The pivotal plot in ’’Amsterdam’’, not much critically examined by other reviewers here, is a story about two not really successful people at the midlife crisis where settling for less becomes life’s main burden, both self indulgent (a musician/composer and a newspaper editor) conspire to murder each other.
They come to this unlikely idea at the end of a life long friendship because - it seems - of perceived slights although this too is not adequately charted in the novel, and both come to the same idea at the same time and select the same method.
They elect to go to Amsterdam where they find corrupt medical practitioners who agree to commit euthanasia for large sums of money paid in cash. They pull off this trick by falsely identifying themselves as the other, then switching places at the last moment, and so simultaneously kill each other.
The mechanics of this unlikely swap are not adequately explained, but in more essential ways the plot line is deeply flawed. The description of the place could not be more wrong; not that McEwan got things like street names in Amsterdam wrong. His researchers made sure of such trivial accuracy. It is his complete failure to understand the Dutch society and her institutions that ruins the book.
The Netherlands, and especially its capital, Amsterdam, is - in the minds of many native English speakers - a den in iniquity, showing how little they know about this, arch conservative and, in many ways, intolerant country. This simply could not happen. Euthanasia is strictly controlled in the Netherlands.
There is compulsory notification to the Department of Justice, independent medical examination of the dying patient by at least two physicians who must lodge their reports with the authorities, and an independent counselor must give guidance to the patient, a lawyer is appointed to wrap up the affairs of the patient taking care of final taxes and distribution of assets to the heirs, following which there is a required period for re-consideration, and an independent psychiatrist must judge that the patient is not making the decision in a desperate moment of despair or treatable depression but is fully competent and capable of making an informed decision, and a final family reconciliation in which survivors of the patient are also able to apply for and receive counseling, and then the actual day of death in which there must be certain people present as witnesses.
A sort of ritual takes place, a kind of funeral at which the dying person may be able to listen to his or her eulogies. Actually the Dutch society is drowning in rules and regulations. A more credible book would describe the adventures of people who die of old age while waiting in Kafkaesque lines, but that would not win any prizes; the suspension of action has already been done in ’’Waiting For Godot’’.
The story told by McEwan, at least this main subplot, could not possibly happen. It is actually the fantasy of an ignorant English author, serving his readers the jingoistic moral saber rattling that foolish people need in order to reaffirm their perceived cultural and individual superiority over the persons of a foreign country they do not understand and have no inclination to learn anything about.
The English way of committing euthanasia, in which nothing official is arranged, and decisions are made in an ad hoc manner behind closed doors, make it more likely that Dutch people would go to the UK to find corrupt doctors for such a deal; assuming that the unlikely plot could be taken with a sufficient serving of suspended disbelief by readers anywhere. Why this won the Booker Prize, I cannot fathom. It should have been Atonement, which is a likely, gripping tale.