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Ian McEwan

Nutshell: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, September 13, 2016

by Ian McEwan (Author)

2,226 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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New from the bestselling author of Atonement and The Children Act

Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home—a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse—but John's not there. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.

Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

Print length

208 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Nan A. Talese
Publication date

September 13, 2016
Dimensions

6 x 0.8 x 8.6 inches
ISBN-10

0385542070
ISBN-13

978-0385542074
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“With Nutshell, Ian McEwan has performed an incongruous magic trick ... A smart, funny and utterly captivating novel ... A small tour de force that showcases all of Mr. McEwan’s narrative gifts of precision, authority and control, plus a new, Tom Stoppard-like delight in the sly gymnastics that words can perform.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Compact, captivating ... The writing is lean and muscular, often relentlessly gorgeous ... McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, The New York Times Book Review

“Brilliant . . . Surprisingly suspenseful, dazzlingly clever and gravely profound.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post

“McEwan pulls it off. I bought the premise and never looked back . . . The most talked-about novel of the season.”
—Mary Roach, O, The Oprah Magazine

"As an example of point of view, you can look no farther than these gorgeous pages, which not only prove that brevity is the soul of wit but also offer the reader a voice both distinctive and engaging ... The reader [will be] speeding through every page, each one rife with wordplay, social commentary, hilarity, and suspense ... Hats off to Ian McEwan."
—Mameve Medwed, Boston Globe

About the Author

Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of sixteen books, including the novels The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both short-listed for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
ONE

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. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I once drifted in my translucent body bag, floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion somersaults, colliding gently against the transparent bounds of my confinement, the confiding membrane that vibrated with, even as it muffled, the voices of conspirators in a vile enterprise. That was in my careless youth. Now, fully inverted, not an inch of space to myself, knees crammed against belly, my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged. I’ve no choice, my ear is pressed all day and night against the bloody walls. I listen, make mental notes, and I’m troubled. I’m hearing pillow talk of deadly intent and I’m terrified by what awaits me, by what might draw me in.

I’m 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 event that’s fairly close to “green”—which I’ve never seen. I count myself an innocent, unburdened by allegiances and obligations, a free spirit, despite my meagre living room. No one to contradict or reprimand me, no name or previous address, no religion, no debts, no enemies. My appointment diary, if it existed, notes only my forthcoming birthday. I am, or I was, despite what the geneticists are now saying, a blank slate. But a slippery, porous slate no schoolroom or cottage roof could find use for, a slate that writes upon itself as it grows by the day and becomes less blank. I count myself an innocent, but it seems I’m party to a plot. My mother, bless her unceasing, loudly squelching heart, seems to be involved.

Seems, Mother? No, it is. You are. You are involved. I’ve known from my beginning. Let me summon it, that moment of creation that arrived with my first concept. Long ago, many weeks ago, my neural groove closed upon itself to become my spine and my many million young neurons, busy as silkworms, spun and wove from their trailing axons the gorgeous golden fabric of my first idea, a notion so simple it partly eludes me now. Was it me? Too self-loving. Was it now? Overly dramatic. Then something antecedent to both, containing both, a single word mediated by a mental sigh or swoon of acceptance, of pure being, something like—this?

Too precious. 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. Just that. In the spirit of Es muss sein. The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems. My mother is involved in a plot, and therefore I am too, even if my role might be to foil it. Or if I, reluctant fool, come to term too late, then to avenge it.

But I don’t whine in the face of good fortune. I knew from the start, when I unwrapped from its cloth of gold my gift of consciousness, that I could have arrived in a worse place in a far worse time. The generalities are already clear, against which my domestic troubles are, or should be, negligible. There’s much to celebrate. I’ll inherit a condition of modernity (hygiene, holidays, anaesthetics, reading lamps, oranges in winter) and inhabit a privileged corner of the planet—well-fed, plague-free western Europe. Ancient Europa, sclerotic, relatively kind, tormented by its ghosts, vulnerable to bullies, unsure of herself, destination of choice for unfortunate millions. My immediate neighbourhood will not be palmy Norway—my first choice on account of its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead I’ll inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits restively for his crown. This will be my home, and it will do. I might have emerged in North Korea, where succession is also uncontested but freedom and food are wanting.

