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Amsterdam (1998)

by Ian McEwan

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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7,4081921,215 (3.38)466
In the affairs of his dead wife, a British publisher discovers compromising pictures of the foreign secretary who was her lover. An opportunity for revenge on both the political and personal level.
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English (172)  Spanish (5)  Italian (2)  Dutch (2)  Swedish (2)  German (1)  Hebrew (1)  Portuguese (Portugal) (1)  Danish (1)  French (1)  Norwegian (1)  All languages (189)
Showing 1-5 of 172 (next | show all)
McEwan won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998. I looked forward to reading it as I have enjoyed several of his other works. But having just finished it, I just don't know what to make of it. It is beautifully written. The characters are well developed. The plot moves along. Imagination jumps off many of its pages. Normally this would cause me to give this a rave review. So what's the problem? I just didn't enjoy where he took me. It’s a short book, as are most of what McEwan writes. The plot is almost believable. The questions it poses are reasonable. I just felt let down. It was just too tidy in a negative sense. No one came out of this in a way that would make anyone say I want to be that guy. It was more like saying a pox on all your houses. Maybe I should think of it as a Shakespearean tragedy. They all get theirs. Ho hum.

The setup is interesting. Molly has died. Her illness had left her totally under the control of her husband, a situation which we are led to believe she would have never wanted. At her funeral, three former lovers appeared. Two are close friends, one an editor of a struggling newspaper, the other a world famous composer of classical music who is struggling with a commission to celebrate the upcoming millennium. The third is the Foreign Secretary, somewhat of a Trump like figure, anti-immigration, anti-Europe, anti –LGBTQ. He's disliked by Molly's husband and her other lovers. The antipathy of the editor and the Foreign Secretary is the foreshadowing of what this book is all about.

After the funeral setup, we concentrate on the editor. We learn how he's attempting to bring back to life a stodgy newspaper where the grammarians are defending true journalism from the more with-it types who the grammarians see as taking them down the drain. The new guys want to gain back readership by trying new things. The editor is leading the charge by pushing hard on the grammarians. A struggle more understandable today than in the early days of the internet, the time in which this book is set. The issue is brought to a head when Molly's husband, an investor in the editor's paper, offers up photographs Molly had taken of her lover, the Foreign Secretary, in three different transvestite poses. The editor goes all in. He sees the photos as both solving the newspaper's readership problem and destroying the career of the Foreign Secretary and derailing his dreaded ascension to Prime Minister. The grammarians push back, seeing this as violating the tenets of journalism which see personal behavior of public figures as off limits and an especially shameless attempt to solve financial problems.

Now we focus on the composer. Molly's death has unnerved him. He contemplates his mortality and decides euthanasia would be better than what happened to Molly. He approaches his friend, the editor, with the request to make sure his wishes are complied with even if the composer is past the point where he can do it himself. The editor agrees only after demanding the composer perform the same duty for him. Some might see this as a mutual suicide pact. This allows the composer to focus on his commission, which has been going poorly. The editor is looking for support for his decision to publish the photos only to find the composer thoroughly opposed. The composer sees it as destroying a career to achieve self-serving goals. Bad form. Don't do it. The composer is mentally blocked on his commission. He decides to go back to nature to seek inspiration, hiking through the Lake District. Inspiration eludes him through most of his hike only to appear at the same time he witnesses a man attacking a woman hiker. Rather than help the woman, he ignores what's happening and seeks a rock to use as a table so he can write down his inspiration before it disappears.

Back to the editor. He has convinced his staff that he has made a righteous decision to go ahead with splashing one of the damning photos on the front page with the understated caption – Foreign Secretary. They are convinced this will end the career of the Foreign Secretary and will be taught forever in journalism schools. Their elation is shattered when the wife of the Foreign Secretary backs him. She's a Doctor who just emerged from performing open-heart surgery, thus saving a child. And the Prime Minister backs his man. The editor's staff turns on him, and he is summarily sacked. The editor can't stand that his friend had been right. He threatens to interrupt the composer's concentration on his overdue commission by telling him if he doesn't tell the police about what he saw in the Lake District, the former editor will tell the police himself. Take that.

Amsterdam finally enters the plot. The orchestra been waiting to get their hands on the commission so they can start rehearsing. The editor expresses remorse for telling the police and announces he'll be coming to Amsterdam to apologize. The composer sees his chance. He can convince a Doctor he needs the means to assist his own suicide. He gets the poison but puts it in the editor's champagne glass. But the editor had the same idea and has done the same thing in the glass he offers the composer. Police rule it a double murder. And to put a neat bow on all this, the Prime Minister announces a reorganization of his cabinet and ousts the Foreign Secretary. So much for the trio.

