‘Nutshell’ is ‘Hamlet,’ as told from the womb
“Nutshell,” Ian McEwan’s preposterously weird little novel, is more brilliant than it has any right to be. The plot sounds like something sprung from a drunken round of literary Mad Libs: a crime of passion based on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” narrated by a fetus. That it should come to this! If you can get beyond that icky premise, you’ll discover a novel that sounds like a lark but offers a story that’s surprisingly suspenseful, dazzlingly clever and gravely profound. To the extent that “Hamlet” is an existential tragedy marked with moments of comedy, “Nutshell” is a philosophical comedy marked by moments of tragedy.
Essentially a 200-page monologue delivered in utero, “Nutshell” opens with this amniotic line: “So here I am, upside down in a woman.” Not exactly Shakespeare, but labor on. This narrator speaks from the discovered country from which all of us come: “Fully inverted, not an inch of space to myself, knees crammed against belly, my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged.”
This is a precocious fetus. Over several dark days, he reveals a wellinformed taste in wine, a broad knowledge of history and a firm grasp of current events. A Latin phrase here and there suggests an unusually sophisticated mind, although he humbly acknowledges that “no child, much less a foetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk.” He’s not a ham so much as a Hamlet.
Such worldliness would be unbelievable, except that our narrator claims he’s an attentive listener of his mother’s educational podcasts. He doth protest too much, methinks, but the whole premise of the novel rests on his thoroughly isolated, well-developed consciousness trapped as a reluctant witness. “I count myself an innocent,” he notes, “but it seems I’m party to a plot.”
Clearly, something is rotten in the state of matrimony. His mother, Trudy, is carrying on an affair with his dull-witted uncle, Claude (Queen Gertrude, King Claudius — check, check). When they’re not having sex — described here from an alarmingly close perspective — they’re planning to murder Trudy’s husband, Claude’s brother. They need him out of the way not only so that they can marry each other, but to get their hands on the family estate, an expensive old house in London.
This is not a consummation devoutly to be wished, particularly by the narrator. He has no special fondness for his hapless father — a poor poet — but, having heard a radio documentary called “Babies Behind Bars,” he’s worried that his mother will be arrested, and then he’ll be birthed from one prison into another.
What’s a fetus to do besides lament his inability to act? “Waiting is the thing,” he concedes. As we listen to the conspirators plotting, our pre-born narrator reflects on the world he’s about to enter. It’s not a wholly welcoming place, as you may have noticed.
But there’s the rub: “Pessimism is too easy, even delicious,” the fetal narrator says. It’s “the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions.” He has no intention of giving up before he arrives: “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.”
But only if he can forestall the carnage gathering around him.
It doesn’t seem possible that this oddly ridiculous narrator caught in a tawdry murder scheme could deliver such a moving, hilarious testimony, filled with equal measures of dread and hope, but babies and sweet princes can surprise you.
Welcome to the world, Nutshell. Ron Charles is the editor of The Washington Post Book World. He wrote this review for The Washington Post.