Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their back to the February chill. It had all been said before, but they said it again. Many times before, and in many other crematoriums.In Amsterdam, this year's Booker winner, Ian McEwan says it all over again, the enduring tale of one funeral and many friendships. Not a grand theme steeped in the autumnal despair of a century. But the architecture of McEwan's crematorium is as deceptive as the structure of love.And lovers of Amsterdam - a famous composer who is writing the symphony for the millennium, a quality broadsheet editor who is struggling to arrest the downward march of circulation, and a foreign secretary who is an arch conservative - play out their passions and fears in an arena where the intensity of betrayal is directly proportional to the lightness of self-preservation.They were Molly's ex-lovers, and Molly's 'undignified' death brings out their best and worst intentions. The post-funeral pactbetween the composer and the editor in honour of the dead not only challenges the limits of trust but rewrites the sociology of existence in an age in which funeral is the most familiar motif. McEwan chronicles this with wit and irony, with the controlled detachment of a moralist, with the immense joy of a satirist. But the story is not funny.Good news that the Booker judges have realised Amsterdam's worth. The Booker, literary London's most revered annual pageant, has grown in reputation not by celebrating the known, but by discovering the distant wonders - Naipaul, Rushdie, Okri, Ondaatje, Ishiguro, Arundhati Roy. The sun was setting on the empire, but the literary sundowner flowed in from the fabulous lands of the decolonised. The Booker meant market as well as reputation.The `English' novelist and his exclusive promoter who upheld the territorial integrity of the imagination cried out: the Booker has reached the fin of its own private siecle. But the finest English novels of the day areonly written in English, their ancestry cannot be traced to the bleak houses of the Victorian countryside. Novelists like Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and Ian McEwan have defied the island long ago by reaching out to the silence of Europe, the sorcery of the Caribbean. Adjectives always came from history, and memory provided the punctuation.So the Booker has found a natural choice in McEwan, the author of such sculpted turbulence like The Innocent, Black Dogs and Enduring Love. Novels that follow this confession: ``I like to think about the tension between the private worlds of individuals and the public sphere by which they are contained. Another polarity that fascinates me is of men and women, their mutual dependency, fear and love, and the play of power between them.''As the charred remains of a moral system multiply in the backyard of the McEwan country, only fiction can afford to be cheerful. Ian the enduring lover wants to buy a sculpture or a canvas with the prize money.Hope it will be as enduring as the art of the buyer.
