Winner of the Booker Prize in 1998, Amsterdam is the story of four men who have loved Molly Lane, a vivacious woman who has died too soon.
The story, related by a third-person omniscient narrator, opens at Molly’s memorial service. There, Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday compare notes on Molly’s positive influence on them and on her prolonged death. They are alike in detesting Molly’s husband, George Lane, for his dullness, for the tabloid empire that generated his wealth, and for limiting their access to Molly. They also detest Julian Garmony, the foreign secretary and Molly’s last lover, for his conservative politics and intimacy with their Molly.
Her unexpected death by debilitating disease sets the serious theme of the novel; the slowly revealed vanity and self-importance of her former lovers provide the satirical theme.
The narrative structure alternates between the events of Vernon and Clive’s remaining months. Each man faces a risky but life-crowning opportunity: for Vernon, it is the promise of a journalistic coup involving incriminating pictures of Garmony found in Molly’s apartment. For Clive, it is the completion of the Millennium Symphony he is writing for the biggest New Year’s Eve party in history.
The two old friends and rivals are in harmony in their grief until Vernon’s journalistic ardor creates a disruption in Clive’s compositional life. Handling the scandalous photographs reveals the limits of Vernon’s judgment; the mistake he makes with them then recurs in connection to Clive. In both cases, disaster follows.
Vernon’s great weakness is his failure to imagine what he has not witnessed. Just as his tastefully displayed pictures are about to hit the stands, Garmony’s stalwart wife and children address the nation with a preemptive strike: Mrs. Garmony’s speech is a model of the appeal to pity, and Vernon’s strategy to topple Molly’s last lover unravels in a frantic day.
In contrast, Clive’s great weakness is his inability to witness and remember the ordinary events of quotidian life in his devotion to the inspired moment. When Vernon’s pursuit of Clive’s civic duty disrupts the composition of the Millennium Symphony at a crucial stage, only revenge will satisfy the thwarted artist.
By the novel’s climax, the old friends are new enemies. Independently, each man sets a plot in motion against the other involving shady Dutch doctors in Amsterdam, where Clive is presenting his botched symphony’s premiere. Each man comes prepared with a large cash payment and makes the necessary arrangements. In a perfectly parallel double betrayal, drinks are doctored and doctors are agents of death.
Vernon and Clive were very similar: they both loved Molly Lane, they both hated Julian Garmony, and they both die quietly of the same cause.
Of Molly’s four lovers, the one who receives the least attention is her dull and conservative husband, George Lane, publisher of sensational tabloids; he, however, winds up with the last word. When the task of concluding the affairs of Vernon and Clive falls to him, he is satisfied that Molly is at last completely his, and he plans a suitable commemoration for her—the sort of event that she, Vernon, and Clive would have hated.
But she is dead, and the liberal journalist and the sensitive artist have done each other in, leaving the world to sensible capitalists and conservatives like George Lane and Julian Garmony.
Ian McEwan is himself both a writer and a composer, so he bears a special relationship to Vernon and Clive, constructing them as deeply flawed exponents of their particular arts and then essentially executing them. McEwan’s black comedy is at once hilarious and disconcerting. The omniscient narrator mercilessly reveals the weaknesses in the hearts and minds of the main characters, who cannot earn the reader’s pity because they are never victimized.
Instead, they make sacrificial victims of others for all the wrong reasons: Vernon attempts to sacrifice Garmony to the principles of journalistic truth, hoping to topple a conservative politician by exploiting the very sensationalism he says he loathes in George Lane, and Clive allows a crime to proceed unchallenged in order to preserve a moment of artistic inspiration. Neither character shows mercy when presented with an opportunity to do so, and neither receives it from his author.
Bibliography
Annan, Gabriele. “Wages of Sin.” Review of Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan. New York Review of Books 46, no. 1 (1999): 7.
Malcolm, David. Understanding Ian McEwan. Understanding Contemporary British Literature Series. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002, 189–195.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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