Fickle Friendship in Ian McEwan's Amsterdam
“But the genius cannot know that he is a genius—not really: he has hopes, he has premonitions, he suffers raging paranoid doubts, but he can have, in the end, only himself for measurement.” --Joyce Carol Oates, from “Notes on Failure.”
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Nobody is very nice in Amsterdam, Ian McEwan’s macabre modern morality tale. The novel opens with death and closes with death. In-between, McEwan finds space, in under 200 pages, to contemplate euthanasia and hubris, while commenting, in a perfectly post-modern self-referential style, upon the self-conscious artist.
Two friends and former lovers of Molly Lane meet at Molly’s funeral. Clive Linley, renowned composer, and Vernon Halliday, editor of the newspaper The Judge, have been friends for a long time, despite their shared interest in Molly. The quick, debilitating decline in their vivacious friend’s mental capacity emotionally shakes Clive and Vernon. She would have been better off, they agree, had she been put out of her misery, rather than nursed along by her hebetudinous husband George. Like soldiers with amputated limbs, they each suffer physical pains in the days following Molly’s funeral, and they agree to help one another commit suicide should similar fates befall them. Once they reach this understanding, their physical ailments subside.
Mental awareness subsides, too. Like nose-diving Icarus, both Clive and Vernon soar toward the sun, their fates sealed long before they notice the wax melting from their feathers. Clive has been commissioned to write the Millennium symphony. McEwan presents Clive as the consummate Romantic artist, working in a midnight frenzy, sleeping by day, and seeking inspiration from hikes in Wordsworth’s Lake District. On one of his hikes, a bird’s three notes (notes of alarm, no less) unlock his writer’s block. As he sits recording notes regarding changes to his symphony, he is interrupted by an argument and presented with a moral choice. His art, however, trumps the ethical dilemma. On reflection, he feels smugly justified because he suspects something “that he would not have shared with a single person in the world, would not even have committed to his journal and whose key word he shaped in his mind only with reluctance; the thought was, quite simply, that it might not be going too far to say that he was…a genius. A genius.” McEwan seems to mock the modern appropriation of the term, now ubiquitously applied to anyone of fame, and the artist’s temptation to harbor such fantasies. Later, a police inquiry will ensue, and the police’s mockery of Clive escapes him: “They seemed rather keen to understand all the difficulties associated with composing the crucial melody [when confronted with a possible crime in his vicinity]. Could he hum it for them? He certainly could.”
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