Nutshell
Ian McEwan
★★★★★ 4/5
I picked up Ian McEwan’s Nutshell (2016) from the neighborhood library while waiting on my hold for his latest “Machines Like Me”. And I’m glad I did. What a delightful read! Even if that comes from a decade long fan of Ian McEwan’s work. Written more in the vein of Solar than Amsterdam or Saturday: clever, funny vs. intensely thought provoking.
It’s the story of a conniving couple – an unfaithful woman, Trudy, in her final trimester carrying her husband John’s son, and her lover Claude, who happens to be her brother in law. It’s McEwan’s take on Hamlet, narrated – and this is the ingenious trick the author pulls off—in the voice of the unborn baby. For this to work, this unborn son is more savant than foetus —wise and observant, sentient and endowed with the trenchant wit of the author himself. This is explained away as the effect of the copious number of radio shows and podcasts consumed by his mother.
Consequently, Savant baby makes incisive observations throughout the book.
The United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powered wigs, a constitution as unchallegable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun.
If you can suspend your disbelief at this narrative construct and sleight of hand that McEwan employs, and that’s not hard to do given the ever sparkling flowing prose, you’re in for a treat!
Trudy, has fallen out of love with John and ‘in lust’ with his brother Claude. Savant Baby thinks the world of his father – a sensitive, intelligent yet unsuccessful poet—penurious, but for the valuable London home he has inherited. He resents his uncle and harbors hopes of reuniting his biological parents. His banal uncle makes a poor substitute for John as Trudy’s companion and his future father:
“Claude composes nothing, invents nothing. He enjoys a thought, speaks it aloud, then later has it again, and — why not? - says it again.”
Yet, he has sway over Trudy – presumably because of her hatred for John and his unsuccessful poetry and because of Claude’s prowess between the sheets. The cuckold John, having moved out of the marital home, is still trying to win Trudy back. He’s trying to woo her back reading poetry to her, oblivious to her contempt. She patiently listens while concocting sinister plans. As Savant Baby observes, for her,
“a monologue is better than an exchange, preferable to another turn round the unweeded garden of their marriage”
Together, Trudy and John are planning to murder John – for the money, what else? Savant Baby, is of course a witness to all of this from the confines of his increasingly cramped residence.
They occasionally discuss the state of the world, usually in terms of lament, even as they scheme to make it worse.
Is Savant Baby going to be a silent witness to the unfolding crime? Or will he exert any influence in the outcome of the devious plot hatched by his mother and his uncle? Is John the cuckold or does he have something up his sleeve? Will it end well for any of the four?
At 208 pages, this is a compact and captivating story, written in McEwan’s characteristic enviable trademark prose – a great summer read.
And “Machines Like Me” is ready for me to pick up just in time…