How is it that I, not even young, not even born yesterday, could know so much, or know enough to be wrong about so much? I have my sources, I listen. My mother, Trudy, when she isn’t with her friend Claude, likes the radio and prefers talk to music. Who, at the Internet’s inception, would have foreseen the rise and rise of radio, or the renaissance of that archaic word, “wireless”? I hear, above the launderette din of stomach and bowels, the news, wellspring of all bad dreams. Driven by a self-harming compulsion, I listen closely to analysis and dissent. Repeats on the hour, regular half-hourly summaries don’t bore me. I even tolerate the BBC World Service and its puerile blasts of synthetic trumpets and xylophone to separate the items. In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She’ll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning.

And she likes podcast lectures, and self-improving audio books—Know Your Wine in fifteen parts, biographies of seventeenth-century playwrights, and various world classics. James Joyce’s Ulysses sends her to sleep, even as it thrills me.

When, in the early days, she inserted her earbuds, I heard clearly, so efficiently did sound waves travel through jawbone and clavicle, down through her skeletal structure, swiftly through the nourishing amniotic. Even television conveys most of its meagre utility by sound. Also, when my mother and Claude meet, they occasionally discuss the state of the world, usually in terms of lament, even as they scheme to make it worse. Lodged where I am, nothing to do but grow my body and mind, I take in everything, even the trivia—of which there is much.

For Claude is a man who prefers to repeat himself. A man of riffs. On shaking hands with a stranger—I’ve heard this twice—he’ll say, “Claude, as in Debussy.” How wrong he is. This is Claude as in property developer who composes nothing, invents nothing. He enjoys a thought, speaks it aloud, then later has it again, and—why not?—says it again. Vibrating the air a second time with this thought is integral to his pleasure. He knows you know he’s repeating himself. What he can’t know is that you don’t enjoy it the way he does. This, I’ve learned from a Reith lecture, is what is known as a problem of reference.

Here’s an example both of Claude’s discourse and of how I gather information. He and my mother have arranged by telephone (I hear both sides) to meet in the evening. Discounting me, as they tend to—a candlelit dinner for two. How do I know about the lighting? Because when the hour comes and they are shown to their seats I hear my mother complain. The candles are lit at every table but ours.

There follows in sequence Claude’s irritated gasp, an imperious snapping of dry fingers, the kind of obsequious murmur that emanates, so I would guess, from a waiter bent at the waist, the rasp of a lighter. It’s theirs, a candlelit dinner. All they lack is the food. But they have the weighty menus on their laps—I feel the bottom edge of Trudy’s across the small of my back. Now I must listen again to Claude’s set piece on menu terms, as if he’s the first ever to spot these unimportant absurdities. He lingers on “pan-fried.” What is pan but a deceitful benediction on the vulgar and unhealthy fried? Where else might one fry his scallops with chilli and lime juice? In an egg timer? Before moving on, he repeats some of this with a variation of emphasis. Then, his second favourite, an American import, “steel-cut.” I’m silently mouthing his exposition even before he’s begun when a slight tilt in my vertical orientation tells me that my mother is leaning forwards to place a restraining finger on his wrist and say, sweetly, divertingly, “Choose the wine, darling. Something splendid.”

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. Even before the wine arrives—tonight, a Jean-Max Roger Sancerre—at the sound of a drawn cork, I feel it on my face like the caress of a summer breeze. I know that alcohol will lower my intelligence. It lowers everybody’s intelligence. But oh, a joyous, blushful Pinot Noir, or a gooseberried Sauvignon, sets me turning and tumbling across my secret sea, reeling off the walls of my castle, the bouncy castle that is my home. Or so it did when I had more space. Now I take my pleasures sedately, and by the second glass my speculations bloom with that licence whose name is poetry. My thoughts unspool in well-sprung pentameters, end-stopped and run‑on lines in pleasing variation. But she never takes a third, and it wounds me.

