Amsterdam - Softcover

McEwan, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385494246 ISBN 13: 9780385494243

Publisher: Anchor Books, 1999

The Booker Prize-winning contemporary morality tale--cleverly disguised as a comic novel--from the acclaimed author of Atonement.

On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is a newspaper editor. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen...

Review:

When good-time, fortysomething Molly Lane dies of an unspecified degenerative illness, her many friends and numerous lovers are led to think about their own mortality. Vernon Halliday, editor of the up-market newspaper The Judge, persuades his old friend Clive Linley, a self-indulgent composer of some reputation, to enter into a euthanasia pact with him. Should either of them succumb to such an illness, the other will effect his death. From this point onwards we are in little doubt as to the novel's outcome--it's only a matter of who will kill whom. In the meantime, compromising photographs of Molly's most distinguished lover, foreign secretary Julian Garmony, have found their way into the hands of the press, and as rumours circulate he teeters on the edge of disgrace. However, this is McEwan, so it is no surprise to find that the rather unsavoury Garmony comes out on top. McEwan is master of the writer's craft, and while this is the sort of novel that wins prizes, his characters remain curiously soulless amidst the twists and turns of plot. --Lisa Jardine

Review:

Winner of the Booker Prize

"A dark tour de force, perfectly fashioned." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A well-oiled machine. . . . Ruthless and amusing." --The New York Times Book Review

"Beautifully spare prose, wicked observation, and dark comic brio." --The Boston Globe

"At once far-reaching and tightly self-contained, a fin de siécle phantasmagoria." --New York

"Ian McEwan has proven himself to be one of Britain's most distinct voices and one of its most versatile talents. . . . Chilling and darkly comic." --Chicago Tribune

"By far his best work to date . . . an energizing tightrope between feeling and lack of feeling, between humanity's capacity to support and save and its equally ubiquitous penchant for detachment and cruelty." --The San Diego Union-Tribune

"You won't find a more enjoyable novel . . . masterfully wrought, sure to delight a reader with even half a sense of humor." --The Atlant Journal-Constitution

"McEwan writes the sort of witty repartee and scathing retort we wished we thought of in the heat of battle. On a broader scale, McEwan's portrayal of the mutually parasitic relationship between politicians and journalists is as damning as it is comic." --The Christian Science Monitor

• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0385494246
• ISBN 13: 9780385494243
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208