Ian McEwans Amsterdam society from surface to depth

PhD assist. Andreia Suciu

I.
Introduction
In discussing Ian McEwans Amsterdam by comparison with almost any of his other
novels critics seem to be unanimous in saying that even if the novel won him the Booker Prize, it
is by no means in the elite group of his fiction. The central ploy of the book involves two friends
the world famous composer Clive Linley and the newspaper editor of The Judge, Vernon
Halliday who after having loved the same woman, the photographer Molly Lane, remain
friends throughout the book up to a moment when all of a sudden they turn against each other
and, in an ingenious manner set by the novelist, commit mutual murder using the pact they had
made to curtail the other ones suffering through euthanasia if it so happened that one of them
suffered from a degenerative disease, each of them sets a trap for the other and using the
libertinistic Dutch laws concerning euthanasia manage to cope with the paper work (including
the signature of the victim-to-be) and have teams of doctors perform the alleged chosen/ assisted
death on them. The trigger of them drawing apart and ignoring a friendship which seems to have
been swallowed by the busyness of contemporary life is the incident stirred by some pictures
taken by their common lover, Molly, to another one of her lovers, Julian Garmony in drag
clothing. Her widower, George Lane, suffering from the complex of the cuckold even if by
relating to his wifes past, becomes the tool who manages to divide and conquer because, after
surfacing the pictures that make Clive and Vernon disagree upon the idea of their publication, he
is the one who in the end brings the bodies of the two back from Amsterdam.
II.
A state-of-the-nation novel
The novel, though shallow in character analysis, has a philosophy built around the the
corrupt worlds of politics, journalism and publicly commissioned art1. Thus, the presentation of
the political world, of the mass-media and of the contemporary artist under the pressure of the
millenarian/ chiliastic times becomes a parody brought on mainly by the conflicting states that
the people in these circles experience due to the confusing mixture between pragmatism and
idealism, between self-affirmation and loyalty. The author himself admits to the introduction of a
comedy which leaves a bitter smile on readers lips: although its somewhat dark in its humor,
Amsterdam is meant to be lighter in tone, and much more based in a recognizable, shared social
reality.2

Finney, Brian, English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996, p. 88.

Interview with Ian McEwan,

http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1298/mcewan/interview.html.

Amsterdam also achieves a clinical dissection of amorality 3 in the first two characters.
However, what is postmodern in such an examination is the manner in which the public opinion
receives such amoral, deviated, grotesque behaviour the leniency that it manifests towards the
sexually aberrant behaviour displayed by Julian Garmony seems not only normal but also noble
in a society in which men, in order to excuse their weakness, are forgiving of other peoples
moral slippages. Hallidays act of revealing this deviance is accused of inhumanity, but the
greater irony in this interplay of events is McEwans intention of revealing the loss of other
fundamental values: morality, family values, respect for ones profession which in the
contemporary world of change and adaptation seem lost. At the same time, by placing its
characters in a double ethical dilemma (Hallidays oscillation between publishing the
compromising photos and ruin a mans public and private life or not; Linleys quick and
dismissal of helping a woman in need and continuing his artistic effervescent act) the novel
achieves a double purpose of making the reader wonder himself about the proper choice and at
the same time ridicule the characters who obviously make the wrong choices and find the most
ridiculous arguments for this. McEwan condemns the vacuity of an enclosed professionalism,
unresponsive to the contradictions and complexities of social life4 (Clive does not help a woman
who was plainly physically abused by a man, later to be discovered as a serial rapist, only to
preserve his fit of inspiration and Vernon is led by his personal obsession in revealing the photos
disconsidering the multi-layered implications of the mass-media), but the manner in which he
does it attempts and actually manages to be objective and this because of the technique he uses in
telling the story. He employs what is called the bi-perspective5 McEwans textual
presentation of events introduces both of his characters perspectives and lets the readers choose
between the two subjective views of the main characters so that they could discover the truth
and the answer to who is right.