“I have to think of baby,” I hear her say as she covers her glass with a priggish hand. That’s when I have it in mind to reach for my oily cord, as one might a velvet rope in a well-staffed country house, and pull sharply for service. What ho! Another round here for us friends!

But no, she restrains herself for love of me. And I love her—how could I not? The mother I have yet to meet, whom I know only from the inside. Not enough! I long for her external self. Surfaces are everything. I know her hair is “straw fair,” that it tumbles in “coins of wild curls” to her “shoulders the white of apple flesh,” because my father has read aloud to her his poem about it in my presence. Claude too has referred to her hair, in less inventive terms. When she’s in the mood, she’ll make tight braids to wind around her head, in the style, my father says, of Yulia Tymoshenko. I also know that my mother’s eyes are green, that her nose is a “pearly button,” that she wishes she had more of one, that separately both men adore it as it is and have tried to reassure her. She’s been told many times that she’s beautiful, but she remains sceptical, which confers on her an innocent power over men, so my father told her one afternoon in the library. She replied that if this was true, it was a power she’d never looked for and didn’t want. This was an unusual conversation for them and I listened intently. My father, whose name is John, said that if he had such a power over her or women in general, he couldn’t imagine giving it up. I guessed, from the sympathetic wave motion which briefly lifted my ear from the wall, that my mother had emphatically shrugged, as if to say, So men are different. Who cares? Besides, she told him out loud, whatever power she was supposed to have was only what men conferred in their fantasies. Then the phone rang, my father walked away to take the call, and this rare and interesting conversation about those that have power was never resumed.

But back to my mother, my untrue Trudy, whose apple-flesh arms and breasts and green regard I long for, whose inexplicable need for Claude pre-dates my first awareness, my primal is, and who often speaks to him, and he to her, in pillow whispers, restaurant whispers, kitchen whispers, as if both suspect that wombs have ears.

I used to think that their discretion was no more than ordinary, amorous intimacy. But now I’m certain. They airily bypass their vocal cords because they’re planning a dreadful event. Should it go wrong, I’ve heard them say, their lives will be ruined. They believe that if they’re to proceed, they should act quickly, and soon. They tell each other to be calm and patient, remind each other of the cost of their plan’s miscarriage, that there are several stages, that each must interlock, that if any single one fails, then all must fail “like old-fashioned Christmas tree lights”—this impenetrable simile from Claude, who rarely says anything obscure. What they intend sickens and frightens them, and they can never speak of it directly. Instead, wrapped in whispers are ellipses, euphemisms, mumbled aporia followed by throat-clearing and a brisk change of subject.

One hot, restless night last week, when I thought both were long asleep, my mother said suddenly into the darkness, two hours before dawn by the clock downstairs in my father’s study, “We can’t do it.”

And straight away Claude said flatly, “We can.” And then, after a moment’s reflection, “We can.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Nan A. Talese; 1st edition (September 13, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385542070
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385542074
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.8 x 8.6 inches

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Ian McEwan

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Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

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PlantBirdWoman

Nutshell by Ian McEwan: A review

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 14, 2016

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"God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually."
- from Nutshell

And eventually, luckily for us, there was Ian McEwan, a writer who routinely delivers such lyrical prose that a dedicated reader could weep for pure joy. In Nutshell, he's done it again.

How can one adequately describe this weird and wonderful little novel? The plot is based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, but our narrator is an eighth-month fetus, preternaturally aware and attuned to the ways of the world. He resides "upside down in a woman" and is privy to all that the woman is privy to, including the plot devised by her and her lover (her brother-in-law) to kill her husband, our narrator's father. McEwan's tale is essentially a two-hundred page soliloquy by that fetus as he watches in horror as their plan proceeds. It is absurd but dazzlingly imaginative and clever and somehow manages to be both suspenseful and profound. It is philosophical in range, in its view of a world that the narrator has not yet entered but imagines all too perfectly; it is a comedy that is marked by moments of tragedy.
To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.
Thus speaks our narrator/fetus/philosopher.

