Book review: Nutshell by Ian McEwan

This is more a brief take than review.

So, this is about pretty Trudy who is cuckolding her  failed  poet husband John with his brother Claude, a property developer. John is getting rather inconvenient, even intractable,  and so they decide to do away with him. Yes, poison. What they don`t know is they have a witness- to-be, the foetus in Trudy`s womb.

Thus goes Ian McEwan`s brilliant retelling of Hamlet. And boy, is this one precociously brilliant foetus! Something of a wine connoisseur already, because of all the wines his mother ingests, he hears all, ponders all, through his inland sea.

Driven by a self-harming compulsion, he clicks his umbilical chord like worry beads and listens closely to all the analysis and dissent he hears via the radio newscasts, radio dramas, TV, podcasts his mother tunes into. In fact, James  Joyce`s Ulsyyses,  though it bores Trudy, thrills her unborn son; he`s concerned about the Beijing smog, he contemplates the unhappy fate of immigrants.

Something sure is rotten in the state of their living quarters, for all that it is a Georgian pile in a very tony part of London; Trudy is a hopeless housekeeper and they live in far- from- splendid squalor, her foetus and she. Trudy is in sexual thrall to a man who bears his banality like a pennant; is he really as stupid as he seems to be, the foetus wonders.  John actually reads poetry to a very disinterested wife in the forlorn hope of winning her back. Add to the mix one snarky, sarcy foetus who is dismayed by the events unfolding in the world outside. People are plotting and planning dark deeds and he fears its repercussions on him. He simply adores his mother and the link to the original is anything but tenuous here, given that he dreams of a future where he sees himself dropping a kiss on Trudy`s nape. We should be close, she and I, closer than lovers, he thinks.

This neonatal narrator is big, he`s due anytime now, he wears his mother like a tight-fitting cap, and yes, gloom has already enveloped this little prince. He has depressive thoughts which he longs to declaim alone somewhere! Get born and act, the foetus tells itself almost continuously. He has plans for his life after birth, plans this murderous duo of mother and uncle seem to be ruining before time.

And when he does choose to make his entry into the world, it`s not very well timed. The murderuous duo`s acts have caught up with them and so have the London Police.

Nutshell is a beautifully crafted masterpiece. The avalanche of creativity in this slim tale blows the reader away. Once you begin, you don`t care how the plot unravels (because you already know how it does), you don`t care that sometimes the people seem to act out of character to fit the situation, you just want to soak some more in the flow of words.