Nutshell: Ian McEwan Hardcover – 1 Sept. 2016

Or a Scot in Dane’s Clothing.I once read a review of a Tom Stoppard play, Hapgood, I think it was, which suggested that Stoppard’s genius was in making his audience feel more intelligent. I got the same sort of feeling with Nutshell, as Ian McEwan plays with his reader’s knowledge of Shakespeare. Or to put it another way, this is a highbrow (or even middlebrow) version of 1066 and All That, all those dimly remembered bits of Shakespeare.Much I had heard about Nutshell before reading it suggested that it is a retelling of Hamlet. Well yes it is to an extent, but firstly it is more of prequel, and secondly the characters and the imagery are frequently closer to the Scottish Play.In this world, the state of Denmark (or Scotland) is a slightly tired but still valuable townhouse in London. (Ger)Trudy has thrown out her husband, poet and publisher, John Cairncross out of the home inherited from his family. She has replaced him with his shallower brother, property developer Claude (ius). The two of them are plotting to murder the unfortunate writer in order to realise the value of this particular property. Their machinations (and copulations) are observed by John and Trudy’s unborn baby.McEwan then liberally sprinkles this set up with references to both Danish and Scottish plays. Trudy cuts her foot and worries about how difficult it is to clean up the blood. Claude having chosen a poison, wonders if he should have used one about which he read, which can be poured into the victim’s ear. Trudy drives Claude toward murder, and in the immediate aftermath is the more practical, but then quickly becomes the more regretful, to the point where Claude cares little for her. John’s ghost appears, a cross between Hamlet’s father and Banquo at the feast.This is a slight book, little more than a novella, but it is extremely intense, and Mcewan’s writing style is that of a virtuoso, revelling in complex vocabulary. The first chapter is one of the most stunningly beautiful pieces of writing I have read for some time, but then I found it difficult to progress. That wasn’t because of anything wrong with the story or style, other than its being so dense and intricate. I found it quite it quite tiring, or perhaps a better description might be extremely rich. I wanted to digest one chapter fully before moving onto the next. That said, as things move toward the crime and its aftermath, the pace picks up as it turns from a piece of angsty middle class literary fiction into an out and out thriller.I suspect that this will be a book which generates pretty binary reactions. A couple of times, I did wonder if it might become irritating, a bit too clever for its own good. I could certainly sympathise with those how might react badly to it. However, in the end, it won me over. It is a surprising, intelligent and entertaining book with a unique and engaging narrative voice. While being set in a very familiar middle class London, it avoids the suffocating smugness of Saturday.Well worth investing your time and a few of your English pounds.

Reviews have alerted us that this is a riff on Hamlet; so we identify the embryo in this story with Hamlet, and are confirmed in that idea because his mother is called Trudy and his uncle, her lover, is called Claude, and because the embryo hears them conspiracy to murder Trudy’s husband, here called John. (The embryo also hears that he is to be placed elsewhere once he is born). But don’t expect too close a parallel with or a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s play. True, the parallel could still work with the setting being 21st century London and the family not being royal. It might still work even if the characterization of Claude as crude and banal has nothing of the subtlety of Shakespeare’s Claudius, or if that of the apparently feeble and doting John lacks any touch of the majesty or the war-like quality of Gertrude’s husband.But the embryo has a mental life which has little in common with that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He knows of the world outside the womb through his sense of hearing – not only of conversations, but of radio and television programmes, which lead him to understand in what desperate crises is the world of 2016 (when the book was first published), while at the same time he has heard all the optimistic arguments for the world’s population as a whole never having been so well off as it was at that time. He ruminates about many of today’s political and cultural issues. From what he hears, he can even visualize – though he cannot see – objects and colours in the outside world (though he sometimes describes the appearance of objects he could not possibly have imagined or heard discussed). The embryo’s knowingness, philosophizing, articulacy, and the descriptions of his various physical sensations in the womb are a delight.Then McEwan departs altogether from any semblance to Shakespeare’s play, as John suddenly springs a great surprise on Trudy, Claude and the embryo. Even so, it does not save John from the fate that Shakespeare had in store for his counterpart. I need not point out that in the play this fate occurs when Hamlet is a young man, and not, as here, when he is not yet born.We are about half-way through the book. The second half is not quite as good as the first, and in places the embryo’s thoughts are quite difficult to follow. At times Trudy segues into Lady Macbeth’s role, as she us haunted by her guilt. Her grief is perhaps genuine; but in any case she plays the role of the grieving widow very well and almost comes to believe the story she tells to outsiders, including the visiting police. But she and Claude realize that the police have reasons not to believe them; and I must not reveal the end, except to say that the embryo gets to avenge its father, if not in the way Shakespeare’s Hamlet does. We may guess what will happen to Trudy and her baby; but the novel does not tell us: “the rest is silence”.The book is witty and very entertaining.

I chuckled my way through the whole thing. The conceit is slight and essentially the book is McEwan having the most fun possible riffing on it, in a very dark context, which really isn't very memorable in itself, it's the foetal monologues on the idiocy of the world outside, assimilated through Radio 4 and podcasts, or the distinct qualities of specific wines as they travel down the umbilical cord that make this so much fun to read. I loved it.

Basically a simple, straightforward murder story in which a woman and her lover plot to murder her husband (who is also the lover's brother) to get his inheritance - not a mystery, we know the murder plot from the beginning. But the novelty is that the 'story-teller' is the unborn baby in the mother's womb. Engagingly, even beautifully told, it kept me engrossed until the end, mainly because of the unusual perspective seen from within the womb.