Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan

This book won the 1998 Booker Prize, so I expected great things of it. I had recently read, and greatly enjoyed, the 1997 Booker Prize winner - The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy - and I usually find Booker Prize winners and shortlisted books to be excellent.


I was surprised, then, to find that it read more like a short story than an important novel. I kept waiting for its genius to shine out, but then it just went and ended. Without any genius. Or any shining. In fact, it was so forgettable that I've already almost forgotten it.

Admittedly, the 1998 Booker Shortlist was not a particularly strong one, though it did have Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto on it - a much stronger book which, with the benefit of my recent hindsight, probably should have won.

Ian McEwan was short-listed again, in 2001 with Atonement, which I have yet to read (its on my shelf at home, though). I hope that turns out to be better. The film of Atonement is currently in the cinema but I am reluctant to go and see it before I read the book. By the time I do read it, though, the film will have disappeared from the cinema, and I'll have to wait for the DVD. Such a dilemma!