Nutshell by Ian McEwan

It may be literary heresy, but I’m not a great fan of Ian McEwan – eek, there I’ve said it…

I have Atonement on my shelves. I bought it at the time of publishing because it seemed like the thing to do at the time, and yes I thought it was well done, but I don’t know that I’m ever going to go back and read it again. I remember buying The Innocent and abandoning it part way through – something I don’t do lightly, but it just wasn’t doing anything for me. I’ve picked up Amsterdam and Enduring Love in bookshops, read the first couple of pages and wandered around the shop with them in my hand, and then eventually put them back because they weren’t doing that magical book thing when you feel like they’re almost pulsing in your hand shouting ‘read me, read me’.

However, here I am, having read an Ian McEwan and enjoyed it – I feel like I may have to go lie down, or at least put my previous prejudices aside, which is always annoying!

When it came out, I recall reading a lot about Nutshell, especially about the premise, which is that a baby still in the womb overhears a plot between its mother and lover (her husband’s brother) to murder her husband (the baby’s father), who is both a poet and a publisher of poets. Eavesdropping baby aside, it’s very Hamlet, and deliberately so.

I was concerned about the choice to make the baby the narrator, as to whether it would work, or just be a bit of an arch conceit. I was pleasantly surprised that it worked very well.

References to Hamlet abound, but I’m glad to say, don’t get in the way if you aren't particularly familiar. The quote at the start of the book that the title comes from is “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.”  The mother is called Trudy and the lover/brother-in-law is called Claude, another obvious shout out.

The idea of a sentient baby made me think oddly enough about Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Small Assassin, in which the baby murders its parents, possibly because it resented them for shoving it out from the cosiness of the womb into the unforgiving world. In the case of Nutshell, the baby is the opposite - it is excited and intrigued about life on the outside, because really it’s only got a couple of weeks until it is due, and it’s getting kind of tight in there. I really enjoyed a lot of the subversive, turning what we think about babies on its head things such as – we know that pregnant women aren’t meant to drink – but this baby is a bit of a wine connoisseur, revelling in the euphoria created by Trudy’s alcohol habit, and thinking that a nice Pouilly Fumé would go well with the smoked herring she was eating. It also has some very amusing observations to make about Trudy and Claude having sex and it worries about becoming a jail baby if the murder is discovered and the feckless pair go to prison.

While the casual plotting of a murder should be/is shocking, making the baby the narrator makes the novel very funny as well. I found myself holding my breath as the murder plot moves forward and in the next moment giggling like mad as the baby makes some particularly pithy observation.

It’s difficult to talk about a crime novel without giving too much away, but I would say that by making the baby the hidden observer and narrator of events, Ian McEwan has written a book that is as surprising as it is well written. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will definitely read it again, and that’s not something I ever thought I’d say.

Nutshell by Ian McEwan was published in 2016 and my copy was published by Anchor Books