Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, Short Review and Quotes
Amsterdam is the only McEwen novel I’ve read so far. As mentioned in a previous post, it contains many well crafted phrases, as witnessed below. I found it a pleasant enough read. Worth the time. But only just. Although attention has clearly been paid to sentence and story, the book is a disappointment. It lacks meat, ambition; a good, fun opening chapter, some clever dialogue, character description, and musings on friendship, mortality and morality, and an abrupt, hollow ending. Serious themes humorously dealt with throughout, falling sharply into incongruent farce that does the book a disservice. Huckleberry Finn suffers similarly.
Ironically, by imposing symmetrical structure on the novel McEwan undermines efforts to sketch ‘the perfect arc,’ truncating what could have been a much better, more significant read. Amsterdam represents the modest achievement of a modest objective. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge intentionally light fare with heavy standards. Better to blame the Booker for my bloated, unmet expectations.
Read more reviews here. And one that concurs with my concerns here.
Christopher Hitchens calls Saturday McEwan’s ‘most successful and daring novel.’ Atonement was voted number three (tied with Burgess’s Earthly Powers) on the Observer’s top 25 novels in the last 25 years. Number one on that list is J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. So, respecting the judgment of Hitch and the Observer’s panel of literary experts, I’ll read more, I won’t weigh McEwan’s worth on one book alone, I’ll report back.
Wicked quotes start here:
To air differences and remain friends, the essence of civilised existence, don’t you think?
Molly was ashes. He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.
Upper lip arched in disgust, he was still picking, cutting and scraping away with a pocket knife as the train began to move. Beneath the patina of grime, the gum was still slightly pink, like flesh, and the smell of peppermint was faint but distinct.
We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man’s privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element – mind.
If it’s OK to be a transvestite, then it’s OK for a racist to be one. What’s not OK is to be a racist…But Clive had found his trope…If it’s OK to be a transvestite, then it’s OK for a family man to be one too..
The open spaces that were meant to belittle his cares, were belittling everything: endeavour seemed pointless. Symphonies especially: feeble blasts, bombast, doomed attempts to build a mountain in sound. Passionate striving. And for what? Money. Respect. Immortality. A way of denying the randomness that spawned us, and of holding off the fear of death.
An image came to him of a set of unfolding steps, sliding and descending – from the trap door of a loft, or from the door of a light plane. One note lay over and suggested the next. He heard it, he had it, then it was gone. There was a glow of a tantalising after-image, and the fading call of a sad little tune. These notes were perfectly independent, little polished hinges swinging the melody through its perfect arc.
His dreams were simply a kaleidoscopic fracturing of his week, fair comment on its pace and emotional demands, but omitting – with the unthinking partisan bias of the unconscious – the game-plan, the rationale whose evolving logic had in fact kept him sane.
Sure enough, something in the fumble and clatter of Clive’s pick-up suggested the near-paraplegia of shattered sleep.
He didn’t, but the next two hours had all the brio of a light opera in which every aria was his, and in which a shifting chorus of mixed voices both praised him and harmoniously echoed his thoughts.
It’s time we ran more regular columns. They’re cheap, and everyone else is doing them. You know, we hire someone of low to medium intelligence, possibly female, to write about, well, nothing much.
He drank from the bathroom tap and put himself to bed, and lay there for hours, open-eyed in the dark, exhausted, desiccated and alert, once more forced to attend helplessly to his carousel.
Lying on the bed beside him was a venomous little card gloating over his downfall, written by his oldest friend, written by a man so morally eminent he would rather see a woman raped in front of him than have his work disrupted.
Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose – to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this non-language whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalisingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused.
This should have been the symphony’s moment of triumphant assertion, the gathering up of all that was joyously human before the destruction came. But presented like this, as a simple fortissimo repetition, it was literal-minded bombast, it was bathos; less than that, it was a void; one that only revenge could fill.
Practically every instrument was playing the same note. It was a drone. It was a giant bagpipe in need of a repair. "
