Amsterdam
by Ian McEwan
Summary
Two old friends meet at the funeral of Molly Lane, a woman they both once loved. Clive Linley is a celebrated composer at work on a symphony commissioned for the millennium. Vernon Halliday edits a struggling broadsheet. Molly's illness robbed her of her mind before it killed her, and both men are frightened enough by that to make each other a promise: if either shows signs of going the same way, the other will arrange matters in Amsterdam, where the law permits it.
Then Vernon obtains photographs of a Conservative foreign secretary, also once Molly's lover, dressed as a woman, and decides to publish them. Clive, walking in the Lake District in pursuit of a melody, witnesses what is probably an assault and walks on rather than break his concentration. Each is disgusted by the other, and the pact acquires a use neither intended.
It is short, tightly plotted and extremely well made, closer to a novella and to black farce than to McEwan's larger novels. The satire on newspapers is sharp and the ending is deliberately absurd.
Be aware that this win was divisive from the night it was announced, and that it has become a standard example of the prize rewarding the wrong book. McEwan himself has called its plot improbable and comic, and the book was better regarded before it won than after.
Read it in an afternoon and treat it as an accomplished dark comedy rather than as the major McEwan novel. If you want that, Atonement is three years later and is the book most readers mean when they name him. This one is sharper and much smaller.
Historical Context & Significance
Amsterdam won the Booker Prize in 1998, and it has spent the years since as the standard example in the argument about the prize rewarding the wrong book by the right author.
McEwan had been shortlisted in 1992 for Black Dogs, and would publish Atonement three years later. The widespread view that Amsterdam is the slighter book, and that the prize was really acknowledging a career, has followed it ever since. McEwan has been notably candid about this, describing a novel that was very well received until it won and then became a target.
It remains among the shortest winners and one of the most frequently named when critics discuss decisions the Booker got wrong, which is a peculiar kind of fame for a book that is, on its own terms, expertly constructed.