Nutshell

Ian McEwan is one of my favorite authors. He's written about all sorts of things, from the deadly serious Atonement to the comic Solar. Of his books I've read, Nutshell is his most comic by far--it's a murder mystery told by a fetus.

Yes, our story is narrated by a fetus. It has no name, of course, but it has quite a vocabulary. The conceit is that the little fellow (he is male, I recall) has an education that would rival an Oxonian, and he hears everything and understands it. He can't see, of course, and at times that defies logic: how could he understand the concept of "purple?" But it's very funny.

The title comes from one of my favorite Shakespearean quotes, from Hamlet: "Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad
dreams." As the novel begins, our hero is in utero with his mother Trudy, who has broken up with his father, a poet, and taken up with his brother, Claude, whom the baby finds quite stupid. "And Claude, like a floater, is barely real. Not even a colourful chancer, no hint of the smiling rogue. Instead, dull
to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque. Here is a man who whistles continually, not songs but TV jingles, ringtones, who brightens a morning with Nokia’s mockery of Tárrega." The baby realizes, to his horror, that they plan on killing his father.

What sustains the concept is the uproarious and absurdly erudite narration of the fetus. His first line is "So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for." He gives us insight into a situation we've all been in but have no memory of, such as: "Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose," or "How solipsism becomes the unborn."

Trudy is not one to have read all the literature on pregnancy, because not only does she have sex rather late in her gestation, but she drinks wine. But the little bugger doesn't mind: "I like to share a glass with my mother. You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good
burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta."

This is funny stuff. The second half of the book, after the crime is committed, is the fetus listening to the investigation. In the end, before Trudy and Claude can escape, he does the only thing he can possibly do. It fulfills the mandate of endings: be unpredictable but inevitable.

Nutshell is a wonderful comic novel, McEwan writes giddily, as if he came up with the idea and finished in, laughing at his computer (or whatever he writes with). Hard to see how could they make it a movie, though.