Amsterdam

The euthanasia pact Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday casually strike at Molly Lane's funeral — that if either man is ever reduced to the kind of degrading, mindless decline that killed Molly, the other will help him die with dignity in Amsterdam, where the law allows it — is set up as an act of loyal, humane friendship and gradually revealed as something closer to two vain men's mutual insurance policy against ever seeming diminished. McEwan structures the whole novel to demonstrate that the pact's generous language survives intact right up until each man needs a justification for something closer to murder.

Clive's crisis of conscience on a Lake District walk — witnessing what looks like an assault in progress and choosing not to intervene because interrupting would break his composing concentration on a commission for the Millennial Symphony — and Vernon's decision to destroy a former cabinet minister's career by publishing private photographs of him in women's clothing are constructed as parallel moral failures, each man convincing himself his own transgression serves a higher professional or public purpose while being appalled by the other's. McEwan's satire targets a specifically British establishment vanity: both men are certain of their own moral superiority and use it to license exactly the kind of self-interested cruelty they claim to be above.

Julian Garmony, the foreign secretary Vernon tries to destroy over the cross-dressing photographs, survives the scandal essentially unscathed and, by the novel's end, positioned to become prime minister — McEwan's bleakest joke, since the one character willing to weather public exposure and brazen it out ends up rewarded, while the two friends who spent the novel manufacturing high-minded justifications for their own betrayals destroy each other instead.

Amsterdam won the 1998 Booker Prize despite being widely regarded, including by some of McEwan's own admirers, as a minor entry in his body of work compared to Atonement, published just three years later — a reception that turned the prize into something of a running joke about the Booker rewarding a lesser book from a major novelist rather than his best work. McEwan's own defense of the novel rests on its precision as a compact black comedy of manners: at under two hundred pages, it has none of the sprawl of his more acclaimed novels, trading depth of feeling for a tightly engineered satire of upper-middle-class English self-regard.