SOURCE: Baker, Phil. “Comfy Conspiracies.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4979 (4 September 1998): 9.

In the following review, Baker judges Amsterdam to be an entertaining examination of such favorite McEwan themes as “grotesque private behaviour, the violation of privacy, and a couple threatened by circumstances.”

Hailing a cab outside the Dorchester one day, the gorgeous restaurant critic and photographer, Molly Lane, feels a tingling in her arm. It is the beginning of events that neither she nor anyone else could have foreseen. First comes the appallingly rapid progress of a disease that reduces her to an abject state before it kills her. And then comes a far more extraordinary chain of events following her death, which forms the substance of Ian McEwan's implausibly elegant black comedy [Amsterdam].

Four of Molly's lovers are present at her funeral. There is the rich old publisher, George, her final partner. There is the Foreign Secretary, Julian...