Amsterdam

A black comedy about two friends living in the UK in the mid to late 1990s.

McEwan is one of those writers who manages to draw the reader in right off the bat with his gorgeous prose. Each passage travels up and down in the most delightful ways, hitting all the right notes as it thunders towards its inevitable - and fulfilling - conclusion. I ate it up. The writing was so lovely that I think I would have enjoyed this book very much even if it hadn't gone anywhere.

The tight plot does move forward, though, in leaps and bounds. The story unfolds via a series of quick scenes that paint the characters in their natural environments, giving us a great sense of who these people are and how they relate to the world. As things gain momentum, show more McEwan demands some real intuitive leaps from the reader, but he always sets them up in such a way that they feel natural. By the time we reach the conclusion, it feels inevitable.

And, as a special bonus, it's hilarious... in a dark way, of course. I initially wondered why this was considered a comic novel, but as things progressed I started to see what everyone was talking about. Events play out in such a way that you can't help but see a certain desperate humor behind it all.

Overall, this was excellent. If Margaret Drabble and Robertson Davies had ever written a book together, it might have resembled this one. Highly recommended. show less

A delightful mastership of language and rythm, that creates a bland book. There is no doubt that Ian McEwan can write well, but also that he can't tell a story. Either it is British phlegm or an excess of intelectualism, the language, as beautiful as it is, does not match the story. This is a story about passions: Jealousy, hate, love, revenge... But it is told in such a distant way that the reader cannot feel any passion going to him. Whatever happens, you don't care about the protagonists, which means that you don't care about the story and ultimately, you don't care about the book. The only thing left is to enjoy the language, like a Vivaldi Quartet in a Battle.

3.5
Have you ever picked up a novel that initially gripped you but found the conclusion so disappointing that it altered your view of the book? Unfortunately, that was my experience with Ian McEwan's Amsterdam.

The novel focuses on the unbridled ambitions and questionable ethics of two friends from the British elite, Vernon, a newspaper editor, and Clive, a classical music composer. McEwan, a master of satire and nuanced characterization, deftly chronicles their rise and decline and then fizzles out. However, I still recommend this book, especially if you are a McEwan fan.

TLDR: Save time and feel less besmirched - read Yeats’ “Crazy Jane” and ponder it. Less excrement and a lot more pleasure, that way.

This book is just irksome, and it portrays pretty much everyone as loathsome and unwell, easily turned to murderousness, or vacuous and so disingenuous that it appears to be innocence to themselves. No one comes out clean - characters, author, reader. Would you like then to step in a sewer? I'd advise against it.

There's also a lot of sloppiness and disrespect in its treatment of one of the central plot lines of the book. The sloppiness, failure to distinguish threads, and the hand-wavy disrespect strike me as emblematic of the book and, though this may be a hasty generalization, I expect I'll find it show more elsewhere with this author, which is another reason in the series of overdetermining reasons I won't read anything else of his.

The book is a cynical and unpleasant place to spend time, and there's no payoff. It has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer hitting plate glass. There is some good writing, but it's just not a good book. Avoid. show less

I'm reading all the Booker Prize winners of the past 50 years. www.methodtohermadness.com.

Ian McEwan is one of those fabulous writers, like Ann Patchett, whose books are each unique. He writes with convincing authority about realms as divergent as music composition, underworld thugs, and wartime nursing. I have been looking forward to reading a new Ian McEwan book since the beginning of this project, and I was not disappointed.

Weighing in at just under two hundred pages, Amsterdam is a lightweight of a novel, but it could stand up to anything by O. Henry in a championship fight. It is brilliantly plotted, bitingly witty, and breathtakingly ironic.

