Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

First published: 1998

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Comedy

Time of plot: Late 1990’s

Locale: London and the Lake District, England; Amsterdam

Principal characters

• Molly Lane, a photographer who dies after a long illness
• George Lane, her husband, a wealthy publisher
• Clive Linley, a composer, her former lover
• Vernon Halliday, newspaper editor, her former lover
• Julian Garmony, a conservative British foreign secretary
• Rose Garmony, his wife, a surgeon

The Story:

At a crematorium near London, family, friends, and lovers of Molly Lane are gathered to mark her death after her long, painful struggle with cancer. Her husband, George Lane, had decided to postpone a formal memorial service, in part because he is not ready to deal with Molly’s former lovers, exchanging knowing glances and comparing notes during the service. Among the mourners are former lovers Clive Linley, a composer, and Vernon Halliday, a newspaper editor, who are both deeply moved by Molly’s death; she was only forty-six years old.

Because Clive is no longer married nor in a long-term relationship, he is especially horrified that he could one day face unbearable suffering from something like terminal cancer without a friend or lover to help him escape his pain by accelerating his death. He persuades Vernon to become that friend in need, and the two agree to a sort of suicide pact. It is not their intention to join each other in dying, but merely to do whatever is possible to shorten the other’s life if that person is dying of a terminal disease.

George discovers among his wife’s personal belongings an envelope of photographs she took of Julian Garmony, the ultraconservative British foreign secretary, rumored to be considering the prime ministry. In the photographs, Garmony is shown as a cross-dresser. George gives Vernon the photographs, anticipating that Vernon will print them in his newspaper, the Judge, which is seeing a decline in circulation. This decline could be reversed by news of a high-ranking member of Her Majesty’s government cavorting in drag, imitating the seductive smile of a woman making herself sexually available. Vernon has a reputation for embarrassing public figures, having earned it through Pate-gate, the exposure of a U.S. president who used taxpayers’ money to buy a toupee. Eventually, it becomes clearer that Lane is plotting to get even with Garmony (yet another former lover of Molly) through this newest scandal; it is possible he is seeking vengeance against Vernon as well. Given the more liberal climate of the 1990’s, the devious George anticipates that public sentiment may well turn against Vernon for exposing Garmony’s kinky pastime.

Meanwhile, Clive, the composer, who is approaching the end of his career, has been commissioned to write another piece of music, already talked about as his “millennial symphony.” At Molly’s funeral gathering, Clive is pressed into being introduced to Julian, who asks how the composition is coming and adds that the commission had been decided at the cabinet level, where he supported it. Given the public pressure, Clive wants to compose something similar to Ludwig van Beethoven’s monumental Ninth Symphony, a massive expression of the mastery of Beethoven’s art. Clive hopes that his own creation will bring to fruition all he has written before, and help to find him a place in the pantheon of great twentieth century composers. He has completed much of the composition but needs a theme for the finale. Deciding that a change of venue might stimulate his creative imagination, he visits the Lake District of northwest England, a lovely vacation spot similar to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York.

One day while out for a walk, Clive has his moment of inspiration and feels he is close to grasping his central theme. He encounters what he first thinks is a married couple having a disagreement; soon, however, he sees that the woman is struggling to fight off a rapist. After a moment of hesitation, Clive abandons the woman to her struggle and finds a flat rock to use as a desk to write out this elusive theme.

Clive makes the mistake of sharing this experience with his friend, Vernon, who later informs him that the man he saw attacking a woman in the Lake District was the Lakeland rapist, who has been preying on women hikers. This particular woman had escaped her attacker. However, because Clive refused to intervene or even to report the incident to the police, the rapist attacked another woman two days later. Fortunately, the rapist was soon arrested. Vernon threatens to report Clive, a witness to the earlier attempted rape, to the police if Clive refuses to do his moral duty. Vernon himself is hardly an embodiment of morality, being embroiled in an effort to publicly embarrass Julian. Before Vernon even got the racy photographs, he had been served with a court injunction to not publish them. However, Vernon succeeds in getting the injunction lifted. His staff shares Clive’s initial response to the photos: that it would be unethical to reveal what Molly and Julian intended to remain private.

In a brilliant preemptive strike, Rose Garmony, Julian’s wife, calls a press conference and lies to the media to save her husband’s reputation. She asserts that he had revealed his cross-dressing to her early in their relationship, and that she had decided to overlook it as a harmless eccentricity. Holding the racy photographs for the media cameras to record, she focuses on Vernon’s effort to blackmail her husband, damning the editor for having the “moral stature of a flea.” Public sympathy is for Julian, and Vernon’s reputation is ruined, along with his career. Clive sends Vernon a postcard criticizing his friend’s behavior, and the “war” is on. Vernon reports his friend to the authorities, and Clive’s creative efforts are further disrupted when the police pursue him as a material witness to the rapist’s crime.

Clive and Vernon each come to believe that the other is showing all the symptoms of a terminal disease, and they make plans to visit Amsterdam. The city has liberal attitudes toward prostitution, recreational drug use, and even euthanasia, which will make it easy to find a doctor to assist in their suicides. The plan is for both Vernon and Clive to hire a doctor to help the two kill themselves and, thereby, fulfill their earlier suicide pact.

George and Julian have a bizarre conversation while they await their flight to Amsterdam to retrieve the bodies of Clive and Vernon and have them returned to England. George tells Julian he admires him for surviving the affair of the photographs, adding that a lesser man would have committed suicide. Presumably, this is exactly what Clive had intended in passing the envelope of photos to Vernon. Now that Vernon is dead, along with Clive—apparently an unexpected bonus for George—the time may finally be right to conduct a memorial service for his dead wife.

Bibliography

Chetrinescu, Dana. “Rethinking Spatiality: The Degraded Body in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam.” British and American Studies 7, no. 2 (2001): 157-165. A focus on illness and the human body in McEwan’s Amsterdam.

Childs, Peter, ed. The Fiction of Ian McEwan: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. An excellent resource for students of McEwan, providing excerpts from books, articles, and reviews examining his work.

Head, Dominic. Ian McEwan. New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. A study of McEwan’s aesthetics and themes, including those in Amsterdam.

Ingersoll, Earl G. “City of Endings: Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam.” In Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in the Contemporary Novel. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. This chapter focuses on “endings”—death, sexual climax, the ends of musical compositions and novels—in McEwan’s Amsterdam. Part of a study examining how gender is associated with the theme of endings in the contemporary novel.

Malcolm, David. Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. This critical study covers McEwan’s work up to Amsterdam. Each chapter is organized around what Malcolm sees as the five key issues in McEwan’s work: textual self-consciousness, feminism, rationalism and science, moral perspective, and the “fragmentariness” of his novels.

Roger, Angela. “Ian McEwan’s Portrayal of Women.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 32, no. 1 (1996): 11-26. This article deals with the key issue of gender in McEwan’s fiction. Roger argues that women in McEwan’s fiction are always constructed from a male point of view.

Walkowitz, Rebecca L. “Ian McEwan.” In A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945-2000, edited by Brian W. Shaffer. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. A biographical essay on McEwan in a literary companion examining British and Irish novelists writing from the end of World War II through the end of the twentieth century.