Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

208 pages

Man Booker Prize 1998

Rating: 3.5/5

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 upmarket 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 be stricken with such an illness, the other will bring about his death. From this point onward we are in little doubt as to Amsterdam'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 rumors circulate he teeters on the edge of disgrace. However, this is McEwan, so it is no surprise to find that the rather unsavory Garmony comes out on top. Ian 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.

I really expected this to be a boring dull book that i wouldn't like. It turned out to be not so bad. Its a really quick read.. and i mean really quick.

Amsterdam is basically written from the POV of Clive and Vernon, a composer and a newspaper editor - good friends who've both been lovers of the now dead Molly Lane. Considering how short the book was, its a lil hard to write anything more on this story that the book blurb above already gives away.
Its amazing how stupidity can ruin a friendship. That's bout all i have to say.

Although i kinda knew what was coming at the ending, it was still refreshing the way it ended.

Considering this this one won the Booker Prize, I'm going to put this one in the category of 'reasons why award winning books are not all they say there are'. I mean, the book was good. McEwan has an unique style of writing and i liked that a lot of it was intellectual. But it really wasn't deserves-to-be-award-winning good.


My favourite lines:

"They could manage your descent, but they couldn't prevent it. " (On doctors)

"He drifted helplessly into a daydream, an elaborate story about someone hiding behind a rock, waiting to kill him. Now and then he glanced over his shoulder. He knew this feeling well because he often hiked alone. There was always a reluctance to be overcome. It was an act of will, a tussle with instinct, to keep walking away from the nearest people, from shelter, warmth, and help. A sense of scale habituated to the daily perspectives of rooms and streets was suddenly affronted by a colossal emptiness. The mass of rock rising above the valley was one long frown set in stone. The hiss and thunder of the stream was the very language of threat. His shrinking spirit and all his basic inclinations told him that it was foolish and unnecessary to keep on, that he was making a mistake."