Amsterdam is the story of two men whose friendship reaches a new level after the death of show more a woman they both loved. It is a meditation on friendship and selfishness, hypocrisy and ethics, success and revenge. I wouldn't spoil a page of it for you, but just to whet your appetite, you will find an editor double-crossing, a politician cross-dressing, and...oh, just read it. show less

I had read Atonement and enjoyed it. Amsterdam looked like what I should try out next to see just how much I did or didn’t like Ian McEwan. The GR rating for Amsterdam was intriguing. An award winner, a fairly well-known author, a low average GR rating, as many 2’s as 4’s. I couldn’t help but wonder. And then there was Atonement. I liked Atonement, but didn’t love it the way some did. Maybe Amsterdam would help me to figure out why.

I reached a couple of conclusions. Not answers, perhaps. There is no one to like in Amsterdam, unless you like the despicable. There were no fine, grey lines of morality here for me. I was not confused about how I felt about the characters. Some readers like to read about characters they like or show more admire, or at least need to have one or two characters in a story that meet those criteria. I am okay with not liking the characters. I often find those I don’t like as interesting as those I do like. So that was not a reason for me to not like Amsterdam. In fact, I really liked Amsterdam, more so than Atonement, and one of the reasons was because the characters were so easy to dislike, and yet so well drawn they were easy to imagine.

Another similartity I noticed between Atonement and Amsterdam: there were aspects of the unbelievable mixed with a story that otherwise seemed very realistic. I noticed from the reviews that this really bothered some. Both novels break the believability spell, at least for me. If you are reading something that seems not dissimilar to the world in which you live and then at some point characteristics are introduced that make it unbelievable, how do you react. That is very different from reading something that intended from page 1 to be a different world or that is expecting you to stretch your imagination throughout. It feels almost mixed genre, and some like their genres straight.

So where does that leave me and this book. I thought story and the characters were great. I was flipping pages. I liked this crash of morality issues that leaves you wondering if there was a message and if so what it was. Now that I have a little better grip on the mix of the realistic with the hard to swallow I at least know what I feel I am reacting to and why. It is a technique. I admire its use. It's intriguing to me. I think I will leave it at that for now. show less

This is the second novel by Ian McEwan that I've read, and I think I may have to conclude Mr. McEwan and myself just do not get along. "Amerstardam" is what literature might be like if "Mrs. Dalloway" had never happened: there's hardly anyone in this book, who isn't wealthy, extremely accomplished, and very British. It invites comparison, of course, to "Saturday," McEwan's more obvious homage to "Daloway," which featured a successful brain surgeon who had a genius-kid blues guitarist and a prize-winning poet for kids. Clarissa Dalloway, we should remember, was neither particularly bright nor particularly accomplished, though she managed to be pretty memorable. I suspect that McEwan is positioning himself to be the favorite author of the show more new British ruling class, which probably gets him invited to some pretty good parties. "Amerstam" features the editor of a national British daily, a noted composer, a cabinet secretary, a photographer who'd worked for Vogue, and another prominent politician. You know, just folks.

The other similarity to "Saturday" here is the fact that it seems to have an odd distrust of the written word. That book, let's remember, featured a venerable old poet getting socked right in the jaw after daring to stand up to a thug. "Amsterdam" gives us Vernon, a newspaper editor constantly at war with a faction of the staff he dismisses as "the grammarians," you know, newspaper writers who bother with the finer points of grammar and style. True, Vernon is attempting to find his fading paper's place in the new media landscape, but It's still kind of depressing, really, especially since McEwan's writing isn't bad at all. But Vernon's attitude seems to point toward the fact that McEwan, for all his use of the indirect third person, is a writer more interested in systems than people. That's not what I read novels for, though, thank you very much.

There are some things to admire about "Amsterdam," beyond McEwan's prose. It features, as other reviewers have noted, a lovely account of the mechanics of artistic creation on the part of the composer, something that's surprisingly rare in fiction. And the book is, as a blurb has it "a well-oiled machine," the plot, with, as another reviewer noted, its Greek tragedy dynamics, really does lock together very nicely. And there's some dry humor here and there. But in the end, "Amsterdam" struggles to justify its existence: its seems a bit like literature for a post-literature world. And it is, at last, refreshingly brief. This thing got the Booker Prize? Heaven forfend! show less