The light, brittle satire of Amsterdam is a decisive break from the past.McEwan himself says that, after writing Enduring Love, the new book felt like a kind of relaxation, “a real holiday”. Other reviewers, no less confidently, have identified Halliday’s newspaper, The Judge, as the Times and Hutton’s Observer. Meanwhile, it seems obvious to me [...]
The light, brittle satire of Amsterdam is a decisive break from the past.McEwan himself says that, after writing Enduring Love, the new book felt like a kind of relaxation, “a real holiday”. Other reviewers, no less confidently, have identified Halliday’s newspaper, The Judge, as the Times and Hutton’s Observer. Meanwhile, it seems obvious to me that the unpleasant right-wing foreign secretary Julian Garmony borrows his CV and aspects of his public persona (though not, I should point out for the lawyers, his complex sexuality) from Michael Howard. McEwan is delighted to be the cause of all this speculation, but denies everything.
Berkeley, for instance, he greatly admires, while Linley is supposed to be a pompous failure. As for Garmony, McEwan’s one concern was to minimise any resemblance to Douglas Hurd, who occupied the post at the time of writing. With Hurd chair of this year’s Booker panel, that looks lsuspiciously like foresight “The one thing it isn’t is a roman a clef,” McEwan says. “But I hope that the institutions and the characters have a sort of recognisable twang.
What broadsheet hasn’t tried to go downmarket at some time in the last 10 years?”
The title and the central idea of Amsterdam grew out of a private joke between McEwan and a psychiatrist friend. James Cameron eat your heart out.On general releaseStephen Applebaum. The book is only just in the shops, but already the game of who’s who has begun. Just who is Ian McEwan getting at in his new novella, Amsterdam (Cape, pounds 14.99)? Private Eye has authoritatively stated that the two central characters, the composer Clive Linley and his friend Vernon Halliday, editor of a declining broadsheet, are portraits of Michael Berkeley and Will Hutton. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (above) finds the director at the height of his film-making powers, and on course for Oscar glory. Praised for its veracity by D-Day veterans and critics alike, this Second World War epic doesn’t flinch from depicting the horrific realities of combat (this could be the first film to cause post-traumatic stress), or from the difficult moral questions raised by war.
Spielberg leaves these provocatively unresolved; and you stagger out into the light, emotionally and psychically drained, pondering the value of human life, weighing up the relative merits of mercy and revenge in wartime, and dreading the real prospect of another tearful Tom Hanks Oscar acceptance speech.Summer blockbusters rarely come this profound, gut-wrenching or humane. He’s been busy writing his new play Handbag (below) or The Importance of Being Someone.
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