Amsterdam

by Ian McEwan

“I’ve seen the circulation figures,” George said gravely. “Not good.” “The rate of decline is slowing,” was Vernon’s automatic response, his mantra. “But it’s still a decline.” “These things take time to turn around.”

“It seems to me,” he was saying, “that what you need now is one big story, something that’ll catch fire, something your opponents will have to run with just to keep up.”

Vernon experienced for the first time the proper impact of Molly’s death—the plain fact of her absence. The recognition was brought on by familiar smells that he had already started to forget—her

until now he had never really missed her in his heart, or felt the insult of knowing he would never see or hear her again. She was his friend, perhaps the best he had ever had,

astonishment first, followed by a wild inward hilarity.

A man’s life, or at least his career, was in his hands. And who could tell, perhaps Vernon was in a position to change the country’s future for the better. And his paper’s circulation. “George,” he said at last, “I need to think about this very carefully.”

the melody was elusive as long as he remained in London, in his studio. Each day he made attempts, little sketches, bold stabs, but he produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work.

whatever local upset it caused, it could only increase respect for the compelling nature of their high calling. These types—novelists were by far the worst—managed to convince friends and families that not only their working hours but every nap and stroll, every fit of silence, depression, or drunkenness, bore the exculpatory ticket of high intent.

He didn’t doubt that the calling was high, but bad behavior was not a part of it.

in a dark mood, he had become aware of an unevenness in his stride, as though one leg had grown longer than the other.

As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.

Clive was inclined to see these as merely elements of a larger fact—Vernon’s lack of principle.

Clive stared ahead

lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness.

Despite the cold, he opened the window wide so he could breathe the distinctive winter Lakeland air while he unpacked—peaty

water, wet rock, mossy earth.

memories of the conversation, and then something beyond—what had been said, and then what he would like to have said to Vernon now that he had had hours to reflect.

He downed the Chambertin Clos de Beze like a lager and said, “What a week, what a terrible week.” He held out his glass for a refill, and Clive, relieved that he had not started with the Richebourg, obliged.

“These prissy bastards! I’m trying to save their arse-wipe newspaper and their piss-pot jobs. They’d rather lose everything than dangle a single fucking modifier. They don’t live in the real world. They deserve to starve.”

Good old Molly. She would have been creative and playful, urging him on, taking him further into the dreams that the House of Commons could not fulfill, and he would have known that he could rely on her.

Perhaps it was lingerie he was wearing. The effect was less successful, unmasking completely the lurking masculinity and revealing the pathos, the impossible hopes of his confounded identity.

We knew so little about each other. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man’s privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element—mind.

In the third

on some mental screen of selfhood he was a demure and feasible woman, but to an outsider what showed was evasion. Face it, you’re a man. He was better off looking to camera, confronting us with his pretense.

“I don’t get it. He’s pure poison. You’ve said so yourself many times.” “He’s vile,” Clive agreed.

At last he said, “Tell me this. Do you think it’s wrong in principle for men to dress up in women’s clothes?”

What exactly is Garmony’s crime that needs to be exposed?” “His hypocrisy, Clive. This is the hanger and flogger, the family values man, the scourge of immigrants,

asylum seekers, travelers, marginal people.”

“If it’s okay to be a transvestite, then it’s okay for a racist to be one. What’s not okay is to be a racist.”

hoping for your support. Or at the least, a sympathetic hearing. I didn’t expect your fucking abuse.”

“I don’t get it,” he said quietly. “I don’t think you’re being straight with me. What is it you really object to about this?”

“Because of Molly. We don’t like Garmony, but she did. He trusted her, and she respected his trust. It was something private between them. These are her pictures, nothing to do with me or you or your readers. She would have hated what you’re doing. Frankly, you’re betraying her.”

Ok Vernon loses that chapter -can he be redeemed?

that he was making a mistake. Clive kept on because the shrinking and apprehension were precisely the conditions—the sickness—from which he sought release, and proof that his daily grind—crouching over that piano for hours every day—had reduced him to a cringing state.

human meaning would be bleached from the rocks, the landscape would assume its beauty and draw him in; the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be set free.

his cares were belittling everything; endeavor seemed pointless. Symphonies especially: feeble blasts, bombast, doomed attempts to build a mountain in sound. Passionate striving. And for what? Money. Respect. Immortality.

Finally he decided to stay by the stream—the exertion of a climb might help jolt him out of his torpor.

An hour later he was at the end of the valley,

regretting his d...

he gained height and the going became less steep, as the rain ceased and a long fissure in the cloud permitted a tiny consolation of diluted sunlight, it began to happen at last—he began to feel good.

this was a cherished moment in mountain walking, when one reached a col and began to cross the watershed and new summits and valleys inched into view—Great End, Esk Pike, Bowfell. Now the mountains were beautiful.

on Rosthwaite Fell, a baton of light across the bracken redeemed the reputation of the color brown with fiery reds and yellows.

not really so much physical difference between him and his thirty-year-old self after all, and that it was not sinew but spirit that had held him back. How strong his legs felt now that his mood had improved!

he was happy in his body, his mind was contentedly elsewhere, when he heard the music he had been looking for, or at least he heard a clue to its form.

It came as a gift.

large gray bird flew up with a lo...

gave out a piping sound on three notes, which he recognized as the inversion of a line he had already scored for a ...

These notes were perfectly interdependent, little polished hinges swinging the melody through its perfect arc. He could almost hear it again as he reached the top of the angled rock slab and paused to reach into his pocket for notebook and pencil. It wasn’t entirely sad.

He ignored the woman’s voice when he heard it. Already it was hard to capture what had seemed so clear a minute before.

He was crossing out notes as fast as he was setting them down, but when he heard the woman’s voice rise to a sudden shout, his hand froze.

what he had been doing, until interrupted, was creating it, forging it out of the call of a bird, taking advantage of the alert passivity of an engaged creating mind.