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- Paperback: 193 pages ;
Dimensions (in inches): 0.55 x 8.00 x 5.25
- Publisher: Anchor Books;
(November 2, 1999)
- ISBN: 0385494246
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Book
Description
On a chilly February day, two old friends
meet in the throng outside a 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; Vernon is editor of
the quality broadsheet The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had
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 neither has foreseen. Each will
make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be
tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for
his political life.
In Amsterdam, a contemporary morality tale that is as profound
as it is witty, we have Ian McEwan at his wisest and most
wickedly disarming. And why Amsterdam? What happens there to
Clive and Vernon is the most delicious climax of a novel
brimming with surprises.
Winner of the 1998 Booker Prize
From the
Back Cover
"Amsterdam is a pitiless study of
the darker aspects of male psychology, of male paranoia,
emotional frigidity, sexual jealousy, professional rivalry and
performance anxiety....Despite the darkness of the themes, or
perhaps because of them, Amsterdam is extremely funny
in a black sort of way....Ghoulishly compelling."--Alain
de Botton, Independent on Sunday
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. --Lisa Jardine
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