Review: Nutshell

Nutshell by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ian McEwan is one of the world’s great novelists. This is not one of his greatest novels. That said, this is a lot of fun and, if you go into it without thinking it’s another Atonement or The Children Act, there’s a lot to recommend it.

This opens with a tour de force of comedy. Our narrator talks of “being inside a woman,” which feels like a metaphor for some deep emotional involvement. Instead, it’s no metaphor at all. Our narrator is actually a fetus, coming to term in the final months of his in-utero development, and understanding himself as a character in a complex family drama.

That drama turns out to involve a plot by his mother Trudy – aka Gertrude – and his uncle Claude (very close to Claudius) to kill his father. It took me a bit longer than it should have, though the insight dawned on me piecemeal, but that gives us an unborn “prince” who’s in the exact situation of Hamlet.

Once that central premise emerges, this drama becomes, as I read it, a comedy. McEwan works to include a variety of prenatal analogues to the Shakespearean play. We get something that feels like a ghost. We get levels of narratorial uncertainty, questions of do-I-act-or-don’t-I, and, in one far-fetched scene, a suicide attempt by wrapping the umbilical cord around his own unborn neck.

This opens with tremendous skill and, once I got my bearings (and the bearingless quality of the opening seems meant to reflect the emerging awareness of the developing fetus) I laughed for most of the first 50 pages. McEwan does an amazing job of milking the possibilities of such a pre-full-term narrator, and his language is rich, his observations clever, and his ‘unborn’ concerns surprisingly thoughtful.

This one never loses that pitch of skill, but I did find it slipping a little as the novelty of the narrator wore off and the implicit echo of the Hamlet plot became central. That is, this feels like utter invention at the start. By the end, it’s an adaptation of something familiar, and it feels less capable of that pure reimagining of what it means to be human.

The end [SPOILER] is harmlessly fun, when our narrator foils his mother’s escape (who, in turn, foils his uncle’s) by precipitating the rupture of his placenta, causing himself to be born a couple weeks prematurely. The idea makes me laugh, and it’s a fitting conclusion to what becomes the heart of the second half of this, but it’s somehow less than the magnificent opening promised.

Certainly give a thought to reading this, but lower your expectations before you do. McEwan may yet win a Nobel prize. If he ever does, this one won’t get mentioned until the last paragraphs of the news story.


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