Quirky rebirth of the Bard
NUTSHELL HHHH by Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape, £16.99
GILLIAN FLYNN, author of Gone Girl, will publish her take on Hamlet next year in the Hogarth Press series of reinterpretations of Shakespeare plays. So far, among others, Jeanette Winterson has taken on The Winter’s Tale and Anne Tyler The Taming Of The Shrew.
But I can’t help feeling a sneaking sympathy for Flynn as Ian McEwan has made such a good fist of Hamlet in Nutshell.
McEwan’s latest novel features all his hallmarks: elegant plotting, suspense, good characterisation and a chilling awareness of just how unpleasant people can be.
There is surprise too, for the narrator is an unborn child, an acute and sophisticated observer from within the womb. So the moody 20-something Prince of Denmark is replaced in this retelling of Hamlet by a foetus who goes through many of the same agonies as he watches his mother betray his father.
Trudy is a beautiful and heavily pregnant woman of 28 who has thrown out her husband John Cairncross to have an affair with his younger brother Claude.
John is a poet and publisher, an encourager of young talent whose reading of poetry to his wife has filtered through into the consciousness of his unborn son.
Claude by contrast is a banal, unscrupulous, not-very-bright property developer “whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble”. Sex between Trudy and Claude is exciting but perfunctory and more important to Claude than Trudy’s body is the Cairncross family home in which she lives: a £4million pile in St John’s Wood.
John is reluctant to grant Trudy a divorce and indeed is even planning to move back home, although – as the narrator ruefully notes – his interest is in Trudy rather than his child. For Claude and Trudy the only way forward is to murder John with the foetus a horrified onlooker. He is, as he says, “party to the crime, safe, obviously, from questioning but fearful”.
The mutually distrustful couple plot, both careless and indifferent towards Trudy’s unborn child. Trudy eats little but drinks to excess, on occasion muddying the clarity of the narrator’s thoughts as he is forced to share bottles of wine with his mother. There is also humour in this dark novel as when the foetus uses his umbilical cord as worry beads and even tries to hang himself with it after reaching the point of wishing “never to be born”.
McEwan uses his unusual narrator to comment on a plethora of issues as the baby reflects on the world he will shortly be joining. Questions of gender, sexual identity and contemporary politics are all pored over by this precocious being as he attempts to come to terms with the crime his mother plans to commit.
Witty and thoughtful, this short, engaging novel punches well above its weight.