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The plight of an impotent witness to a murder, one unable directly to prevent a killing, even his own, has been the starting point for a number of excellent mysteries. Peter Dickinson's 1999 SOME DEATHS BEFORE DYING comes to mind, as does Belinda Bauer's recent RUBBERNECKER. In these and in other similar fictions, the protagonist is incapacitated by illness. But the narrator in Ian McEwan's NUTSHELL is wholly handicapped by the fact that he has not yet been born.
Ian McEwan appears irresistibly drawn toward crime fiction, though often with mixed results. A home invasion in SATURDAY, for example, is defused through the power of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" to move one of the angry, violent intruders. Anyone who has attempted to teach this poem to a class of contemporary nineteen-year-olds will be unpersuaded. This time, the literary source is Hamlet, the narrator an unborn, 21st century Hamlet upside down in his mother Trudy's uterus, head engaged and ready to be born. In this position he is the unwilling eavesdropper on Trudy and her lover, Claude (never mind - you've read the play) as they plot to murder Trudy's husband John so as to get hold of John's very valuable, if thoroughly derelict, house in St John's Wood that Trudy is now living in. It's worth seven million pounds, though Claude will settle for four and a half on a quick sale.
The narrator, as yet unborn, is unable to do anything to foil the deed. He can only listen as the tawdry couple hatch their plot, a murder almost wholly unmotivated (have these people never heard of divorce?) and not even fuelled by any noticeable passion. Perhaps there's some sibling rivalry here - Claude is, of course, John's brother, but slipping anti-freeze into John's smoothie seems a bit over the top. It is all intentionally thin, since this is McEwan's primary theme. Trudy and Claude are pallid and vulgar versions of their literary ancestors because this is the best the 21st century can manage. Ours is, it would seem, a culture that has run out of juice.
Though the narrator cannot act, he can certainly hold forth on a variety of topics about which he has decided opinions. He is well-read, though he has never held a book - thinking about Claude, he declares that he is "no more like my father than I to Virgil or Montaigne"; he does not dread "the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno - the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds." He has a well-developed palate. He and his mother are "sharing a glass, perhaps a bottle, of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Not my first choice, and for the same grape and a less grassy taste, I would have gone for a Sancerre, preferably from Chavignol." Remarkable discernment for one who has only imbibed via his umbilicus.
How to explain this precocity in one still awaiting his very, very first birthday? The BBC is the answer; Trudy is addicted to podcasts and her baby, from the time he developed hearing, has had no choice but to listen. That these seem to have had virtually no effect on the mother is unexplained, but they have definitely shaped the mind and prose style of her embryo.
And that is where the problem lies. McEwen makes occasional attempts to explain the extent of this foetus's range of reference, but even if these were convincing (how many podcasts can a rather dim woman addicted to sex and wine actually have listened to in four months?) they serve more to remind us of the artifice of the narrative choice than of its likelihood. I could not shake the mental image of the nameless foetus in Trudy's interior as a elderly man in a tweed jacket and turtleneck pullover who has embarked on a lengthy monologue on the evils of the day and trapped his listener in a corner of an otherwise deserted library. Remarkably confident for one yet to celebrate his first day of independent existence, he is happy to pronounce on any number of topics. He is critical of the generation he calls "the young," though they are roughly twenty years his senior. They are, he says, "on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the west in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes 71 gender options — neutrois, two spirit, bigender ... any colour you like, Mr Ford."
So what is the point of this particular McGuffin, aside from furnishing a probably unique vantage point for an earwitness to a crime? It does provide the opportunity for McEwan to indulge in some rather rude depictions of the effect of intercourse on the innocent unborn, an event, incidentally, that takes place with alarming frequency, considering that Trudy is in the very final stages of pregnancy. It certainly drives home McEwan's evident conviction that we are not born with a tabula rasa or trailing clouds of glory, but rather burdened with all of Western culture weighing us down and equipped with the opinions of the op-ed writers on the more dignified newspapers. But otherwise...?
At the very end of the novella, McEwan is able to generate some lively suspense out of the foetus's predicament and from the inevitable conclusion to his nine months' stay in utero. Certain reviewers have admired the crime genre elements in the book, the critic for The Guardian going so far as to term it a "brutally effective howdunnit, magnificently strong on the details of murder: the hats, gloves and waxed fingertips of it, the intimate workings of poison." Other readers, perhaps more widely-read in the genre, may find it a laboured performance.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2016
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