Our narrator reveals himself to be as much of a ham as a Hamlet. He has developed a well-informed taste for wine and a worldly grasp of current events gained through attentive listening to the educational podcasts preferred by his mother for her insomniac amusement. When he is bored at night, he kicks his mother awake so she will entertain him.

He recoils in horror at the active sex life pursued by his mother in her advanced state of pregnancy and cringes at the assault of her lover's penis pounding close by his soft skull.

He worries about what will happen to him if their murder plans succeed. Will his mother wind up in prison and will he be born there? Or even if her culpability is not discovered, will she give him up to some foster home or orphanage in order to pursue an unfettered life? The plans he hears her discussing certainly don't seem to include a baby.

In despair at his impotence, he considers suicide by strangling himself on his own umbilical cord. ("To be, or not to be...") But there, he realizes, is the rub.
Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies.

Every sentence of this short novel seems burnished to perfection. For example, the precocious fetus describes his uncle Claude, the murder conspirator, as a man "whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks, cheaply fading." Cheaply fading - one understands Claude completely in that phrase. And did I mention that the fetus' father is a poet and publisher of poets, a purveyor of rich and meaningful sentences?

McEwan has shown a preference for short novels. The last one of his that I read was The Children Act, another brief and well-polished gem. One gets the impression that he is not willing to accept anything else than perfection in his prose and so he whittles everything down to the essentials. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but for those of us who find brevity to be the soul of wit and who enjoy a bit of philosophy with our fiction, it is hot and tasty and just right.

There is so much insight contained in this short book. The narrator describes a world where poverty and war, "with climate change held in reserve," is driving millions from their homes, vast movements of angry or desolate or hopeful people, "crammed at borders against the razor-wire gates, drowning in thousands to share in the fortunes of the West." His description of faith-based violence and the inanity of identity politics seems a perfect diagnosis of much of what ails modern society.

In this 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death, there have been a plethora of rewrites of his plots and themes. A number of them have been successful, some less so. None of them - at least of the ones that I've read - have attained the conspicuous brilliance of McEwan's effort and his beautiful prose. It is a unique bravura performance.

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Patricia Bizzell

Troubling tour de force

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 17, 2021

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This novel is narrated by a foetus, but not just any foetus: he will be Hamlet when he emerges, having engineered the arrest of his mother Trudy and her cloddish lover Claude for the murder of his admirable father. He knows what's going on because he's old enough to hear conversations near him and to listen to the interminable pod casts with which his mother puts herself to sleep. McEwan maintains the fiction with prodigious consistency, and many readers have found the book to be funny.

There is a sly wit at work here, but to me it is fueled by white-hot rage at the degeneracy of modern society (some of which I admit that I share)--with a soupcon of disgust at the bodily functions of females. I'm reminded of Jonathan Swift's disillusioned view of Celia at her dressing table: yes indeed, she s--ts!

Readers who share McEwan's predilections will not be put off by the novel's elitism, with all its unattributed quotes from Shakespeare's play (his name is neve mentioned), not to mention the central conceit embodied in the characters' names. If you have never read and re-read the play Hamlet, well, you don't deserve to understand!

Please note, I have called this novel a tour de force, and in spite of my distaste for the qualities I have mentioned, I acknowledge its brilliance and I think it would be a very instructive read for any would-be fiction writer, just to see how it's done. For me, well, mercifully, it's short.

3 people found this helpful

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Regis

A cute idea for a thriller

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 12, 2021

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_Nutshell_ is short, smart and fast suspense novel, very different from _Atonement_, but with the same careful construction and gifted writing. But while in _Atonement_ it takes maybe half the book to know where McEwan is actually going on with the story, _Nutshell_ immediately hooks you: there is something very nasty and ugly going on here. Granted, a lot of poetic liberties are taken in the book for the plot to work (and no irony that two of the characters are indeed poets, one of them an "owl poet"), but all is admissible if you think that the whole story is narrated by someone who is still in the belly of his mother and constantly under the influence of alcohol. Boy, how these guys drink! And all the wines mentioned in the book are well-ranked on Vivino!

