There have been plenty of novels inspired by Hamlet – Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius, even David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. And there have been one or two novels told in the voice of foetuses in the womb – Carlos Fuentes’s Christopher Unborn, for example. But Ian McEwan’s virtuoso entertainment is almost certainly the first to combine the two.
Embryos, of course, are all soliloquy. Conversation will come later. McEwan’s garrulous and unnamed Hamlet could have taken his cue from any number of lines from the play, but “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams” describes his confinement particularly well. At one point he overhears his mother, Trudy, full of hormonal frailty, telling her estranged husband that what she needs is space from him during her pregnancy. “Space!” the third trimester narrator exclaims, with camp outrage. “She should come in here, where lately I can barely crook a finger…”
Nutshell’s Elsinore is a grand Georgian terraced house gone to seed in contemporary St John’s Wood. Claude, property-developing uncle to the unborn, has seamy designs on both it and Trudy. In consequence, she has persuaded her husband, John, a poet, to move out. Claude, inevitably, would like his brother’s absence to be far more permanent. A plot is formed involving the application of poison to one of John’s favourite fruit smoothies. In a scenario never knowingly lost for irony, the unborn must listen to this rank pillow talk between hated uncle and beloved mother, literally tangled with them in “incestuous sheets”, unable to raise a hand in his old man’s defence. “Don’t waste your precious days idle and inverted,” he chides himself. “Get born and act!”
Biology was always Hamlet’s destiny – “The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right” – but never has it seemed quite so graphically chromosomal. The famous Freudian interpretations of the play are executed here in 3D closeup. The inky protective cloak of the womb is almost penetrated on a daily basis by satyr-like Claude. “Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose,” our narrator observes, pointedly, fearing for both his mental stability and his life. “On each occasion, on every piston stroke, I dread that he’ll break through and shaft my soft-boned skull and seed my thoughts with his essence, with the teeming cream of his banality.”
We are invited to believe that the monologuing embryo has gained his erudition from Trudy’s Radio 4 habit. McEwan has what seems like enormous fun constructing a voice that is both alive with wild and whirling wordplay and capable of all sorts of antic dispositions. This display sometimes gives Nutshell the feel of one of the more tricksy performances of the author’s old friend and sparring partner Martin Amis – like the backwards Holocaust of Time’s Arrow, for example. As with all novels based on self-consciously clever conceits, the danger is always self-consciously clever conceit.
At times, McEwan employs the pre-term voice to digress on some familiar preoccupations. The narrator’s parental concerns are punctuated by frequent Moral Maze-like examinations of the world waiting for him. He has precocious fears for his continent: “Europa’s secular dreams of union may dissolve before the old hatreds...” Or he will channel Thomas Piketty on inequality: “My reasonable suspicion is that poverty is deprivation on all levels...” Or, in one particularly knowing aside, the author appears to step forward to reopen a debate about transgender issues for which he felt obliged to publicly apologise last year: “A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the west in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes 71 gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender… any colour you like, Mr Ford.” And so on.
These asides are oddly intrusive. For the most part, though, the neonatal narrator feels himself properly locked in the older binary of “to be or not to be”. He worries at his umbilical cord, the only object to hand, and wonders about its darker possibilities (“To take my life I’ll need the cord, three turns around my neck of the mortal coil…”). He is seduced – “It’s not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most – the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds – and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion…” – but inevitably undone by his first love, language. There are other small solaces, not least in the quality of Claude’s cellar, which he imbibes passively. He is fated to share Trudy’s wine snobbery: “After a piercing white, a Pinot Noir is a mother’s soothing hand. Oh, to be alive while such a grape exists! A blossom, a bouquet of peace and reason…”
And all the while of course, while he drinks and thinks, the murder he is born to avenge takes slightly comic external shape. McEwan is too practised a storyteller to ever let his digressions stall the forward direction of his plot. For a long time, though, it seems to be going on without our narrator. Then, finally, fatefully, inevitably – ripeness is all! – he chooses the moment to make his grand entrance.
Nutshell is published by Jonathan Cape (£15.99). Click here to buy it for £13.11
