability and seem both to mourn the passing century and all its senseless cruelty and to celebrate its brilliant inventiveness.”
We need to see Clive as both arrogant and capable of attaining great art, and McEwan banks and pitches this roller coaster to stomach-hollowing effect. What’s satisfying here is that the composition process does not feel, like so many artistic processes described in fiction, like a thinly veiled surrogate for the author’s own writing experience. McEwan’s work on his oratorio, “And Now We Die,” seems to have given him a real insight into the swelling, symphonic inner life of a composer.
If it’s true that we never quite believe in Clive or Vernon’s friendship, this says less about McEwan’s skills and more about the shallowness of the relationship. These men, after all, shared the same lover but only come circuitously to a revelation of their rivalries.
Overall the author strikes a wonderful balance between our engagement with the characters and our creeping distaste for them. Their comeuppance when it comes is perfectly timed; any earlier and it would feel rushed, any later and we might tire of them and their jaded hopes.
What’s finally striking here and characteristic of much of McEwan’s work is the way a woman influences and shapes the lives of these men. From his earliest work McEwan has, by his own description, explored “a fear among men of women and their power”–a power that is sometimes sexual, sometimes procreative, but always transformative, and that here extends beyond the grave. Vernon fails Molly’s memory directly; Clive, in a scene reminiscent in its evocation of moral choice in a natural landscape of the wonderful opening of “Enduring Love,” fails another woman in distress. As a British political fable of millennial revenge upon the generation that came to prominence in the 1980s, “Amsterdam’s” most delicious dark joke may be the sight of these mournful male characters fighting over the scraps of the legacy of another powerful woman: Margaret Thatcher.
