Critical Reviews of the Nutshell by Ian Macquen
Fiction
An Unborn Baby Overhears Plans for a Murder in Ian McEwan'due south Latest Novel
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NUTSHELL
By Ian McEwan
197 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $24.95.
We might brainstorm with Hamlet, of form, but nosotros may also begin with Abhimanyu. Locked inside his mother'south womb — as i version of the Mahabharata story runs — Abhimanyu overhears his father, Arjuna, discussing a well-known battle strategy with his wife. It involves a military formation called the "disk": A murderous rank of enemy soldiers forms around a warrior in a perfect spiral, and seven steps, carried out in precise sequence, can penetrate that deadly labyrinth, permitting escape. Abhimanyu listens intently — at times, the thrumming drone of his mother'south aorta side by side to his tiny ear is near-deafening — simply as Arjuna speaks, his mother dozes off to slumber. The conversation stops. The final route of escape — the seventh step — is left unmentioned.
Ian McEwan'southward compact, captivating new novel, "Nutshell," is besides about murderous spirals and lost messages between fathers and unborn sons, although it's the begetter'south fate that hangs in the balance here. I hope not to give away the formidable genius of the plot — only the premise, loosely, is this: Trudy, jittery and fragile, lives in a London townhouse every bit dilapidated as it is valuable, where she spends hot afternoons coldly plotting the murder of her husband, John. She is heavily pregnant with John's son. They have separated, their beloved spent; he inspires nothing more in her than a "retinal crust of boredom." He has moved to Shoreditch (or "sewer-ditch," as it used to be known), where he scrapes out a living every bit a poet and publisher. John may or may not be in love with an aspiring poet named Elodie, who writes about owls, and whose name rhymes with "threnody" — a lamentation to the dead.
The accomplice to this murder — "clever and night and calculating" merely also "tedious to the bespeak of brilliance, vapid beyond invention . . . a man who whistles continually, not songs only Idiot box jingles, ringtones . . . whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble" — is Claude, a existent estate developer. Claude — Hamlet'south Claudius — needs no literary disguise: He is John's brother, a prosperous animate being of a homo with whom Trudy (Gertrude) is having an affair.
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And the narrator of this saga? Listen advisedly at present: He is Trudy'south son, withal in her womb, who hears his mother and uncle programme and connive over lukewarm coffee in their Hamilton Terrace kitchen, and who must countenance the life-threatening ignominy of his uncle's lovemaking every night. "I grit my gums, I brace myself against the uterine walls," the fetus tells us grimly. "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 boiler. Then, encephalon-damaged, I'll think and speak like him. I'll be the son of Claude."
Is there another writer alive who can pull off a narrative line of this sort? McEwan has experimented with the unreliable narrator — Briony Tallis, from "Atonement," comes immediately to listen. But in "Nutshell" we are confronted with an over-reliable narrator. The unborn son, squirming uncomfortably within the amnion, knows every detail of his father's murder-to-be — the glycol-spiked smoothie from a shop on Judd Street that will stifle John with its glutinous toxicant; the spider-infested glove used to explain the lack of fingerprints on the bottle; the ubiquitous CCTVs, sprawled all over London, that volition capture the scheme in progress.
To be fair, even our unblinking witness does not always accept his wits intact. He is so frequently sloshed — Trudy, in her 3rd trimester, makes it a point to drink for two — that he tin, by the tender historic period of 30-odd weeks, distinguish the grassy, acrid high of a New Zealand sauvignon from the tobacco-and-leather lull of the Pomerol coursing through the placental veins. But when sober, he learns to put the world together through its attenuated sights and syncopated sounds; he invents his own fuzzy, amniotic CCTV. The flavorful rise in his mother's hormones — the quickening of her pulse, the baste of adrenaline in her synapses — tells him a poisonous story to which he, alone, is privy.
The writing is lean and muscular, frequently relentlessly gorgeous. "So hither I am, upside down in a adult female," the novel begins. "Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I'm in, what I'm in for. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I in one case drifted in my translucent torso bag, floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motility somersaults. . . . I'k immersed in abstractions, and only the proliferating relations between them create the illusion of a known world. When I hear 'blue,' which I've never seen, I imagine some kind of mental upshot that's fairly close to 'green' — which I've never seen. . . . I count myself an innocent, just information technology seems I'm political party to a plot. My female parent, anoint her unceasing, loudly squelching heart, seems to be involved."
The literary acrobatics required to bring such a narrator-in-the-womb to life would be reason plenty to admire this novel. Just McEwan, aside from being ane of the virtually accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose, also happens to exist a deeply provocative writer about science. His musings are often oblique and tangential — all the same he manages to penetrate the spirals of some of the almost engaging quandaries in gimmicky science. In "Indelible Love," the novel spins out of a rare, obsessive psychiatric syndrome — erotomania — in which ane character is captivated by the delusion that another is secretly in love with him. But the existent story of "Enduring Beloved" concerns the neuropsychiatric perception of love. What kind of "love" exists when only one person imagines information technology? What happens when that imagination endures a little too much?
"Nutshell," as well, has strange scientific questions lurking at its cadre — about genetics, kinship and the cocky. Consider the problem: The child a mother carries in her womb is non a "reproduction," equally the writer Andrew Solomon has reminded us, but a production — a genetic constructing of father and mother. The fetus shares only half its mother'southward genes; it is, inevitably, part self, office resident alien. "It's in me lone that my parents forever mingle, sweetly, sourly, along split up sugar-phosphate backbones, the recipe for my essential self," McEwan's narrator informs united states of america.
In "Nutshell," the genetic mingling turns more sour than sweet. Equally Claude and Trudy carry out their hideous scheme, the fetus hatches his ain counterfoil to relieve his father — "my genome's other half," every bit he puts information technology. Only how exercise we know the allegiances of our genomes? What if the two genomes within an organism are at war? Cognizant readers might recognize in "Nutshell" the influences of Richard Dawkins (about whose work McEwan has written thoughtfully) or Daniel Dennett — and a good dose of Agatha Christie — simply it hardly matters: The pleasures of this tautly plotted book crave no required reading.
And what of Abhimanyu? Sixteen years later, as a young warrior, he is defenseless in the spiral labyrinth. He battles his way through the half-dozen prescribed steps that he recalls from his moment in the womb — but he falters at the last one, and is slaughtered past a circular shower of arrows. I'm not going to divulge the bone-spooky climax of "Nutshell" except to reveal this: Our narrator, recalling the terminal break, knows his route of escape.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/books/review/ian-mcewan-nutshell.html
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