Book of the week
Jonathan Cape 208pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £13.99
“So here I am,” begins Ian Mcewan’s new novel, “upside down in a woman.” The unnamed protagonist of Nutshell is a nine-month-old foetus narrating from within the walls of his “living-womb”, said Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in The Times. Trapped inside his mother, Trudy, he is forced to listen to her and his uncle, Claude, with whom Trudy is having an affair, plot the murder of his father, John. Owing to his mother’s love of podcasts, audiobooks and the BBC World Service, this is a very erudite foetus – a snob and a wine connoisseur with a wide vocabulary – whose commentaries on the world around him can be very funny. “Think of him as the literary version of Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, the potty-mouthed toddler with a brain the size of a bus.” And he is trapped not only inside his mother but also inside a modern-day reworking of Hamlet. Trudy is Gertrude, Claude is Claudius, and the foetus, the Prince of Denmark. Denmark itself is played by a decaying but valuable Georgian house in central London, owned by the older brother.
Nutshell recalls the twisted early fiction that earned Mcewan the nickname “Ian Macabre”, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times. We’re a long way from the “tasteful”, seriousminded realism of his recent novels. He has taken a risk in offering such a “dangerously limited perspective”, but the result of this “brilliantly brazen decision” is “one of the most hilariously unlikely narrators in contemporary fiction”. “Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose,” declares our long-suffering narrator at one point. It’s a tricksy performance, said Tim Adams in The Observer. The voice is used as a mouthpiece for “oddly intrusive” asides on, for instance, Europe, inequality and transgender issues, but Mcewan is too practised a storyteller to allow his digressions to get the better of the plot.
“The familiar story retains a strong forward momentum,” said Kate Clanchy in The Guardian. But with so much going on, the social satire sometimes floats adrift. Trudy is a child of the 1980s who “dials” the phone, rather than sends texts, and never uses Facebook or Google. But in the grand scheme of things, these ragged edges are insignificant. The book is gripping, well written and very thoroughly organised. It is “a late, deliberately elegiac masterpiece, a calling together of everything Mcewan has learnt and knows about his art”.