Ian McEwan’s new novel has an unexpected narrator. By Sue de Groot for the Sunday Times
Nutshell
Ian McEwan(Penguin Random House)
****
You don’t have to be familiar with Shakespeare’s Hamlet to enjoy Ian McEwan’s latest novel, but it helps. Allusions and inferences and in-jokes abound, from the title (“Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams,” said Hamlet) to the names (the narrator’s mother is Trudy and his wicked uncle is Claude – Gertrude and Claudius, geddit?) to the baked meats ordered from a delicatessen after a murder.
Unlike Hamlet, the protagonist of Nutshell has a good excuse for his dithering passivity – he cannot take up arms against an amniotic sea of troubles because he is still trapped within his mother’s womb, waiting to be born.
Most people give a shiver of distaste at the thought of a story told from a foetus’s point of view, but this book is not visceral or gross – it is engaging and thoughtful, a thriller that sometimes veers into comedy.
Readers of a sceptical bent will have to suspend rational objections to the advanced intellect of an organism yet to enter the world. McEwan solves the problem of how an unborn child has such an extensive vocabulary thus: “How is it that I, not even young, not even born yesterday, could know so much, or know enough to be wrong about so much? I have my sources. I listen.”
From his mother’s ears “sound waves travel through jawbone and clavicle, down through her skeletal structure, swiftly through the nourishing amniotic”. He listens closely to news broadcasts, source of bad dreams, and absorbs knowledge through his mother’s addiction to podcasts (no doubt the pun is intentional) on all manner of subjects: “self-improving audio books … biographies of 17th-century playwrights, and various world classics”.
There is dark humour in his appreciation of the wine that reaches him via his mother’s bloodstream – and perhaps a subtle warning to pregnant imbibers of alcohol – but it is the live conversations, permeating porous skin, that provide the meat of the plot: “Lodged where I am, nothing to do but grow my body and mind, I take in everything.”
This is a strangely effective place from which to examine and dissect human flaws and foolishness, desires and discoveries. Like Hamlet, this narrator is not a fully formed human but a sounding board, a tabula rasa, a reflective surface for the unravelling of those around him. And the ending, when it comes, it not nearly as predictable as one might expect.
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Book details
- Nutshell by Ian McEwan
EAN: 9781911214335
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