NUTSHELL: A NOVEL (2016)
By Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape
Publishers, 208 pp.
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Savor this passage, from whence the title of Ian McEwan’s
latest novel is derived. In the midst of musing on confined spaces in art and
science, McEwan writes:
To be bound in a nutshell, see the
world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of
literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of
possible things. And when this universe may well be a speck in a multitude of
actual and possible universes.
Savor this because it’s mighty fine prose from a celebrated
British author (Atonement, Comfort of
Strangers, etc.) who has won the Man Booker Prize once, has been nominated
five other times, and has shelves full of other awards. But savor it also
because the style is the best thing about his latest novel. Although it’s a
retelling of Hamlet, somewhere along
the line, McEwan forgot to write a story worthy of his eloquence. His is a
one-trick pony laden with adornments designed to make a plow horse appear a
show stallion.
The novel’s device—and it’s a clunky one—is to change the
point of view of that most conventional of plots: a love triad. Hamlet works because of its sumptuous
setting of the royal court of Denmark and because the principals–Hamlet,
Claudius, and Gertrude—are characters of depth and complexity. And let’s not
forget a cast of intriguing supporting characters: Polonius, Horatio, Ophelia,
and a ghost! McEwan’s setting is suburban London, a decidedly non-regal place,
and his principals are far more shallow: John Cairncross, a crusty though
respected poet; his wife, Trudy, who is full in the tummy, but vacant in the
head; and John’s solipsistic brother, Claude, who has been successful in real
estate, but is a clod who knows the price of everything but the value of
nothing, especially family fealty. Claude and Trudy are lovers, despite the
fact that she is carrying John’s soon-to-born child.
Here’s where the nutshell comes into play—our narrator for
the coming Hamlet-like perfidy and
sanguinary treachery is Trudy’s unborn child (the future Prince Hamlet?).
That’s unique, I suppose, but there’s no escaping the fact that it’s also pure
contrivance—and a thin, implausible one that leads to logical inconsistencies
that not even McEwan can write his way out of. I think he banked on the hope
that readers would suspend disbelief once they got used to the idea of a
talking fetus. This leads him to try to have things both ways. At times the
unborn child is blissfully innocent and ignorant. In other moments, our little
nutshell is displaced from his placental sac and expounds upon people’s
appearances, classical music, the coital thrust of his uncle’s penis just
inches from his head, and politics. What do we make of this musing on the
United States?
…barely the hope of the world,
guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of
powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous
population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of
governance, murdering sleep with every handgun.
This is so insightful I’d declare the speaker “Tocqueville
for Modern Times,” were those reflections from any character other than a fetus!
McEwan wants us to think that our not-yet-a-person is capable on such wisdom.
Also that he can detect the thinness of the Pouilly-Fumé his mother has just consumed,
or that he can plot his own role in the unfolding drama.
If you know Hamlet,
you can probably predict how this ends. A cliché holds that there is no such thing as a
perfect murder and literary convention thrives on the fatal overlooked detail.
Fair enough, but shouldn’t these standards apply equally to literary devices
and logic? Let’s be brutally honest. If you were teaching a writing class and a
first-year student outlined a story with an omniscient fetus, wouldn’t you urge
the student to dispense with such a sophomoric, hackneyed setup? Why should we
lower those standards for a writer as gifted as McEwan? From where I sit, my
cracking of Nutshell yielded rancid
meat.
Rob Weir
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