Ian McEwan, Nutshell (Jonathan Cape)Having seen a couple of reviews, and heard McEwan interviewed, of this book before it arrived, I had severe reservations about it. Surely this time he's gone too far. Others have cast doubt on his cleverness, the 'meta-fiction' and some unlikelinesses in his stories in the past but I've always been an admirer but maybe this time, a re-make of Hamlet, told by an unborn embryo, was an indulgence a bit beyond any suspension of disbelief.
But it was immediately not the case and it is all down to the quality of the prose.
The foetus can only work out was is happening from what he can hear and feel and is a prisoner of what his mother does and he goes where she goes. He has developed as very sophisticated palette and taste in fine wine due to her serial consumption and has a full, if bleak, understanding of world current affairs from her listening to the World Service.
The intertextual references to the source material - his mother and her lover are planning to murder his father, who is the lover's brother- are more than enough and McEwan wears his learning conspicuously but even that can be enjoyable.
Among the many ills prevailing in the world, the United States is,
helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs
and the brief manifesto of poetics (the father is a poet and publisher of poetry) is exemplary,
if it doesn't come at once, it shouldn't come. There's a special grace in facility.
and,
"Form isn't a cage. It's an old friend you can only pretend to leave."
But from this highbrow range of reference, the final pages conjure a tense climax worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.
It is an unlikely masterpiece, short enough to read in a day. Perhaps Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday is a more convincing thing, not having taken quite such liberties, but consummate professional that he is, McEwan achieves his ambitious intention with no problems at all. As if it should ever have been in doubt.