The image of the mother's belly as a prison where you can't really say what is happening outside made me think of _Oxygen_, the Netflix feature film. But imho, that is not the best part of the whole idea of this book.

What is really nice is how it gradually evolves (or decays) and how the characters become increasingly tense and nervous with their own mistakes (or accomplishments). If you think this is Bruce Willis doing the baby's voice in a light comedy like _Look Who's Talking_, think twice. The last of the three acts in _Nutshell_ is nothing but a tense and extremely well-performed thriller that grabs you and doesn't let you go. This is a book to read maybe in one or two chunks, a real page turner.

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P. G. Harris

Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 22, 2017

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Or a Scot in Dane’s Clothing.

I once read a review of a Tom Stoppard play, Hapgood, I think it was, which suggested that Stoppard’s genius was in making his audience feel more intelligent. I got the same sort of feeling with Nutshell, as Ian McEwan plays with his reader’s knowledge of Shakespeare. Or to put it another way, this is a highbrow (or even middlebrow) version of 1066 and All That, all those dimly remembered bits of Shakespeare.

Much I had heard about Nutshell before reading it suggested that it is a retelling of Hamlet. Well yes it is to an extent, but firstly it is more of prequel, and secondly the characters and the imagery are frequently closer to the Scottish Play.

In this world, the state of Denmark (or Scotland) is a slightly tired but still valuable townhouse in London. (Ger)Trudy has thrown out her husband, poet and publisher, John Cairncross out of the home inherited from his family. She has replaced him with his shallower brother, property developer Claude (ius). The two of them are plotting to murder the unfortunate writer in order to realise the value of this particular property. Their machinations (and copulations) are observed by John and Trudy’s unborn baby.

McEwan then liberally sprinkles this set up with references to both Danish and Scottish plays. Trudy cuts her foot and worries about how difficult it is to clean up the blood. Claude having chosen a poison, wonders if he should have used one about which he read, which can be poured into the victim’s ear. Trudy drives Claude toward murder, and in the immediate aftermath is the more practical, but then quickly becomes the more regretful, to the point where Claude cares little for her. John’s ghost appears, a cross between Hamlet’s father and Banquo at the feast.

This is a slight book, little more than a novella, but it is extremely intense, and Mcewan’s writing style is that of a virtuoso, revelling in complex vocabulary. The first chapter is one of the most stunningly beautiful pieces of writing I have read for some time, but then I found it difficult to progress. That wasn’t because of anything wrong with the story or style, other than its being so dense and intricate. I found it quite it quite tiring, or perhaps a better description might be extremely rich. I wanted to digest one chapter fully before moving onto the next. That said, as things move toward the crime and its aftermath, the pace picks up as it turns from a piece of angsty middle class literary fiction into an out and out thriller.

I suspect that this will be a book which generates pretty binary reactions. A couple of times, I did wonder if it might become irritating, a bit too clever for its own good. I could certainly sympathise with those how might react badly to it. However, in the end, it won me over. It is a surprising, intelligent and entertaining book with a unique and engaging narrative voice. While being set in a very familiar middle class London, it avoids the suffocating smugness of Saturday.

Well worth investing your time and a few of your English pounds.

33 people found this helpful

Ralph Blumenau

A witty and entertaining riff on Hamlet

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 19, 2017

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Reviews have alerted us that this is a riff on Hamlet; so we identify the embryo in this story with Hamlet, and are confirmed in that idea because his mother is called Trudy and his uncle, her lover, is called Claude, and because the embryo hears them conspiracy to murder Trudy’s husband, here called John. (The embryo also hears that he is to be placed elsewhere once he is born). But don’t expect too close a parallel with or a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s play. True, the parallel could still work with the setting being 21st century London and the family not being royal. It might still work even if the characterization of Claude as crude and banal has nothing of the subtlety of Shakespeare’s Claudius, or if that of the apparently feeble and doting John lacks any touch of the majesty or the war-like quality of Gertrude’s husband.

