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A review by storytold
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
2.0
2.5, originally rounded up for craft, but then I made a face about it for so long that I had to round down for dislike. Reading Ian McEwan is always an experience. This is a moral novel, which is to say, a novel about morals and about social mores. It is quite plainly and purposefully about terrible and aggressively mediocre people, a favourite subject of McEwan’s. It contains the following plots:
1. Vernon, a self-centered newspaper editor, decides to publish crossdressing photos of a conservative politician—alleging to champion progressive values, but perhaps to save his newspaper.
2. Clive, a self-centered composer, ignores a woman being assaulted on a mountain hike in order to finish his composition.
3. Each man hates what the other has done on moral grounds and swears to bring the other down.
It was written in 1998; crossdressing and transness are conflated under the term “transvestite." There is an allegation that Britain is becoming more accepting of gender transgression, which was certainly interesting to read 25 years later. The book is about the British media in a way that is still relevant and prescient: Vernon’s sensationalist actions are first lauded when they sell papers, then condemned when the politician gets ahead of it. The British media! When’s someone going to do something about that?
There’s obvious craft in the book. You can see its influences, its scaffolding. It’s certainly an entry into the canon of British literature, and draws from same. The prose is typical of McEwan: dense, stream-of-consciousness, researched, sometimes lyrical. Hard to get into, then eminently readable.
Throughout I had the bizarre impression that I was reading a play, despite that much of the book is spent in throes of solitude and reflection. It is the moral quality to the book that creates this impression, but also the absurd escalation of the two characters and the events that draw them together: the death of their shared lover, their encounters along the way, the culmination of the novel. It's also described as a 'comic novel,' which I think it technically likely is: the tone is intense, dark, and jocular, something McEwan does uniquely well. Some reviewers have noted the tone of the ending is discordant from the rest of the book. I don't agree. This is a story about three or more fools, court jesters, showing their asses again and again and with increasingly dire consequences. I think of Shakespearean comedies I have seen live, particularly modern adaptations: the way ugly, tacky raunchiness is played for laughs. This feels like that, but exponentially more cynical.
And god, I did not enjoy this.
This won the Booker Prize. Okay. For craft alone, it seems. I think perhaps it shouldn't have done. This is perhaps a comic novel, but it's also a story of moral decline: the casualty rate is incredibly high, and what parody was there was dry and severe. Clive writes a bad symphony, Vernon is fired, and meanwhile women become gravely ill and die and are raped and murdered and beaten and cheated upon and performing open heart surgery before agreeing to get ahead of their “disgraced” husbands by lying on the air, all so the men may perform their amoral theatre. A comic novel.
Solar, also by McEwan, had the same problem: we followed a man absolutely drowning in the arrogance of his own mediocrity, and that was the entire conceit. I think perhaps McEwan is successfully satirizing the prevailing middle-class masculinity in Britain with these books, but if you're neither intimately acquainted with this kind of mediocrity nor inclined to find it interesting, something about it—particularly the presence of women in the role of background wife or plot device—doesn't land how it should. There’s no doubt McEwan approaches mediocrity as a subject well, often compellingly; but when it's the sole lens of the book, it is flat, discordant, cynical, crass. It needs context to feel like it matters. Apart from an intense sense of schadenfreude, I’m not sure the 'comic' framing of this novel achieves anything for readers who aren't white, male, and British except a 180-page grimace. My two favourite McEwan novels—Atonement and Sweet Tooth—feature women prominently. The contrast makes a difference.
This novel is about two too-alike men who begin the novel together, diverge, converge again. It’s an interesting structure. The bones of the novel have something to them. But I can’t imagine recommending it, and I honestly might not bother picking up another from McEwan if the description looks like it's going to be another study of English masculinity to exclusion.
1. Vernon, a self-centered newspaper editor, decides to publish crossdressing photos of a conservative politician—alleging to champion progressive values, but perhaps to save his newspaper.
2. Clive, a self-centered composer, ignores a woman being assaulted on a mountain hike in order to finish his composition.
3. Each man hates what the other has done on moral grounds and swears to bring the other down.
It was written in 1998; crossdressing and transness are conflated under the term “transvestite." There is an allegation that Britain is becoming more accepting of gender transgression, which was certainly interesting to read 25 years later. The book is about the British media in a way that is still relevant and prescient: Vernon’s sensationalist actions are first lauded when they sell papers, then condemned when the politician gets ahead of it. The British media! When’s someone going to do something about that?
There’s obvious craft in the book. You can see its influences, its scaffolding. It’s certainly an entry into the canon of British literature, and draws from same. The prose is typical of McEwan: dense, stream-of-consciousness, researched, sometimes lyrical. Hard to get into, then eminently readable.
Throughout I had the bizarre impression that I was reading a play, despite that much of the book is spent in throes of solitude and reflection. It is the moral quality to the book that creates this impression, but also the absurd escalation of the two characters and the events that draw them together: the death of their shared lover, their encounters along the way, the culmination of the novel. It's also described as a 'comic novel,' which I think it technically likely is: the tone is intense, dark, and jocular, something McEwan does uniquely well. Some reviewers have noted the tone of the ending is discordant from the rest of the book. I don't agree. This is a story about three or more fools, court jesters, showing their asses again and again and with increasingly dire consequences. I think of Shakespearean comedies I have seen live, particularly modern adaptations: the way ugly, tacky raunchiness is played for laughs. This feels like that, but exponentially more cynical.
And god, I did not enjoy this.
This won the Booker Prize. Okay. For craft alone, it seems. I think perhaps it shouldn't have done. This is perhaps a comic novel, but it's also a story of moral decline: the casualty rate is incredibly high, and what parody was there was dry and severe. Clive writes a bad symphony, Vernon is fired, and meanwhile women become gravely ill and die and are raped and murdered and beaten and cheated upon and performing open heart surgery before agreeing to get ahead of their “disgraced” husbands by lying on the air, all so the men may perform their amoral theatre. A comic novel.
Solar, also by McEwan, had the same problem: we followed a man absolutely drowning in the arrogance of his own mediocrity, and that was the entire conceit. I think perhaps McEwan is successfully satirizing the prevailing middle-class masculinity in Britain with these books, but if you're neither intimately acquainted with this kind of mediocrity nor inclined to find it interesting, something about it—particularly the presence of women in the role of background wife or plot device—doesn't land how it should. There’s no doubt McEwan approaches mediocrity as a subject well, often compellingly; but when it's the sole lens of the book, it is flat, discordant, cynical, crass. It needs context to feel like it matters. Apart from an intense sense of schadenfreude, I’m not sure the 'comic' framing of this novel achieves anything for readers who aren't white, male, and British except a 180-page grimace. My two favourite McEwan novels—Atonement and Sweet Tooth—feature women prominently. The contrast makes a difference.
This novel is about two too-alike men who begin the novel together, diverge, converge again. It’s an interesting structure. The bones of the novel have something to them. But I can’t imagine recommending it, and I honestly might not bother picking up another from McEwan if the description looks like it's going to be another study of English masculinity to exclusion.