Amsterdam.

I’ve never met the novelist Ian McEwan, but after reading two of his books and seeing a film adaptation of a third, I think his worldview is depressingly misanthropic. Amsterdam, a slim novel that won the Man Booker Prize in 1998, plays out like a dark comedy without the comic elements, taking a mutual euthanasia pact between two friends and using it as a core plot device with the most obvious possible ending.

Clive and Vernon connect at the funeral of Molly Lane, a woman with whom they’d both previously had affairs and who has just died of some sort of progressive neurological disease, where they form this pact, saying if either sees the other heading for the same sort of miserable, undignified death, they’ll speed the process by going to Amsterdam where such things had just become legal. While at the funeral they also run into another of Molly’s former lovers, the ambitious politician Julian Garmony, then British Foreign Secretary with eyes on the top prize.

Vernon, an editor of a newspaper coping with falling readership, ends up privy to compromising photographs of Julian that could ruin the latter’s career, and after much debate within the office decides to publish them – over moral objections from Clive. Meanwhile, Clive, a renowned composer working on a piece for the government celebration of the upcoming millennium, is experiencing a bit of writer’s block and goes on a long walk in northwest England’s hilly Lake District, where he comes upon a man fighting with a woman, but chooses not to intervene because doing so might cost him the melody he’s crafting in his head. When he later explains this to Vernon, the latter is incensed at Clive’s selfishness and points out just how serious the consequences might have been. These two subplots turn the friends into mortal enemies, and, between that and the book’s title, you can probably see where we’re headed.

The Guardian‘s review at the time says the book has “a distinct whiff of Evelyn Waugh” in both style and subject, but I’d say that’s half right. Waugh’s social satires were often bitingly funny, both in character and in plot. If this reminds one of any of Waugh’s novels, it’s the questionably unfunny A Handful of Dust, where one major character ends up with one of the most unfortunate endings (short of death) in literary history. Amsterdam is devoid of humor; McEwan scorns his characters, and appears to loathe the Netherlands’ lax policy on euthanasia, but the combination of the two means two people we are supposed to hate drive each other to a shared ignominious end. Aside from my reaction that the conclusion probably wasn’t realistic, I was barely moved to shrug my shoulders. Even Tony Last got more of a rise out of me than that.

I didn’t care for Atonement, where McEwan builds a narrative around what I felt was a totally unrealistic event and then pulls the entire rug out from under readers; I did like this year’s film adaptation of On Chesil Beach, but the worldview within is still decidedly pessimistic, with both works arguing, in essence, that we can’t atone for or even recover from past mistakes. Maybe that’s true but it makes for miserable reading.