Vernon Halliday and the Judge: Editorship
and Newspaper Power in Ian McEwan s Amsterdam

von Ralf Käcks

Contents

1. Introduction 3

2. Vernon Halliday and "Entrepreneurial Editorship" 4

3. George and Vernon - The Owner-Editor Relationship 9

4. The Judge, Vernon and Politics 12

5. Steering the Judge Downmarket 15

6. Conclusion 18

7. Bibliography 19

1. Introduction

Ian McEwan′s ability to present his settings and themes in detail has been already noticed. In his novel Amsterdam he exellently describes for example the Lake District when Clive Linley hikes to find inspiration or the composing process when Clive tries to write the perfect ending for his symphony. But these are not the only passages where he uses his knowledge of perfectly drawing the reader into a certain theme. He also shows in this novel that he has deep insight into the media and especially in how modern newspapers are made.

Media and especially the newspaper is one of Ian McEwan′s main themes in Amsterdam. Besides Vernon Halliday, who as the editor of the British national daily The Judge is the character the most involved in the printing press, also George Lane and McEwan′s secret main character Molly Lane are linked with the media. George owns a small part of the Judge and therefore is one of the proprietors to whom Vernon is responsible. Molly was part of the media establishment as well. She worked as critic for a magazine and later married George.
I will show in this paper that McEwan succeeded in portraying his character Vernon Halliday in a way that strongly resembles an editor of a national daily newspaper in Great Britain today. He even managed to hint at changes that happened during the last decades in how editorship is characterized by using George Lane as old fashioned proprietor to counterbalance the modern editorship of the Judge. It will also become obvious how comprehensive McEwan′s knowledge of the relationship between the media and politics is and how he weaved this aspect into the novel. Furthermore, I will point out that Ian McEwan portrays the Judge throughout his novel as a quality paper on its way to become a downmarket tabloid. By doing this the author again achieves to establish a direct link to current criticism of British national newspapers.

2. Vernon Halliday and "Entrepreneurial Editorship"

This chapter will focus on McEwan′s portrayal of Vernon Halliday, who as chief editor of the Judge is the character the most involved in media affairs. Everything in the novel that has to do directly or indirectly with Vernon is also linked in some way to his position at the newspaper. The reader gets to know Vernon in the course of the novel pretty well. McEwan shows his career, his position at the Judge and also a lot about Vernon′s private life. To point out that Vernon resembles a modern entrepreneurial editor in a lot of aspects I will focus on the first two points and exclude his private life.

The very beginning of Vernon′s career, that is his training for a job, is not explained by McEwan. The first thing the reader learns of Vernon′s curriculum vitae is that he got a job working for a news agency: "He had lived [...] in Paris in′74, when he had his first job with Reuters" . By then he must have been already a trained journalist because otherwise he would not have been sent to a foreign country for one of the biggest news agencies. After another blank in Vernon′s CV the reader learns that Vernon had changed his employer by the mid-eightes when "he was Rome correspondent for the paper he now edited" - the British national daily The Judge. Both facts about Vernon′s working life so far are mentioned rather casually when the relationships between Molly and her former lovers are explained. Later in the novel the form of presenting Vernon′s career changes into a more direct approch when McEwan starts to portray "the manner in which he had become editor of the Judge". After his work as correspondent in Italy Vernon became assistant for the editor and later for his successor. After becoming correspondent in Washington by chance his career was pushed when Vernon succeeded in breaking an affair that involved the president. This ′big story′ coincided with the sacking of the chief editor and was therefore the reason why he became editor when he returned to London.

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