The new novel by Ian McEwan is a loose retelling of Hamlet narrated by an erudite, morally engaged fetus. Remarkably, the project is not ridiculous.
Rather, McEwan has crafted a psychological thriller of the first order: a murder mystery set in the London of this instant and propelled by two of the most intimately sketched villains in recent memory. How intimately? Trudy, a self-deceiving egomaniac and adulteress, is the very sea through which our hero swims, her every autonomic twitch observed from the inside. Her lover Claude (fans of Shakespeare will note their names) is a banal psychopath whose libido carries him into a space “inches from” the protagonist’s nose and whose endless whistling (“not songs but TV jingles”) is clearly audible through uterine walls.
Locked within an ever-tighter confinement, able to do little more than listen, the unnamed narrator (hereafter “Baby”) is audience not only to Claude and Trudy’s plot to kill the middling poet who is at once Baby’s father, Trudy’s husband, and Claude’s brother, but to the beating of Trudy’s guilty heart, as well. As such, Baby operates as a kind of sentient polygraph, reading in his mother’s nervous system the state of her conscience as easily as he hears in her conversations with Claude the progress of their scheme. The narrative voice that results from this perspective is unlike any the reader is likely to have encountered before: godlike but painfully limited, worldly (due to the endless series of podcasts to which Trudy subscribes) yet “immersed in abstractions.”
It is from the soil of these contradictions that McEwan reaps the novel’s central points of interest: not whether the murder will occur but how the culprits will respond and, crucially, what their crime will reveal to Baby about the world that awaits him. In the case of the former, McEwan shows himself, once again, to be a master of the interior style, albeit with a compelling twist. Because Baby’s circumstances preclude his seeing, McEwan is forced to rely on physiological cues as much as on visual ones, a strategy that provides him with a strikingly original vocabulary. Observing Trudy’s reluctant sexual desire for her co-conspirator, Baby notes the “curlicue of thrill, [the] cold contraction [that] lodges in her perineum” upon Claude’s approach. He feels her quick thinking under pressure as a tightening “in her sinews, in the stiffening drapes of her omentum.” Through Baby’s “innocent” eyes—he is, “despite what the geneticists are now saying, a blank slate”—Trudy’s all-too-human shame, self-protectiveness, and fear are given surprising and vital expression, as are such novel (to Baby) ideas as the vagaries of love and hate, the slipperiness of sexual consent, and the cold fact that human beings can’t read one another’s minds. (A late scene in which Baby overhears the chess match of a police interrogation is a marvel of page-turning tension.)
It is in McEwan’s exploration of the wider world, however, that Nutshell reaches its greatest heights. A news junkie, Baby knows that he’ll be born into “a condition of modernity (hygiene, holidays, anesthetics, reading lamps, oranges in winter) and [will] inhabit a privileged corner of the planet—well-fed, plague-free western Europe.” Yet he’s aware also that the 21st century is “too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage,” riven not only by “self-pity and aggression” but by “confusion about values, the bacillus of antisemitism incubating, immigrant populations languishing, angry and bored.” In short, Baby grasps a theme that McEwan has returned to again and again in his late oeuvre: The world is troubled—the sort of place where mothers can kill fathers and lovers can turn against one another. It is also wondrously, miraculously good. That Baby yearns, despite this incongruity, for his allotted “handful of decades”—for the felt pleasures of “wine by the glass rather than the placenta, books direct by lamplight, music by Bach, walks along the shore, kissing by moonlight”—is a sign of his faith, however tenuous, “in life after birth.” It is, after all, the only thing he has to look forward to.
Nutshell is not, mercifully, a pro-life novel. As conservatives, we don’t require the politicization of everything our eyes behold. Yet it is a book with its toes in the cultural water. Pondering his mother’s fleeting sense of remorse, Baby recognizes a strange phenomenon at work. Just as “the almost-educated young” make “a version of a womb for [their] student days,” insisting on the state’s “validation of their chosen identities,” so Trudy “marches with a movement. Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that’s old thinking. She affirms, she identifies as innocent.” The hero of Nutshell may not have seen the world, but he most certainly sees its future.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
