Scaffolding

I just finished reading Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. The funny thing is, I just started reading it, this evening. It's under 200 pages, but even so starting and finishing a book on the same day is an extreme rarity for me, as I've got the reading speed of a concrete block. Yeah, it was really helpful in grad school. But Amsterdam also turned out to be fantastic, which sped things along.

The further along I get in a plot like that of Amsterdam, the more I think of scaffolding. Most humble house painters and storytellers build a scaffold from the ground on up. At his blackboard or his park bench or wherever he does his scheming, perhaps McEwan erects his plots from the ground up, too. But with something as intricate as Amsterdam, perhaps not. The relevant details, the key planks and piping that allow one level to link to the next, are interspersed so skillfully and almost randomly throughout the narrative that I can't see how they could be thought up in linear fashion. Instead, I'm so dazzled by it that I envision the scaffold floating in mid air, pieces gradually filling in here and there below it, with not a touch of urgency or wobble. Add McEwan's graceful prose, eye for metaphor, absorbing characters, intelligence without pretension, and you end up with a novel that would please architects and concrete blocks alike.
I highly recommend this book, as well as Atonement and Saturday, and I'm confident his other dozen or so books I've yet to read are just as impressive.