Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

The climax of this story was a little too neat and far-fetched (very very close friends don't normally murder eachother over personal affronts...) and also predictable from miles away because McEwan aludes to how a pact made between two men in the first half of the story is going to have repercussions later. That sort of took the wind out of these sails. Even so, I did enjoy reading it and especially loved when the composer, Clive, heads out into nature in an attempt to find inspiration for his final symphony. The reasons for seeking the outdoors and the initial timidity of confronting a world so different from the one we are accustomed to is something most of us can relate to.

"During the first hour or so, after he had turned south into the Langstrath, he felt, despite his optimism, the unease of outdoor solitude wrap itself around him. He drifted helplessly into a daydream, an elaborate story about someone hiding behind a rock, waiting to kill him. Now and then he glanced over his shoulder. He knew this feeling well because he often hiked alone. There was always a reluctance to be overcome. It was an act of will, a tussle with instinct, to keep walking away from the nearest people, from shelter, warmth, and help. A sense of scale habituated to the daily perspectives of rooms and streets was suddenly affronted by a colossal emptiness. The mass of rock rising above the valley was one long frown set in stone. The hiss and thunder of the stream was the very language of threat. His shrinking spirit and all his basic inclinations told him that it was foolish and unnecessary to keep on, that he was making a mistake.

Clive kept on because the shrinking and apprehension were precisely the conditions -- the sickness -- from which he sought release, and proof that his daily grind --crouching over that piano for hours every day -- had reduced him to a cringing state. He would be large again, and unafraid." (83)

(New York: Doubleday, 1999)