There’s the narrator of Conversations With a Cupboard Man, who was treated as a baby until the age of 17; Serena Frome, the spy from Sweet Tooth; or Joe Rose, the narrator of Enduring Love, who witnesses a deadly ballooning accident. Ian McEwan has a history of intriguing, weird or disturbing first-person narrators, but they have nothing on his latest in Nutshell, due out in September: the narrator is a baby, still in the womb.
“So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for,” it opens. In a brief summary on his publisher’s website, the plot of the novel is revealed: “Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She’s still in the marital home – a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse – but John’s not here. Instead, she’s with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy’s womb.”
McEwan told Entertainment Weekly: “My unborn narrator has privileged access to pillow talk and to the careful plotting of a murder. What can he do about it? His options are necessarily constrained. But he has his thoughts, and he might find a way to intervene – or he might be too late. Might he take revenge?”
The novel is told “from a perspective unlike any other”, says his publisher, and while it’s certainly bizarre, it’s got us thinking about some of the stranger narrators we’ve loved in the past.
“I was aware, from the very beginning, that I was a most unusual cat,” starts Thomasina, the feline narrator of Paul Gallico’s eponymous children’s classic. There are tons of books told by animals – from Black Beauty to War Horse – and as a child I roared through a ton of them. But Gallico’s cats have been burned in my brain since childhood; they seemed so real to me and Thomasina still stands out.
While we can include some of Kafka’s stories in this narrated-by-an-animal subgenre, I think it’s fair to say that animals are not as odd as unborn babies when it comes to narrators.
Jenny Diski, however, might outdo McEwan with Nony, the baby born without a brain who narrates Like Mother. Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones is told by Susie Salmon, a dead child. Orhan Pamuk has multiple narrators in My Name Is Red, some of whom aren’t human at all - a dog, a horse, even a tree and a coin. Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector prides itself on being “a comic masterpiece and unquestionably the finest novel ever narrated by a bowl”, while Irvine Welsh’s Filth includes the voice of a tapeworm. And you can’t get much more mind-bending than Calvino’s Cosmicomics and his narrator “old Qfwfq”, an animated being as old as the universe.
My favourite strange narrator? I still haven’t got over the brilliance of Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and his narrator Charlie. Charlie – “all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb” – has an IQ of 68, but after an experiment that has previously only been tried on animals, he becomes steadily cleverer and cleverer. But Algernon, the mouse who was experimented on before Charlie, loses his intelligence and dies, and Charlie, now a genius, foresees what lies ahead for him. “Please … please … dont let me forget how to reed and rite …”
Tell me your favourite odd narrators – and join me in anticipation of McEwan’s latest. I can’t wait to see what he does with it.
