I am not going to review this novel. If you want to read an intelligent, thoughtful if slightly showy-offy review, try this or this even more florid review by Adam Mars Jones. This blog is a reading diary (hence the recent absence of content) where I record my impressions of the books I read. Usually these look at first glance quite similar to reviews, without the clarity of expression or depth of analysis you might otherwise expect.
‘Nutshell’ is a curious, whimsical novel. In the last few years the Hogarth Press has been commissioning authors to write a series of novels re-imaging Shakespeare’s plays, and I thought at first that ‘Nutshell’ was a part of or inspired by this series. It appears not, it is a solo, voluntary effort.
In a nutshell, in ‘Nutshell’ McEwan takes the themes and ideas of Hamlet, and updates them to the present day. Hamlet is played by not a moody young prince, but an about to be born foetus. His mother and her brother in law lover are planning to murder his father. The unnamed and apparently unwanted baby is a passive observer of events, with much energy expended on maintaining the conceit that he can detect what is going on in the outside world through hearing, taste, and a fair amount of guesswork.
McEwan’s fierce dazzling intelligence shines through this short novel. It has an extraordinary breadth, ranging through many different genres, least successfully crime (the resolution whereby the lovers are caught by the dogged but uninspired police is appallingly clumsy). Contemporary politics, the Royal family, Brexit, Trump, are all referenced and swiftly disposed of for the more substantial feasts of philosophy, literary criticism, and absurd levels of sophistication in wine-appreciation (“No one seems to want to read aloud the label so I’m forced to make a guess, and hazard an Echézeaux Grand Cru. Put … a gun to my head to name the domaine, I would blurt out la Romanée-Conti, for the spicy cassis and black cherry alone. The hint of violets and fine tannins suggest that lazy, clement summer of 2005, untainted by heatwaves, though a teasing, next-room aroma of mocha, as well as more proximal black-skinned banana, summon Jean Grivot’s domaine in 2009”)
There is, inevitably, a ‘but’ coming. More precisely two. The first is something that seems to have only been an issue for me, and that is that the narrator character, an extraordinarily erudite and cultured baby, reminded me unavoidably of Stewie from ‘Family Guy’. Once that narrative voice got in my head that was it. Stewie, as I shall now call him, channels Jacob Rees Mogg in his social conservatism, (or is this McEwan letting loose his inner fogey?):
A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. …A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. …I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.
The more serious issue is that McEwan is demonstrably better than this. For him to be writing a comedic novel about a ham(let)-fisted murder with a sub-Colombo style solution, constructed however cleverly around the scaffolding of the plot of Hamlet, seems such a waste of his energies and talents, almost like an academic exercise (“Rewrite Hamlet as a comic novel from the perspective of Hamlet as a foetus. No more than 200 pages, by Friday”). The jokes about the discomfort of a foetus being a few inches away from his uncle’s penis, for example, were obvious and clumsy. The novel’s anachronistic tone troubled reviewers (see for example the LRB review referenced earlier) but I think McEwan just about gets away with it, probably because the majority of his readers will share a generation with him, if not a world view.
At a shade under 200 pages, ‘Nutshell’ is an easy read with some jokes that make you chuckle, and some stunningly impressive prose. But it is not McEwan at his best, not by a long distance.
The Reading Bug 