Changes

A Booker Prizewinner, Amsterdam opens in typical McEwan fashion, at a funeral, and as usual, you're immediately struck by the accurate and unpleasant observation that is a particular skill of his. As the book's two protagonists; Clive Linley, a composer, and Vernon Halliday, a newspaper editor, walk along talking in that awful desultory yet stilted fashion that is the way of funerals this is where you find them:

As I said - typically McEwan; it's not a pleasant description is it? But I'm sure you can imagine it, it's so close to the bone. The funeral is that of Molly Lane. She's the reason Clive and Vernon are hanging about in that euphemistically named 'garden'. Molly was a socialite, a columnist, a lover of life and the erstwhile lover of both men. She may be dead but in this book hers is the character with all the verve and enthusiasm. She's also the posthumous instigator of events; everything that happens in Amsterdam hinges on the relationship Molly had with its four main characters. She died nastily and sadly, poor Molly, victim of a horrible dementia. Shortly after the funeral Clive and Vernon decide that should either of them ever face a similar situation the other would not allow such an awful decline. They make a pact, a pact of mercy killing, of euthanasia. Are you beginning to guess yet? Hence the title you see - euthanasia is legal in Amsterdam.