The thought recurred to Vernon Halliday, during an uncharacteristic lull in his morning, that he might not exist.
In his Booker Prize-winning novel, Amsterdam, Ian McEwan offers one of the most intriguing chapter openers I’ve ever read. An exquisitely constructed text, Amsterdam is a novella-sized exploration of morality. It is the ultimate baby boomer book, complete with mid-life crises, workplace politics and fear of aging.
The novel begins at a funeral. Best friends, Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday, are linked by being former lovers of the deceased, Molly Lane. They have watched Molly’s rapid decline and lamented her undignified helplessness in the final days of an unnamed illness. Interestingly, Molly had first realised she was unwell when she started fumbling for words. Is this a clue to the word-obsessed author’s own fear of death?
Parliament, chemistry, propeller she could forgive herself, but less so bed, cream, mirror. It was after the temporary disappearance of acanthus and bresaiola that she sought medical advice.
Clive is a successful composer who is working on the Millennial Symphony, convinced that it will be ‘a masterwork that will echo down the years’. Likewise, Vernon is at the top of his field, and is not a little inclined to vanity. He is editor-in-chief of stuffy, left-leaning newspaper and is struggling to increase its circulation.
It is Clive’s deep-seated fear of humiliation and degeneration that causes him to ask Vernon a favour.
Just supposing I did get ill in a major way, like Molly, and I started to go downhill and make terrible mistakes - you know, errors of judgment and not knowing the names of things or who I was, that kind of thing. I’d like to know that there was someone to help me finish it . . . I mean, help me to die.
I am hardly giving away an ending that is not obvious from the outset. And with a euthanasia pact in place, it is merely a matter of time before someone crosses the line. The interesting question is: what deeds, or misdeeds, will set it off?
What follows is the theatrical descent of these two men over five acts. Each is confronted with a moral dilemma and each tries to convince himself of his own importance and righteousness when he makes his unfortunate choice. Clive is confronted with a duty-of-care responsibility for a woman in danger and Vernon is entwined in a scandal involving the sex life of a leading politician. Each takes the moral high ground regarding the other’s dilemma, yet insists on justifying his own actions dogmatically.
The world McEwan has created in Amsterdam is one in which God is quite absent. Both Clive’s and Vernon’s actions are governed by a lust for personal greatness. And once they have justified their behaviour to themselves, they are intoxicated.
The thought was, quite simply, that it might not be going too far to say that he was . . . a genius. A genius . . . When he had this suspicion about himself, the world grew large and still.
In the accumulating momentum of the week, practically every hour had revealed to Vernon new aspects of his powers and potential . . . Molly’s funeral had given him the jitters. Now his purpose and being filled him to his fingertips. The story was alive, and so was he.
Clive and Vernon are desperate to leave their mark on this world, convinced there is nothing to hope in outside of the here-and-now. They know nothing of the self-worth that is to be found in relationship with the Almighty.
It is the author who ultimately judges his characters. Like Shakespeare, he leads them to their inevitable fate, allowing them to make their mark only in an unexpected way.
The remarkable thing about Amsterdam is the masterful structure and elegant way McEwan describes his protagonists’ step-by-step fall from fame to obsolescence. His description of how music is composed is also beautifully written.
How elegant, how simple. Turning the sequence round opened up the idea of a plain and beautiful song in common time which he could almost hear. But not quite. An image came to him of a set of unfolding steps, sliding and descending - from the trap door of a loft, or from the door of a light plane. One note lay over and suggested the next. He heard it, he had it, then it was gone.
It is surprising, then, that McEwan’s characters are strangely two-dimensional. It’s not the characters that have the reader enthralled; it’s the form and structure. It feels like McEwan decided on a strict shape for his novel and forced the characters into it.
In an interview with ‘bold type’, the Random House webzine, McEwan says: ‘For a long time I wanted to get back to the kind of form, the short novel, that could be read in three or four hours, that would be one intact, complete, absorbing literary experience. I wanted you to be able to hold the whole structure in your mind so that you could actually see how it works.’ McEwan certainly achieves his goal in Amsterdam. Here we have an almost flawless structure, a couple of moral quandaries to chew over and a good evening’s entertainment.
And why Amsterdam? Well, the medical professionals might have a clue . . .
With this 1998 Booker Prize-winner, Ian McEwan joins the ranks of novelists that include Arundati Roy (The God of Small Things), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) and A.S. Byatt (Possession). But unlike these other masters, McEwan hardly fell in love with the world he created. Which means we don’t either.
