Listen with Mother

Ian McEwan’s novels are drawn to enclosed spaces. There is the squash court upon which the surgeon plays a meticulously described game in Saturday, and the honeymoon suite in a little seaside hotel for the awkward newlyweds in On Chesil Beach. In Atonement, the mother is kept in her bedroom by migraines while her daughter (spoiler alert) dies in a bomb-hit Underground station, and in the famous opening to his early novel Enduring Love a child is carried away in the basket of a hot air balloon. ‘Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces,’ he writes in his new novel Nutshell, which is — oddly but perhaps logically — narrated by a foetus from inside the womb.

‘I squat here sealed in my private life, in a lingering, sultry dusk, impatiently dreaming,’ the foetus explains; but the problem is that its life in the womb is not private at all. It does not yet know whether it is a girl or a boy, and can of course see little, but it can hear everything: conversations, characters coming and going, and the podcasts which its mother listens to when she cannot sleep. It likes the Reith lectures; the mother must listen to an awful lot of Radio 4, as the unborn child has reliably middle-class opinions about world politics. It also sounds a bit like Hannibal Lecter: ‘You may never have experienced… a good Sancerre decanted through a healthy placenta.’

Confinement has a double meaning: held in a restricted space, and the condition of childbirth. Nutshell is confined in a further way by its constant allusions to Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, which gives McEwan’s novel its vocabulary, style and plot. There are key words taken from the play (‘Seems, Mother?’, ‘common’) and the foetus’s mother, named Trudy after Hamlet’s Gertrude, is having an affair with her brother-in-law Claude; there are in-jokes (Claude orders ‘baked meats’ from the local Danish takeaway) and paragraphs of pastiche.