No Stranger Than Fiction

Hey, look, I know that reviewing a year-old book isn’t an acceptable way to meet a word count, even on the internet. It’s even less excusable when the book in question was laurelled with a Man Booker prize and lavished with widespread critical and public attention. But Ian McEwan’s novella Amsterdam is just too tempting a morsel not to discuss, especially since one of its major protagonists is a composer.

McEwan must have sat down with a composer or two before he set pen to paper, because he absolutely nails Clive Linley, the self-styled heir to Ralph Vaughan Williams commissioned in 1998 to write a symphonic work commemorating the new millennium. At times McEwan seems to be paying homage to Doktor Faustus, another famous composer novel, but much of the fun of Amsterdam is in distinguishing the moments when McEwan chooses to indulge in the large-R Romanticism of the tortured, driven artist from the moments when he skewers those tropes mercilessly and his book reads like a parody of Thomas Mann’s.

Linley is a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, a “thinking man’s Gorecki” who rails against the radical musical currents of the 20th century. I don’t know how McEwan expected readers to react to this characterization; naturally I developed an immediate antipathy—how could I possibly sympathize with someone who gets hugely lucrative orchestra commissions and cadges melodies from Beethoven? But Linley, of course, is prey to the same unreasonable insecurities and endorphin-fueled ego trips that the rest of us deal with, and McEwan’s real achievement here is capturing these psychological fluctuations so deftly.

At any rate, Amsterdam is a quick and terrifically enjoyable read—dark, often funny, sometimes very moving. If uncomfortably foible-ridden characters in dire interpersonal straits entertain you, McEwan’s fiction is worth checking out; this tale is all the more gripping because it’s about us.