Seldom during its thirty-year history has the Booker McConnell Prize for fiction actually succeeded in selecting the best of the fiction eligible. True, there have been a few outstanding winners: South African J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, for example, probably the finest novel ever to win, held off the strong challenge of Graham Swift's Waterland in 1983, while three years ago Booker not only reestablished the credibility of the prize by awarding it to Pat Barker's The Ghost Road but also helped reaffirm English fiction in the process and further consolidated this in 1996 with Graham Swift's Last Orders.
Ian McEwan's Amsterdam (Cape, £14.99 in UK) starts out favoured by the bookies as well as the reviewers on this year's disappointing shortlist, comprising five English writers and one Irishman. Immediately established as one of Britain's leading writers of the post-war generation on the publication of the daring fiction collections, First Love and In Between the Sheets in the 1970s, McEwan, who is fifty, a war baby and son of an airman, has made a specialty of writing fiction about the strange and unsettling, often with undertones of war. His fiction seemed set to remain dark after his first novels The Cement Garden (1978), and former Booker contender The Comfort of Strangers (1981). However, with A Child in Time (1987) McEwan's fiction began to move away from sinister effects and bizarre sexual behaviour and began to concentrate seriously on human dilemmas. That novel explored every parent's nightmare: the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of a child.
Many critics regard it as McEwan's finest work. It also belongs to a group of novels which are heavily informed by the politics of Thatcher's Britain. Indeed, A Child in Time is possibly a metaphor for Thatcherism, and certainly could not have been written without the experience of that particular form of Toryism.
The intensely psychological interests him and this theme dominates The Innocent (1990), which tells the story of a man's wartime experiences and their disturbing aftermath. Black Dogs (1992) is also concerned with war and its effect on memory. That novel gave McEwan his second Booker shortlisting. Last year the omission of the overrated Enduring Love - which admittedly opens brilliantly with a haunting, self-contained sequence involving an incident with an escaped hot-air balloon - from the shortlist helped make McEwan into a Booker casualty of sorts.
Amsterdam is a lively performance on many levels, and reveals a lightness of touch not associated with McEwan's work. This sharp, skilful novella is a far larger book than it seems. Much of its achievement lies in the strength of the characterisation and some wonderfully quickfire set-pieces. McEwan has never observed, or listened, as well as he has here.
Two friends, Clive, a successful composer, and Vernon, a newspaper editor under pressure, are joined at the funeral of their former lover, Molly, by the dreaded Julian Garmony, a Foreign Secretary and possible future Prime Minister, with a fondness for dressing up - in women's clothes. The politician is another of Molly's former men friends, and his presence is not welcomed by Clive or Vernon, or, indeed, by George, "the sad, rich publisher who doted on her and whom, to everyone's surprise, she had not left, though she always treated him badly". Although she is dead before the novel opens, felled abruptly at forty-six - "the speed of her descent into madness and pain became a matter of common gossip" - Molly emerges as the heroine of McEwan's deftly sustained narrative, which moves from scene to scene and from one lonely character to the next with extraordinary skill.
With the exception of the Foreign Minister's supportive wife, a children's doctor, none of the characters is remotely noble. Instead, McEwan has assembled a cast of relatively successful middle-aged people who all have a wild former social life in common. Even in death, Molly presides over the action, and the sympathy which McEwan earns for Clive and Vernon is directly related to their memories of the dead woman they both loved. Flighty, affectionate, dazzling, utterly unreliable but kind, she is their past. Clive the composer exists largely through his preoccupation with his new orchestral piece, and his memories of Molly. She "used to say that what she loved most about Clive's house was that he had lived in it so long". Clive suspects Molly liked the house because it was "a history of an adult life, of changing taste, fading passions and growing wealth".
Molly's death comes to symbolise the growing doubts, fears and evasions of Clive and Vernon; the composer is worried about his latest commission, while Vernon the newspaper man lives with the pressure of making the wrong decision. Having witnessed Molly's collapse into helplessness, the friends vow to save each other such humiliation should the need arise. It does. Drawn into a plot to expose the Foreign Secretary, Vernon finds his friendship with Clive under serious strain.
This is a subtle novel of changing tones and nuances. The narrative voice is wry, detached and often ironic. Several times throughout the novel the supposedly sophisticated characters sound like warring children. The dialogue is clever, and many of the exasperated exchanges are funny. McEwan has written a morality play which does not moralise because he allows his characters - most of whom speak to themselves as much as to others - to muddle and lie to themselves and each other. There are no judgments and yet ultimately this deceptively slight, unexpectedly profound, brief work is as moving as it is entertaining. Above all, its cleverly twisting, snapshot plot provides McEwan with multiple opportunities to demonstrate his technique and his convincing flair for irony on several levels.