AMSTERDAM by Ian McEwan

 Finished Mo 4/1/24

This is one of my trade paperbacks that I had not read. However, there was a note that I listened to the booktape We-Th 1/12-13/00; 1) Troy/ East St. Louis 2) Crane to Maryville/ Pick up scrap Ofallon. That brought back memories that I do not miss. 

The novel begins at Molly's cremation ceremony. Two of her lovers, Vernon and Clive meet and discuss their ex-lover. 

Vernon is a newspaper editor and Clive is a symphony composer.

Clive is working on a big and new work and goes for a hike in the wilds of England. He witnesses a rape, but doesn't report it because he doesn't want to take time away from his work. He tells Vernon and Vernon insists that he report what he saw to the authorities. 

Vernon receives photos of a hated conservative member of parliament in drag. Vernon wants to expose the man and Clive feels that the MP has the right to privacy. To release or not to release the photographs is the theme of the novel.

Both men poison each other and the photos are released to the public. The country rallies behind the conservative 'drag queen'. Trump in a dress would probably not hurt his popularity. 

From a review by NY Times:

"Ian McEwan's new novel, "Amsterdam," which won the Booker Prize in Britain this autumn, is a dark tour de force, a morality fable, disguised as a psychological thriller.

A chilling little horror story, easily read in one enjoyable gulp, "Amsterdam" is by no means McEwan's finest work: It is less ambitious than "Enduring Love" (1998) and "Black Dogs" (1992), and less resonant than "The Innocent," his 1990 masterpiece of Cold War suspense. One can only hope that this small, perfectly fashioned novel -- novella, really -- will send readers back to the rest of the talented McEwan's oeuvre.

Like so many of the author's stories, "Amsterdam" concerns the sudden intrusion of violent, perverse events into his characters' mundane lives, events that cruelly expose the psychological fault lines running beneath the humdrum surface of their world. In "The Comfort of Strangers," a pair of middle-class tourists fall prey to a Machiavellian sadist during a trip to Venice. In "The Cement Garden," a group of children are orphaned and bury their mother in the basement. And in "The Child in Time," a man's 3-year-old daughter is kidnapped during a trip to the supermarket.

In the case of "Amsterdam," two old friends -- one a famous composer named Clive, the other a mercenary newspaper editor named Vernon -- enter into a strange euthanasia pact that will determine both their fates and send shock waves through their privileged world.

Toby Melville/ The Associated Press

Ian McEwan holds a copy of "Amsterdam" at The Guildhall in the City of London.

Now in their middle years, Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday have both achieved prosperity and influence. How lucky they were, Clive thinks, to have been "nurtured in the postwar settlement with the state's own milk and juice, and then sustained by their parents' tentative, innocent prosperity, to come of age in full employment, new universities, bright paperback books, the Augustan age of rock and roll, affordable ideals."

Clive, who regards himself as Vaughan Williams' heir, has been commissioned by the government to write a Millennial Symphony; in his more optimistic moments, he dares to think of himself as a genius, an artist worthy of comparison to Shakespeare.

Vernon, who has become editor of a tabloid paper by default, is decidedly less confident: There are moments, alone in his office, when he wonders whether he even exists. All the exchanges in which "he had decided, prioritized, delegated, chosen or offered an opinion" made him feel he was "infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all the people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all."

Back in their impoverished, bohemian youth, Clive and Vernon had been lovers of a "restaurant critic, gorgeous wit and photographer" named Molly, a daring, glamorous woman who also had an affair with Julian Garmony, a conservative, xenophobic politician who would go on to become Britain's foreign secretary. Molly would eventually marry a rich, stuffy publisher named George Lane, who detests (and is unanimously detested by) her former lovers.

When a sudden illness leaves Molly delirious and incompetent, George seizes control of her life, forbidding her old friends to visit her sickbed. In the wake of her funeral, Clive and Vernon not only commiserate over her death but also make a pact with each other to avoid ever suffering such an undignified end: Should one of them become as sick and incoherent as Molly, the other will help him finish things off.

Writing in his usual spare, evocative prose, McEwan deftly conjures up the glittering London world Clive and Vernon inhabit, and he also does a nimble job of depicting them at work, showing us how Vernon is trying to boost his paper's falling circulation with trendy, tasteless stories, how Clive is trying to create an ending for his symphony commensurate with his ambition to commemorate the millennium.

Though there's a faint satiric edge to McEwan's portraits, he uses his psychological insight, as he's done so often before, to create sympathy for some decidedly unsavory people. Indeed, we find ourselves rooting for Clive and Vernon, even as it becomes clear that both of them -- much like James Penfield, the hero of "The Ploughman's Lunch," a movie written by McEwan back in 1984 -- are conniving opportunists, willing to use virtually any means necessary to achieve their ends.

Within days of each other, Clive and Vernon are both faced with moral dilemmas that will test just what sort of people they are. Clive must decide whether to put aside his beloved symphony to help a woman who may be in trouble, while Vernon must decide whether to publish some compromising photos of Julian Garmony that could end his political career. Their respective decisions will forever alter their careers, and imperil their decades-long friendship.

For all the appeals to high-flown principles like art and freedom that Clive and Vernon make in coming to their decisions, their problems do not really open out into the sort of weighty philosophical debates that animated "Black Dogs" and "Enduring Love." Nor, given the predictable outcome of the story, is there the sort of grisly narrative tension that made "The Innocent" so suspenseful to read. Instead, there are the simple pleasures of reading a writer in complete command of his craft, a writer who has managed to toss off this minor entertainment with such authority and aplomb that it has won him the recognition he has so long deserved.