But the embryo has a mental life which has little in common with that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He knows of the world outside the womb through his sense of hearing – not only of conversations, but of radio and television programmes, which lead him to understand in what desperate crises is the world of 2016 (when the book was first published), while at the same time he has heard all the optimistic arguments for the world’s population as a whole never having been so well off as it was at that time. He ruminates about many of today’s political and cultural issues. From what he hears, he can even visualize – though he cannot see – objects and colours in the outside world (though he sometimes describes the appearance of objects he could not possibly have imagined or heard discussed). The embryo’s knowingness, philosophizing, articulacy, and the descriptions of his various physical sensations in the womb are a delight.

Then McEwan departs altogether from any semblance to Shakespeare’s play, as John suddenly springs a great surprise on Trudy, Claude and the embryo. Even so, it does not save John from the fate that Shakespeare had in store for his counterpart. I need not point out that in the play this fate occurs when Hamlet is a young man, and not, as here, when he is not yet born.

We are about half-way through the book. The second half is not quite as good as the first, and in places the embryo’s thoughts are quite difficult to follow. At times Trudy segues into Lady Macbeth’s role, as she us haunted by her guilt. Her grief is perhaps genuine; but in any case she plays the role of the grieving widow very well and almost comes to believe the story she tells to outsiders, including the visiting police. But she and Claude realize that the police have reasons not to believe them; and I must not reveal the end, except to say that the embryo gets to avenge its father, if not in the way Shakespeare’s Hamlet does. We may guess what will happen to Trudy and her baby; but the novel does not tell us: “the rest is silence”.

The book is witty and very entertaining.

14 people found this helpful

J. Ang

Inner Sanctum

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 17, 2017

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Ian McEwan is well-known for his tales of suspense with artful twists, so this bitterly funny novella comes as quite a pleasant surprise. The narrator is a preternaturally aware foetus who bears witness to the misdemeanours of his mother, Trudy, and her good friend Claude, with a keen ear, despite not being able to actually see what’s going on, encased inconveniently as he is within his amniotic sac.

He struggles with his contrary feelings of love and hate for his mother, as it becomes clear that he is tasked to play the part of Hamlet in this increasingly dangerous bedroom farce, with adultery and even murder on the cards. And led as he is unwillingly into this plot, he feels powerless to act (and not entirely for altruistic ends), but that may soon change with what he thinks could be a contribution on his part.

That McEwan gives a foetus such a prime role and such character is already quite a feat, but to add to that the foetus’s sophisticated sommelier taste for his mother’s choice of wine which potentially endangers his own development, and his mortal fear for his own safety whenever his mother gets amorous, tip the scale and make this piece into a full out satirical comedy, which is riotously funny. As always, McEwan’s exacting prose is a joy to read, and I would say this is one of his more successful pieces in recent memory.

5 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Disappointing and unbelievable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 22, 2021

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The reviews on this book were good and the preposition that an unborn baby could hear conversations from inside the womb believable...... that is until you start reading!! I'm happy with the context that s/he can hear sounds and even voices, but it's too much of a stretch to believe that s/he can understand, reason, deduct, "see" colour, or have any concept about the height of an adult, what is constitutes a beautiful face etc etc etc. Have to admit that I lost patience with it about three quarters of the way through and skipped to the end, which was equally unbelievable, even although the outcome was satisfying.

One person found this helpful

Tubes

Wit, ugly and succinct

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 4, 2022

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It's so annoying when people write that a book like this is 'unbelievable'.
OF COURSE IT'S UNBELIEVABLE!

But the book/baby is a vehicle that carries the reader on a reflective journey with
accurate summaries of world issues, a growing sense of fear and desperation, sexual encounters (devoid of love) and delightful imagery (the baby's sensations and conjured hopes).

Thought-provking for a thinking reader. For the sensitive and empathetic, this book will remain with you for quite a while.

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FREE delivery: Thursday, Dec 29 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon

Sold by: JTN OUTLET LLC

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