III.
Dichotomous themes
Built as a condemning of hypocrisy in the circles of the intelligentsia, the novel
introduces basic topics such as friendship and rivalry, loyalty and betrayal, responsibility and
freedom (in other words personal desire and public or professional responsibility), morality and
amorality, forgiving and revenge, the realistic/ pragmatic and the idealistic (equally binding as
modes and ridiculous as character-types in contemporary society therefore parodied in the
novel), sexual jealousy and emotional/ creative frigidity backgrounded against performance
anxiety, the frailty of the body and the strength of the mind, creation and death.
The freedomresponsibility dichotomy, can be traced in the world of journalism
involving freedom of speech, the freedom of the readers to receive the news with the bias or
3

Head, Dominic, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 19502000, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002, p. 45.
4
Idem, p. 46.
5
Mauter, Eva Maria, Subjective Perspectives in Ian McEwans Narrations, Noderstedt, Germany: Grin Verlag,
2006, p. 34.

objectivity, the lenience or the intolerance they want, but also the responsibilities that come as a
result of the choices made both by journalists (oscillating between ethical and pragmatic
professionalism) in what they release and by readers in what they judge (as simple viewers,
consumers of images or trendsetters through the admonition they could practise on the actors of
the social life). We can also analyze this dichotomy in the act of creation as the author introduces
both the beauty and emotional/ intellectual frenzy that come with it, but also the responsibilities
that creation imposes in contemporary society in which the work of art has become a commodity
that has to meet the requirements of the market: deadlines, sellability, profit. The creator-vendor
is subjected to supplementary pressures than in the times in which creation was an act of freeing
the mind, and McEwans exaggerated presentation of Clive Linleys tensions and his final act of
committing partial plagiarism introduces the topic without asking for pity on the creator that he
himself is.
In what the frailty of the body is concerned (the two main characters are both obsessed
with the fading away of the powers of the body Clive feels his left hand going dead on him,
and Vernon thinks that the right side of his brain, generally recognized as controlling logic,
creativity, has already died) we consider that this is McEwans use of a method of punishing his
characters and of bringing them to the ultimate sanctioning from the last pages of the book: their
deaths is so comically-grotesque a manner which shows total loss of any trace of strength of the
mind if ever there had been. This also completes the dark symmetry of the novel which had
started with a funeral that hid the same fear of frailty of the body and mind of the departed one.
The love triangle is the easiest, most natural manner for McEwan to ridicule his
characters and make them all the more grotesque by the introduction of the desire to revenge.
George Lane is the best example as he seeks to exact revenge on all of Mollys past lovers and
again in a grotesque manner he becomes the undertaker of two of them (Clive and Vernon) and
the grave digger for the career of the third (Julian Garmony) thus bringing an end to any
possibility of triangle and settling scores in the hate triangle.
IV.
Style
The first perception of Amsterdam is that it is a novella, a book which is read breathlessly
in two-three hours and leaves us bewildered at the complicated yet simple plot which brings
under our eyes two of the most frequent topics in Britain at the end of the 90s: invasion of
privacy and vulgarization of the press. The book builds therefore as an indictment of the human
nature and especially of the generation formed in the 60s as Clive and Vernon are. The
presentation is done through a series of complications which come from McEwans mastery in
revealing the plot, in a skilled mixture of dramatic simplicity and novelistic development:
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. Part of my ambition for
Amsterdam is that the reader would share in the plotting of the book. Its a fairly

elaborately plotted novel; its meant to take pleasures in its own plotting, and I
hope the reader is drawn into that. I always had it in mind as almost a kind of a
theatrical experience. Its original subtitle was a comi-tragedy, and it was therefore
in five acts, which remain in place. There were any number of ways I could have
padded it out, but in fact successive drafts involved a process of making it leaner
and leaner until I really couldnt lose any more of it.6
Perhaps due to the very introduction in the novel of a creator, respectively Clives work
upon his Millennial Symphony, the novel was compared to an operetta imitating the light tone
and the amusing dialogue or with a fugue due to its polyphonic presentation of the same events,
to the repetition of the implications of such events by contrast or interaction. Ian McEwans is
not a stranger from the writing of music and the laws of composition as he had written the
libretto for Michael Berkeleys oratorio Or Shall We Die? (1983) and later for the opera For You
(2008).
At the same time, the work develops as a myse en abyme because Clives progress(ion)
in the composition of his symphony follows the progress(ion) of McEwans writing his novel,
following the same sequence of bursting beginning, bouts of inspiration and absurd ending
(plagiarized in Linleys case, grotesque and incredible in McEwans case).
Despite its postmodern cultural background, Amsterdam was seen as introducing events
in a rather traditional manner: omniscient narration, use of suspense, linear, logical,
chronological narration, the use of subplots (Vernon being outmaneuvered by his subordinates),
all culminating with the hubris in the end.7 One other element which is fairly traditional is the
use of space: McEwan introduces the city as a bearer of a mentality, a cultural frame which
encloses all the social stirrings of contemporary times (London), a space which assigns freedom
politically and judicially (Amsterdam), a space in which it is difficult to live by one self because
the connections compel ones behaviour. The author also uses space in a manner which reminds
of the romantic spirit as being a trigger for the artists inspiration, providing a refuge and
becoming his nook. However, the contemporary world does not let even this place be an ivory
tower for the artist as it is invaded by contemporary crime. The abuse upon the woman at Lake
District signals the abuse of the artists space but his inability to act responsibly only shows the
ridiculousness of any demand from the artist to be isolated nowadays. He has to live in all circles
and adapt to each and all of them.
The novel was also seen as having strong elements of psychological novel8 as it makes
extensive use of free indirect thought (in the form of indirect internal speech) thus revealing the
characters emotions, worries, intimations of mortality and immortality, morality and immorality,
jealousies, doubts, moods, uncertainties, or plans.

