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Amsterdam was published in 1998, four years before a statute permitting physician assisted dying became effective in The Netherlands. Voluntary euthanasia had been a topic of hot debate for twenty years and Dutch courts had gradually become more lenient with doctors who helped dying patients end their lives, but there was no law explicitly allowing euthanasia in Amsterdam at the time McEwan wrote his book.

 

The topic, however, was very much in the air; much as it is in the UK now.

 

These are the opening lines of Amsterdam: ‘Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their backs to the February wind.’

 

Two former lovers of one woman chatting in a crematorium?

 

‘Poor Molly. It began with a tingling in her arm as she raised it outside the Dorchester Grill to stop a cab; a sensation that never went away. Withing weeks she was fumbling for the names of things. Parliament, chemistry, propeller she could forgive herself, but less so bed, cream, mirror. It was after the temporary disappearance of acanthus and bresaiola that she sought medical advice, expecting reassurance. Instead, she was sent for tests and, in a sense, never returned.’

 

Comedy then. Black comedy. Black comedy always has the black part lurking and ready to reach into your unvoiced fears.

 

Euthanasia enters at the beginning of the book when these two lovers of Molly’s, who are also old friends, make a pact to help each other die.

 

It returns at the end.

 

But the middle of the book is about the choices people make and how friendships can turn sour.

 

Clive  (near the beginning), “I’d like to know there was someone who’d help me finish it…I mean, help me to die. Especially if I got to the point where I couldn’t make the decision for myself, or act on it. So what I am saying is this­–I’m asking you, as my oldest friend to help me if it ever got to the point where you could see that it was the right thing.”

 

Hesitant dialogue. No conclusion. ( Vernon says he’ll think about it). This little speech is loaded with the ambiguity and the problems that pervade any honest discussion around voluntary assisted dying: not being able to make a decision yourself, someone else having to decide it was the right thing­, the passing of your life and death moment onto another person. Amsterdam is not only a comedy. It’s not a light book, despite the criticism that surrounded it when it won the Booker prize. It is as full of weighty questions as McEwan’s previous books, it’s just written like a comedy.

 

Some people don’t even find it funny; the humour is so dark.

 

I find traces of a medieval morality play in Amsterdam. Like the morality plays, which were performed on carts in the street, there is a stark separation between the players and the audience. In this case those two unnamed lovers in the chilling first scene are the players on the cart. Later  the whole world patrician they live in forms the stage. This world is not my humdrum world. It is the world of great and the good (Clive is a famous composer, Vernon is a newspaper editor, Molly wrote for Vogue and the other main character, Julian, is Foreign Secretary.) At least they believe they are the great and the good. As the humble viewer looking on, I  am less sure.

 

What I am sure about, because it’s the driving plot of the book, is that both Clive and Vernon  make moral choices (choices that have nothing to do with euthanasia) and I know, as they are making them, which decision is the right one­­, the one that requires courage, however hard the interior thoughts of the characters work to justify the other.

 

Tension between interiority and distance exists all the way through the book. As a reader, or audience, I was always mentally commenting on the characters, never feeling at one with them, not even at the most highly descriptive moments of Clive’s hike in the Lake District, or of his composition of a piece of music. I was always aware that these people are deceiving themselves. They are neither great nor good. Sure enough, they have risen to the tops of their professions and they think of themselves as above the social norms that restrict the rest of us mere mortals, but I knew they were due for a fall.

 

Like a morality play.

 

(Some of those are very funny too. But you have to be able to appreciate black humour.)

 

And the end?

 

Don’t expect your views about assisted dying to be either confirmed or denied. Unlike the morality plays, which were telling familiar stories and were grounded in a religious outlook common to both players and audience, there are no more fundamental truths at the end of Amsterdam than there were at the beginning.

 

Except the truth that art can hold a mirror to the worlds people create.