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The little chill >> Has the Booker Prize chosen the nouveau Beaujolais of fiction? by JULIET WATERS
This isn't to say it's not a good book. It's an easy Sunday afternoon read, tightly woven, plot driven and funny in a nasty way. Still, proving that you can judge a book by its dustcover, a perceptive fan will easily hear the hesitant tone of rationalization in this muddled blurb: "This short novel is perhaps the most purely enjoyable fiction Ian McEwan has ever written." If something's pure, there's no "perhaps." Amsterdam is without a doubt the most easily readable fiction McEwan has ever written. But anyone who appreciates McEwan's carefully crafted ambiguities and his extensive palette of greys is going to find Amsterdam the most cynical and relatively facile of his novels. Nevertheless, coming so soon after Enduring Love, Amsterdam is easily forgivable. And there's a good reason to forgive it. McEwan explained in an interview I did with him in February that usually after completing a novel he unwinds with a bit of screenplay writing. However, since he's officially "sulking" since Hollywood shelved the sequel he wrote to The Fly, he decided to write a short novel instead. Calling Amsterdam "more lighthearted than anything I've ever done," McEwan claims it's his tribute to Evelyn Waugh. But even the title, Amsterdam, suggests that this is something of a mini-vacation for McEwan (although the title takes on a more sinister meaning as the novel progresses). What is remarkable--and what maybe accounts for the prize--is the novel's eerie topicality. It may seem a stretch to link the debate over euthanasia with the privacy of politicians' sex lives, but this is what McEwan pulls off. Another purpose the book might serve is as an antidote to an epidemic of Big Chill nostalgia--McEwan has always been more of a pathologist than an apologist for his own generation. Anyone thinking about adapting this novella to the screen (McEwan refuses to adapt his own material) might consider re-naming it The Little Chill, since it opens at the funeral of one friend in a triangle of baby boomers. This is primarily the story of two friends, newspaper editor Vernon Halliday and celebrity composer Clive Linley, who are also ex-lovers of the recently deceased Molly Lane, an early victim of Alzheimer's. "Molly, restaurant critic, gorgeous wit and photographer, the daring gardener who had been loved by the Foreign Secretary and could still turn a perfect cartwheel at the age of forty-six." For people who expect more from McEwan, Amsterdam could be enjoyably read as a companion novel to Enduring Love. It deals with many of the same issues, the fear of mortality brought on by a recent death, the mid-life grasping for significance that leads a character into morally ambiguous territory. And finally the terror of madness. But while Enduring Love was a novel about how much it takes to destroy a solid, ordinary man in a good marriage, Amsterdam is about how little it takes to destroy the lives and friendship of two vain, shallow, self-absorbed characters. Think of it as the nouveau Beaujolais of this year's McEwan products. As long as he keeps coming out with the better stuff this'll do as his retail line.
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan,
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Ian McEwan winning the 1998 Booker for Amsterdam almost seems like the perfect epilogue to his social satire. On a short list of McEwan's great books, Amsterdam shouldn't even place. But there's a satisfying irony in knowing that this is exactly the kind of book that the society McEwan satirizes would pick as the best book of the year.