4 Stars
Though not one of the novels commissioned by the Hogarth Shakespeare project, this book could be one of those novels inspired by Shakespeare’s plays. Nutshell is a retelling of Hamlet; the twist is that the narrator is a fetus.
Trudy (Gertrude), the neonatal narrator’s mother, and Claude
(Claudius), Trudy’s brother-in-law, are having an affair. The two scheme to poison John, Trudy’s
husband and the narrator’s father, so they can acquire his dilapidated but valuable
London house. In utero, the fetus hears “the
voices of conspirators” as they engage in “pillow talk of deadly intent”
(1). So what is he to do: “My mother is involved in a plot, and therefore I am too, even if my role
might be to foil it. Or, if I, reluctant
fool, come to term too late, then avenge it” (3).
The reader must suspend disbelief and accept a fetus as
narrator. And this is no ordinary fetus;
he is very precocious and articulate.
The reader is to accept that the yet-unborn narrator has acquired his
knowledge because Trudy listens to talk radio, podcast lectures, and
self-improving audiobooks. He has a
broad knowledge of history, art and poetry and a clear understanding of current
events, and his well-informed taste in wine would befit an oenophile. He finds James Joyce’s Ulysses thrilling (4) and he uses Latin and French phrases.
There are a few instances where McEwan includes digressions
on the state of the world. For instance,
he summarizes a podcast: “China, too big
to need friends or counsel, cynically probing its neighbours’ shores . . .
Muslim-majority countries plagued by religious puritanism . . . The Middle
East, fast-breeder for a possible world war.
And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world,
guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of
powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful,
tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep
with every new handgun” (25). The last
sentence certainly made me think of the current American presidential
election.
At another time, McEwan has his narrator speculating as to
what will happen in the rest of the century in which he will live his
life: he questions whether the world
will “scrape through without a nuclear exchange? Think of it as a contact sport. Line up the teams. Indian versus Pakistan, Iran versus Saudi Arabia,
Israel versus Iran, USA versus China, Russia versus USA and NATO, North Korea
versus the rest. To raise the chances of
a score, add more teams: the non-state
players will arrive.” And he wonders
about other possible events: “A cosy 1.6
degrees, the projection of hope of a skeptical few, will open up the tundra to
mountains of wheat, Baltic beachside tavernas, lurid butterflies in the Northwest
Territories. At the darker end of
pessimism, a wind-torn four degrees allows for flood-and-drought calamity and
all of turmoil’s dark political weather.
More narrative tension in subplots of local interest: Will the Middle East remain in frenzy, will
it empty into Europe and alter it for good?
Might Islam dip a feverish extremity in the cooling pond of
reformation? Might Israel concede an
inch or two of desert to those it displaced?
Europa’s secular dreams of union may dissolve before the old hatreds, small-scale
nationalism, financial disaster, discord. . . . Will the USA decline quietly? Unlikely.
Will Ching grow a conscience, will Russia? Will global finance and corporations?” (129)
But that doesn’t mean that the fetus wants not to live. He mentions that “Pessimism is too easy, even
delicious . . . It absolves the thinking classes of solutions” (260) and
asserts, “Healthy desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my
infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a
consciousness. I’m owed a handful of
decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. . . . I want my go. I want to
become” (128).
What I found rather incredible is that Trudy had not opted
for an abortion. She has no great
attachment to her unborn child. He has
become a wine connoisseur because she drinks excessively. She does not abstain from sexual
intercourse: “By this late stage they
should be refraining on my behalf. Courtesy, if not clinical judgment, demands it”
(20). And the fetus comments that “no
preparations have been made for my arrival, no clothes, no furniture, no
compulsive nest-making. I’ve never knowingly
been in a shop with my mother” (131).
John seems to care as little; in a conversation that should have made reference
to his child, “Not even a mention, not in an aside, not even dismissed as an
irrelevance” (71). Claude speaks of “’[placing]
the baby somewhere’” (41) so adoption, as the narrator fears, is a definite
possibility: “Placed is but the lying cognate of dumped. As the baby is of me. Somewhere is a liar too. . . . This will be my undoing, my fall,
for only in fairy tales are unwanted children orphaned upwards. The Duchess of Cambridge will not be taking
me on” (42). Of course, there would be
no narrator if the abortion option had been chosen. I would have like to know why it was not
considered – or did that consideration take place in the days of the narrator’s
“careless youth” when he “floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion
somersaults” (1)?
I also had difficulty with the relationship between Trudy
and Claude. They are such an unlikely
pair. He lacks intelligence and speaks
in clichés. The fetus describes Claude
as a “property developer who composes nothing, invents nothing. He enjoys a thought, speaks it aloud, then
later has it again, and – why not – says it again” (5). Those “repeated remarks are a witless,
thrustless dribble, whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks,
cheaply fading.” The fetus even worries
that during sex, Claude will “break through and shaft my soft-boned skull and
see my thoughts with his essence, with the teeming cream of his banality. Then brain-damaged, I’ll think and speak like
him” (20-21). Understandably, the
narrator has a bias and so his descriptions may be unreliable, but Claude’s
words and actions suggest there is accuracy in the direct characterization.
As the above quotations illustrate, McEwan’s writing is brilliant. As is typical of his novels, there is fabulous
word play and extensive use of literary allusions. The use of a narrator who even pre-birth is a
Renaissance man may strain the reader’s credulity, but one cannot but admire
the author’s originality. And there are
wonderful touches of humour: “Not
everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your
nose” (20).
Apparently, Gillian Flynn has agreed to interpret Hamlet for the Hogarth Shakespeare
project. It is perhaps fortunate that
her version is not due for release until January of 2021 because she will have
a difficult task surpassing McEwan’s retelling.
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