JUMP FROM REALISM WAS A ‘LIBERATING’ JOURNEY
English author’s new book has an unlikely narrator: a baby still in the womb
It took a trip back to the womb to make Ian McEwan feel 40 years younger.
For his latest novel, Nutshell, the Booker Prize-winning English author put to rest the realism that has consumed most of his considerable career in favour of a whimsically eccentric conceit: an unborn narrator.
Yes, the slim novel’s protagonist is a still-in-the-womb baby (“so here I am, upside down in a woman,” it begins) listening helplessly as its wine-guzzling mother conspires to murder its poet father with help from her lover, the doomed dad’s doltish brother. And for McEwan, author of 2001’s Atonement and most recently 2014’s
The Children Act, breaking from the rigid constraints of plausibility was “liberating.”
“I’ve been caught up with a quite engaged form of realism,” he said recently. “I couldn’t help but feel that I was not only freer than I usually allow myself to be, but that I was returning to some of the work of my 20s.
“Maybe,” he added, “as you get older, as a novelist, you either return to something you did earlier or you feel a bit liberated from the usual constraints. You just do the hell what you want.”
Where did this idea come from?
The first sentence came into my mind while I was at a rather long and boring meeting. My mind wandered and suddenly this voice said: “So here I am, upside-down in a woman.” And I wrote it down immediately. I found myself drawn to the idea of some articulate being who was not only waiting to be born but speculating about the world he was about to inherit. I thought too of Hamlet’s helplessness, his inability to act, out of that then came the notion of reenacting to some extent the plot of Hamlet.
Your narrator is pretty articulate for someone who isn’t born.
Once you decide to have him speak, you might as well give him the full range of conscious thought. I had these rather flimsy little excuses, like his mother listening to podcasts and radio broadcasts, to hang it around. But the whole thing is entirely improbable. When I was going through the copy editing, the editor would say: “Well, how does he know what it’s like to be in a photographic dark room?” I just burst out laughing. I said, ‘well, you find that improbable, but not the rest of it?’
Your research process is famously thorough, but I can’t imagine you spent much time on it with this book?
It’s one of the things I liberated myself from. Not a moment of research. I didn’t have to stir from my desk to write this. I didn’t have to rely on anyone’s expertise. I have children and I’ve watched birth, but no, I didn’t need to research.
Surely, this novel is unfilmable?
I hope it’s the most unfilmable thing I’ve ever written. I said that to someone and he said, “well, with CGI, we can do anything now.” I’m not sure I’d want to write the screenplay.
But you’ve long been involved with Hollywood (production is about to start on McEwan adaptations On Chesil Beach and The Children Act). What wisdom have you accumulated about navigating the film industry?
It requires infinite patience. You have to accept a clear demotion in the creative process. You’re no longer God. You’re no longer even St. Peter. You’re kind of a fallen angel in the process. There are plenty of people around you telling you that such and such a character would never do or say such a thing, and you just have to bite your tongue. It’s very nice to collaborate. Nice to get out of the house. Nice to break that solitude. People often ask me the standard question: is it amazing to see your novel up on the screen? And I always say: it would be amazing if it happened quicker.
You wrote a pained essay following the Brexit vote. How are you feeling about the situation now?
We are in some kind of economic decline and that was clearly predicted and foreseeable. I worry that many of the people who voted to leave will be the first to suffer. The government seems very serious about doing this. I’m still in denial. I still cling to the possibility that it won’t or can’t happen, largely because the promises made to those who wish to leave cannot be fulfilled. A lot of my friends who are passionately for remaining have now accepted the current situation, and I seem to be still hanging onto the idea that we can end up remaining, because the deal will be so poor.