Interview with Ian McEwan,

http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1298/mcewan/interview.html.
7
8

Malcolm, David, Understanding Ian McEwan, University of South Carolina Press, 2002, pp. 191192.
Ibidem.

Amsterdam also stands out as a social, traditional novel through the satire it builds around
the two main characters as social types of the 1960s who have thriven in the 1980s and 1990s.
They stand for an entire generation who is presented as shallow, hollow, due to the pragmatism
and the political influence that mark their growth: politicians are hypocrites, journalists are
pragmatic and care more about selling figures than the quality of their material, artists have
delusions of grandeur, ultimately they are all people who choose self-interest over moral conduct
because they live, after all, in the era of professional competitiveness and entrepreneurial selfpromotion:
Nurtured in the postwar settlement with the states 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. When the ladder crumbled behind them, when the state
withdrew her tit and became a scold, they were already safe, they consolidated
and settled down to forming this and that taste, opinion, fortunes.9
Though contested because of the use of predictability, melodrama, over-coincidence,
macabre twists, bizarre plot twist, witty diversions and misunderstandings Amsterdam becomes
an example of black comedy that stands out precisely through these apparent faults as they are
perfectly circumscribed to the genre of social satire: a mode of writing that exposes the failings
of individuals, institutions or societies to ridicule and scorn10, using wit or humour that is
either fantastic or absurd and announcing its lack of tolerance for human imperfection 11. And
if some characters or incidents seem caricatured or exaggerated this is again only to serve the
purpose of satire as do parallelism and parody. McEwan succeeds wonderfully in softening his
attack through the element of play that he introduces as the reader is borne through the web of
relations in which characters exhibit many times childish behaviours. The lenience with which
the author manages to treat his characters though they commit despicable acts is aimed at
introducing the image of a puppeteer who masters his puppets with detachment this being the
ultimate form of punishment and the ultimate form of expressing his admonition of the
contemporary times in which they live. Therefore, we consider that the shallowness that
McEwan was accused of in his treatment of character analysis is only another device employed
to make the reader understand the very shallowness of his characters.
Ultimately, the novel can be seen as a skilled mixture of genres: Amsterdam is a thriller
as well as a farce, with a plot whose extreme convolution and plethora of unlikely coincidences
reads as a sendup of the thriller genre.12

Annan, Gabriele, Wages of Sin, review of Amsterdam in New York Review of Books, 46, no 1, 14 th January 1999,
pp. 78.
10
Baldick, Chris, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, OUP, 2001, p. 228.
11
The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms, 2006, p. 211.
12
Annan, Gabriele, op. cit..

Bibliography
Annan, Gabriele, Wages of Sin, review of Amsterdam in New York Review of Books, 46, no 1,
14th January 1999, pp. 78.
Baldick, Chris, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, OUP, 2001.
Childs, Peter, Contemporary Novelists. British Fiction Since 1970, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005.
Childs, Peter; Fowler, Roger, The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms, 2006.
Finney, Brian, English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.
Head, Dominic, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 19502000, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Ingersoll, Earl G., Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in Contemporary Novel, Rosemont
Publishing and Printing Corp., 2007.
Malcolm, David, Understanding Ian McEwan, University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
Mauter, Eva Maria, Subjective Perspectives in Ian McEwans Narrations, Noderstedt, Germany:
Grin Verlag, 2006
Rennison, Nick, Contemporary British Novelists, London and New York: Routledge Taylor &
Francis Group, 2005.