An insider’s revealing take on the tragedy of Hamlet
and who’s who. “Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches f ro m yo u r n o s e , ” h e complains, shortly before learning that this brute roughly driving his mother to orgasm (“Wall of Death!” to him) is in fact his father’s brother.
So this is a very high-concept narrative from a pretty much unprecedented point of view. Kafka established that, delivered with enough cool formality, a story could come from anywhere (an ape in Report to an Academy, a mouse in Josephine the Singer, Investigations of a Dog, etc). McEwan himself has been down this wacky road before (Confessions of a Kept Ape).
The difference here is that instead of simply assuming thi s extraordinary narrative voice, surely the only way to make it work, McEwan repeatedly tries to justify and explain it. “I have my sources, I baby says. He has heard lots of intellec tual radio (the World Service, the Reith Lectures) and many educational podcasts, improbably chosen by his mother, as well as poetry readings by his father.
Although he doesn’t know what blue and green are he is effectively extremely well-read and otherwise highly cultivated, rather beyond the average arts graduate with a first-class degree. To be or not to be? “says baby, alluding to Beethoven’s String Quartet Op 135. “he comments. He is a big fan of Ulysses. He thinks his uncle’s tuneless whistling “more Schoenberg than Schubert” and that a clock ticks in “thoughtful iambs”.
When the adulterers discuss having him “placed” somewhere after his birth, he angrily retorts “is but the lying cognate of Where Hamlet compares his father to his uncle as “Hyperion to a sat yr” and rants extensively to his mother (“Look here upon this picture, and on this”) our baby finds his uncle to be “no more like my father than I to Virgil or Montaigne”. Little reader, already.
M o r e o v e r, he has thoroughly bourgeoi s, not to s ay grandee, ex p e c t a t i o n s , d r e a d i n g e n d i n g u p “somewhere on the 13th floor of the brutal tower block my mother says she sometimes gazes sadly on from an u p p e r b e d r o o m wi n d o w. . . R a i s e d bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head.”
Even more remarkably he has a wellinformed t aste in wine, his mother sloshing it back in crazy amounts for a pregnant woman ( just as Claudius and Gertrude drained their draughts of Rhenish in heavy-headed revel). When his mother downs a bottle of Marlborough sauvignon blanc, he sagely remarks: “For the same grape and a less grassy taste, I would have gone for a