Where Morality Is No Obstacle--but Judgment Is Harsh

Each era has its fashions in moral and immoral dilemma. The British novelist Ian McEwan is coldly and elegantly up-to-date with his. In the recent “Enduring Love,” he depicted two ingeniously constructed quandaries. One concerned the rub of heroism and self-preservation among men caught in an absurd danger; the other, the murky relationship between a mad (yet not utterly) religious stalker and his hapless (yet not entirely) target.

“Amsterdam,” a hastier and somewhat tinnier book, is a punitive farce with Grand Guignol trimmings. It provides a jocular death’s-head judgment upon three exemplars of contemporary London celebrity: an artist, a journalist and a politician. Though for all three the ending is unpleasant, and for two, grisly, it’s all in a national spirit of fun--as in the mockery lilt of the round:

Man’s life’s a vapor full of woes.

He cuts a caper, down ‘e goes.

Down ‘e, down ‘e, down ‘e, down ‘e, down ‘e goes.

Down indeed, and literally, go the capering Clive Linley, a rich and honored though unfashionably melodic composer, and Vernon Halliday, an editor working to lower his respectable newspaper gutterward. Down, less literally, goes Julian Garmony, an unscrupulous right-wing Cabinet minister. At the book’s start they assemble at the site of a previous down-going: the crematorium where Molly Lane, flamboyant golden girl and former lover of all three, is turning to ashes.

Clive and Vernon pace outside, tentative allies in their loathing for Garmony and the other mourners. McEwan allows them a bitten-off English conversation, with needles embedded and cryogenic gusts piped between each too-bad-poor-Molly. They are sorry, of course--stricken with a brain tumor, she had lingered in drooling indignity--but largely, it seems, for their own aging selves.

Both men, having zigzagged around their mediocrity to clamber to eminence, cling to it fervidly while sensing that they will be dislodged. The hyperactive melodrama of what happens over the next few weeks--one that will entangle and bring down Garmony as well--simply accelerates a slower dislodgment through fickle fashion and the eventual decay of unsound success.

First, though, there are capers to cut. Clive and Vernon each hope to reverse their declines with a final defining triumph. Each will do something loathsome to try to achieve it.

Seeking a distinctively climactic melody for the grand Millennial Symphony, which the government has commissioned (Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is his model), Clive goes mountain-climbing for solitude and inspiration. He glimpses an ambiguously threatening scene between two fellow climbers, a man and woman, but ducks away so as not to be distracted. Art, he rationalizes, is more important than a tawdry dispute. Later it will turn out that the man is a serial killer about to claim a new victim.

Vernon, defying his editors’ scandalized opposition, lays out a front page with photographs of Garmony, the minister, posing suggestively in a dress. He counts on a scandal to boost circulation and secure his shaky position. Sleaze, he rationalizes, is justified to end the political career of a right-wing menace.

Triple nemesis looms, as we perfectly plainly see. The chasm between our Olympian view and the characters’ fogged one is the stuff not so much of fiction as of satirical allegory. That the author is playing a game is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be enjoyable and even instructive, though for the reader, almost by definition, it remains a spectator sport. The Booker judges, who awarded this year’s prize to “Amsterdam,” seem to have been in a spectating frame of mind.

*

While its plot thickens or perhaps bubbles--it never gets very thick despite a slew of ingredients--”Amsterdam” takes an engaging look at Clive and Vernon practicing their careers. Orchestrating and filling out his score while pursuing an elusive melody, Clive could be a lighter version of the composer in Thomas Mann’s “Dr. Faustus.”

McEwan is ingenious at using words and images to convey a nonverbal art and particularly at evoking what one might call preinspiration: the foreshadowing of a musical theme about to take form. It is oddly suggestive of the aura that precedes an epileptic attack. With an equivalent fineness of perception, he renders the queer initial unease of mountain hiking: estrangement, even fear, at being alone and unassisted in a universe of rock and sky.

The portrait of Vernon at his newspaper is amusing but more ordinary, with dozens of subordinates besieging him for a ludicrous variety of decisions. At the morning news conference he tugs his affronted editors, accustomed to “quality” journalism, into the depths of populist high-concept. There is an arresting moment, though, when, briefly alone, he feels that without orders to give he no longer exists. “When he reached in solitude for a thought there was no one to think it.” Worse: “He could not say for sure that the absence was his.”

Back to nemesis, although to be fair, we have never really left it. Clive’s and Vernon’s respective ruthless pursuit of art and journalism both invite it. So does Garmony’s brutal politics. In fact--and this is one of McEwan’s subtler points--the narrow hunger for success and the blinkering of wider human sympathy condemn all three mediocre practitioners of their trades, ripe for downfall.

Getting us to these downfalls involves a plot that resembles an array of mousetraps setting each other off serially. There is no reason for details, not so much because they could give away the story as because, in their complication and growing wildness, they could discourage it.

The three principals manage to sabotage each others’ triumphs, in one case with the help of a wife. In fact it is the wife, Rose Garmony, who is one of the book’s only two complex and truly interesting characters. The other, even though she is dead, is the quite splendid Molly.

They inhabit a novel, in fact: McEwan has relinquished them into the freedom and mystery of fiction. Clive, Vernon and Garmony he keeps hard at work on his satire: pointed and amusing enough, but set up on flimsy and with a few pains too few.