To Be or Not to Be

WRITERS’ LIVES presumably follow an arc in which they move from raw and intense wonderment to a refined and polished contemplation. Literary giants glow so brightly at a point that even when they lose their lustre with time, they still outshine the ordinary. Ian McEwan is one such colossus. His early work is deliciously wicked. Though I discovered him in 1997’s Enduring Love, my favourite remains A Child in Time (1987): pitch-perfect, haunting. But after Atonement (2001) I was tossing his books aside; by Sweet Tooth (2012) I gave up. As with Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, his best writing was barely visible in the rearview mirror.

His latest, Nutshell, a slim yet packed read, is a variation on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, involving palace intrigue, adultery, murder, a confused Prince, madness, and poison. In a nutshell, Hamlet’s mother Gertrude and uncle Claudius murder his father and Claudius becomes king. Hamlet learns of the murder from his father’s ghost and spends much of the play wondering if revenge is a dish worth pursuing. He is helpless, paralysed by dilemma and indecision.

In Nutshell the crises are literally internal: the narrator is still inside mother Trudy’s womb, listening as she and uncle Claude, a boorish property developer, plan the murder of John Cairncross, father, poetry teacher and publisher. Like Hamlet, the foetus is helpless, frozen in place not metaphorically but literally—nearing term, he is ‘upside down in a woman’. He is witness to Trudy and Claude’s sexual intimacy, despite her late pregnancy: ‘On each occasion, on every piston stroke, I dread that he’ll break through and shaft my soft-boned skull and seed my thoughts with his essence, with the teeming cream of his banality.’ The foetus does not much like his uncle.

Neither do we, but like the narrator we cannot but help love his mother. Her crumbling London mansion presumably substitutes for Denmark’s decaying royal family in Hamlet. He imagines she is beautiful, yet all she does all day is drink the best wines, ‘the brooding ensemble of flavours, formed at civilisation’s summit’, and as with her animal sex with Claude, the possible consequences to the baby are ignored. Still, we hope for her sake, for the baby’s sake, and for the father’s sake, that the murder plot unravels.

The first half of this 199-page novel is like the finest wine; it is poetry; it is McEwan’s ‘brooding ensemble of flavours’, the summit of his powers. You read each line, savouring the song of each sentence, the dense allusion to things literary, scientific, political, civilisational. There is the old wickedness, but it is polished, not raw or unrelenting.

It seems improbable that a baby can know so much before birth and experience, language and concepts, but McEwan uses his craft and a few tricks to pull off this conceit: the fact that our narrator listens to everything through his mother’s physicality, be it podcasts or radio broadcasts or conversations or compliments, or even his own guesses from listening to the rustle of clothing.

On page two itself, when the foetus recalls his consciousness’ first idea: ‘So, getting closer, my idea was To be. Or if not that, its grammatical variant, is. This was my aboriginal notion and here’s the crux—is.’ McEwan has immediately thrown at us Hamlet’s most famous existential query, ‘To be or not to be’, and it is enough to dispel any scepticism and allow immersion in this universe.

The first 100 pages’ poetry reaches a zenith in the most marvellous chapter seven; but by the halfway mark the inevitable takes place and the book switches gear. The poet departs and so does the poetry. The hard-boiled prose of crime fiction takes its place. One sentence is read only to get to the next. The denouement, though unanticipated, is perhaps less than surprising.

After the headiness of the first 100 pages, breezing through the last 99 is less than thrilling. The first half resurrects McEwan, phoenix-like; but then he loses his way, impatient to get to the end. Nutshell is no atonement for the second half of his career. I’m still waiting for the return of his child in time.

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