Amsterdam raises several questions. What is the proper role of the editor and journalists and what is fair game? How private are the lives of public figures even when they are doing exactly what they say they disapprove of? Can euthanasia be misused or even justified? Can anyone, even famous people, ignore their responsibilities? Can heirs do things with the property of the deceased when the deceased would not have given their approval? Who looks out for the interest of those who are unable to look out for themselves? Lots of things to debate. Unfortunately, McEwan really doesn't give us anyone we feel like reaching out to take their side. No winners here. ( )
  Ed_Schneider | Mar 11, 2024 |
The power of book covers. This one lead me astray! Here’s me thinking that my old copy, discarded from our local Library, was going to be set late in the 1880s or early 1900s and yet it’s a modern narrative. Another surprise is that this is the first book to win a Booker Prize that I’ve finished and I’ve tried a few. The title Amsterdam is what caught my eye. We’ve been lucky to have had a wonderful holiday in The Netherlands. When the revelation for the title came, I was surprised. Many reviewers have called this a dull predicable book. I disagree. There are plenty of twists and turns and I found it compulsive reading at times. Three men, one the husband, all known to each other and all in love with the same, recently deceased woman. They all attend her funeral. Two of them are best friends and it is their friendship that ultimately destroys them both. ( )
  Fliss88 | Jan 20, 2024 |
After reading two fabulous books of McEwan and enjoying them thoroughly, this book turned disappointing. Found the plot to be too 'filmy' especially after the amazing insights of On Chesil Beach and Saturday. Yet looking forward to reading Atonement, that's the pull of the author's style. ( )
  sekhar0210 | Oct 13, 2023 |
This was an interesting mystery with a plot and a predictable conclusion. It was pretty good, but I do not understand why it won awards. ( )
  RickGeissal | Aug 16, 2023 |
Lovely way with words, couldn't stop writing down quotes. ( )
  Kiramke | Jun 27, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 172 (next | show all)
Because Booker prize deliberations go on behind closed doors, we'll never really know what led the judging panel to Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. Naturally, that makes it all the more tempting and intriguing to speculate. What discussions were there? What compromises were made? Who stuck the knife into poor old Beryl Bainbridge? Were there displays of taste and erudition from Douglas Hurd and Nigella Lawson? How was the case made for Amsterdam? Were there compromises, or just a fuzzy consensus? Did anyone dissent? Did anyone actually try to suggest that this isn't a very good book?
On the latter question, we must assume that the answer was "no" – or that the person making the case against the book was roundly ignored. As I shall now attempt to show, a point-by-point debunk of the novel can be carried out in around five minutes – even less time than it takes to read the thing.
added by KayCliff | editThe Guardian, Sam Jordison (Dec 6, 2011)
 
Amsterdam is an intricate satirical jeu d'esprit and topical to the point of Tom Wolfeishness. It is also funnier than anything McEwan has written before, though just as lethal.
added by jburlinson | editNew York Review of Books, Gabriele Annan (pay site) (Jan 14, 1999)
 
''Amsterdam'' is very British and, despite its title, takes place mainly in London and the Lake District. On the scale of nastiness, it gets high grades as well. But it is less unsettling than McEwan's earlier solemn-gory fables since its humorous dimension is everywhere apparent -- granted that the humor is distinctly black. Its tone overall, as well as part of its theme, reminded me more than once of the excellent 1990 Masterpiece Theater production ''House of Cards,'' in which Ian Richardson plays a sinister Tory cabinet minister.

What readers tend to remember from McEwan's fiction is its penchant for contriving scenes of awful catastrophe: human dismemberment in ''The Comfort of Strangers''; a confrontation between a woman and two deadly wild dogs in ''Black Dogs''; the tour de force balloon disaster that brilliantly opens ''Enduring Love.'' Nothing in ''Amsterdam'' quite measures up to these events. Instead, the tribulations of its two main figures -- a composer, Clive Linley, and a newspaper editor, Vernon Halliday -- are treated in a cooler, more ironic manner, even as they move toward disaster. This chilliness is an extension of McEwan's habitual practice of damping down the sensational aspects of his imagined encounters by narrating them in a precise, thoughtful, unsensational way. It may, in fact, make the violence, when it occurs, seem that much more natural and inescapable.
 

» Add other authors (27 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
McEwan, Ianprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Caulfield, MaxNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Verhoef, RienTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Zulaika Goicoechea, JesúsTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Zulaika, JesúsTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
"The friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake;"
~ W.H. Auden "The Crossroads"
Dedication
To Jaco and Elisabeth Groot
First words
Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their backs to the February chill. It had all been said before, but they said it again.
Quotations
There was something seriously wrong with the world for which neither God nor his absence could be blamed.
(as irony): V.T. did that famous front page. Pushed all the copy onto page two and let the piture tell the story .
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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In the affairs of his dead wife, a British publisher discovers compromising pictures of the foreign secretary who was her lover. An opportunity for revenge on both the political and personal level.

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Book description
Two old friends meet outside a crematorium on a chilly February day paying last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley, Britain's most successful modern composer and Vernon Halliday, editor of the quality broadsheet The Judge, were Molly's lovers in the days before reaching their current eminence. Gorgeous Molly had other lovers, including Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. Following Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will each make a disasterous moral decision, testing their friendship to the limits, and Julian Garmony will fight for his political life. Amsterdam, a short novel, is a contemporary morality tale that is as profound as it is witty. It is perhaps the most purely enjoyable fiction Ian McEwan has ever written.
Haiku summary
"Nouveau Beethoven",
et "grand éditeur de presse",
se fâchent, s'entre-tuent.
(Tiercelin)

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