Nutshell

Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape, £15.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

As they gain experience, some writers delight in a challenge. Recently, in Mothering Sunday, Graham Swift attempted to gasp the holy grail of fiction: to evoke fully, believably, what it is like to live in a particular moment – the way it looks, smells and sounds, but above all how it feels. This he achieved in a novel so slim some would call it a short story. But as he told an audience at the Edinburgh book festival, it is neither a short story nor a novella, a word he refuses to acknowledge. Mothering Sunday contains all the elements of a longer book, and – to this reader’s eye – deploys them with unusual brilliance.

Like Swift, Ian McEwan has also shrunk his scope while at the same time aiming higher. In his case, Nutshell is less a miniature magnum opus and more a jeu d’esprit, but do not be fooled. Although the story is told from the perspective of a highly articulate nine-month-old foetus, a gimmick to trump most others, it is nevertheless a serious book, despite being blackly comic.

Aware of the criticism his keyhole narrator might attract, McEwan gets his justification in early. “Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces....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 endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.”

There’s no arguing with that. In the opening chapters, however, one jibbed at being asked to accept that an unborn child, self-educated though he is by listening to podcasts and radio, can possibly be a credible raconteur. Everything in this reader recoiled at the idea. Slowly, however, McEwan works his magic. The story takes hold, one is keen to hear more, and in no time the foetus’s voice has become compelling as well as touching. By the end, one swallows fanciful improbability as if it were a tin of Heinz baby food.

Yet how can a rounded tale be told from the confines of a womb? Quite easily, as McEwan shows: “When I hear the friendly drone of passing cars and a slight breeze stirs what I believe are horse chestnut leaves, when a portable radio below me tinnily rasps and a penumbral coral glow, a prolonged tropical dusk, dully illuminates my inland sea and its trillion drifting fragments, then I know that my mother is sunbathing on the balcony outside my father’s library.”

This mother, Trudy, is beautiful, young and malevolent. She is living in her estranged husband’s squalid London townhouse, with her secret lover, who happens to be her husband’s brother. The baby’s father, a poet called John, wishes to move back in and mend their marriage. We soon learn that the future Trudy and her avaricious, lustful inamorato Claude are planning does not include either baby or ex. From within his confined chamber, the narrator is frantic to find a way in which he can avoid being abandoned. Despite what he learns she is plotting to do, he cannot but crave Trudy’s affection: “it’s hard to be separate from her when I need her. And with such churning of emotion, need translates to love, like milk to butter.”

The macabre premise of the novel is vintage McEwan: the idea of knowing your mother intends to murder your father, yet you can do nothing about it. Children are a recurring preoccupation in his work, and as Trudy and Claude discuss how to get rid of John, the baby’s keen ear is unsettling. It will unnerve all who are pregnant, or in the presence of the unborn, raising as it does the suspicion that there is greater awareness of the outside world from the womb than is ever allowed. Of course we cannot accept the pre-born could ever be as precocious as McEwan’s narrator, but one must always wonder how much a person’s earliest experiences and apprehensions colour later life. Meanwhile, those who have sex close to full-term might wince at McEwan’s mischievous descriptions of an act the baby describes as “the Wall of Death”, when he is mightily buffetted and discomfited.

The sordid contract around which Nutshell revolves is the thread from which the story’s web is spun. Just as interesting, however, is the picture McEwan paints of our febrile, chaotic times. As a descant to the misery of the amoral couple we are reminded of the litany of human ails: wars and terrorism, climate change and famine, the poverty stricken on our own doorstep, and refugees from afar.

“Anxiously,” the baby writes, “I finger my cord. It serves for worry beads.” There is much for him – and us – to be fearful of. On one level Nutshell is a mordant comedy of murder and lust. It is also a powerful cameo of vulnerability and helplessness. This universal condition, for many born as well as unborn, adds texture and timbre to the tale that makes it more than an exercise in perspective, or a demonstration of the novelist as Houdini, able to write himself out of the most tortuous situation. As its title suggests, Nutshell is short. When space it this tight, however, every word must earn its place. As a result, it is also richly rewarding.