If This Fetus Could Talk: With Nutshell, Ian McEwan Tries (and Fails) to Fight His Own Conventionality

The narrator of Ian McEwan'southward novel Nutshell is a male fetus in its third trimester, and his mother, Trudy, is sleeping with his uncle Claude and they are planning to kill his male parent. So the scenario resembles Hamlet, until halfway through, later on the murder is committed and Trudy feels remorse, when she starts quoting Macbeth. The fetus has learned to tell his story by listening through the womb to the radio and to podcasts his mother keeps on all day. That's why he sounds like a middle-grade North London infant boomer: likewise much BBC Radio 4, peculiarly Melvyn Bragg'southward In Our Time. Information technology'due south a shame McEwan decided to leave out whatever the plotline of The Archers was when he was writing Nutshell. Chances are it was more intriguing than what he came up with himself.

Claude is a property developer, and his brother John, the cuckolded murderee, is a poet. One is rich, or at least greedy, the other is a debtor, and no English poets are very famous these days, unless you count James Fenton, who lives in New York. So the fratricide symbolizes the ruin of bohemian London at the hands of craven mail service-Thatcherite commercialism. Equally doltish as Claude is, it's hard to feel pitiful for John. The quondam is predatory and virile, the latter flabby and bromidic — which reflects McEwan's view of English poetry of contempo vintage (exceptions for Fenton but not Hughes; Betjeman is cited neutrally; Larkin goes unmentioned). "Most of the modernistic poems go out me common cold," the fetus says of the stuff his father recites. "Too much about the self, also glassily cool with regard to others, too many other gripes in also short a line. But as the embrace of brothers are John Keats and Wilfred Owen." John also suffers, like McEwan's transatlantic stylistic uncle John Updike, from psoriasis. His hands are cherry and scaly, ane of the reasons Trudy prefers Claude'due south touch on, and so we're told.

The emphasis in Nutshell is all on the stunt narrator. The murder story is sparse to the signal of parody — John is fed smoothie laced with sweet-tasting antifreeze, with props planted to brand it expect like a suicide — and the authorities unravel it in a matter of hours (whatsoever Londoner knows that even smoothie shops are surveilled by CCTV). The fetal narrator is the sign of a writer overcompensating for his own perceived conventionality. Which is itself an interesting phenomenon. London may take been one of the principal staging grounds for modernism, but many of the players on that scene were Irish (Yeats) or American (Eliot and Pound) and England has never been a nation of innovating vanguards. Its movements tend to be reactionary — similar the Motion poets and the Angry Young Men of the 1950s — and its innovators, whatever their social milieu, have tended to exist artful loners, at least in their own state: Virginia Woolf, Henry Dark-green, B.Due south. Johnson, Ann Quin, J.G. Ballard, Will Cocky, Tom McCarthy, Adam Thirlwell  (not to mention the unclassifiable genius of Kazuo Ishiguro). The bulk of English novelists are conventional creatures, and it's no accident that the well-nigh historic English author of the moment, Hilary Mantel, churns out costume-drama books, ready for stage and screen on commitment. McEwan too had his biggest success with the costume drama Atonement (2001).

Only in fits of compensation for English conventionality nosotros do sometimes get what passes for experimentation: See the backward-running narration of Martin Amis's Time ' s Arrow or, to rather better effect, the numbered chronological essaylets of the third function of Zadie Smith's NW. Stunt narrators are at to the lowest degree as old in England as Adventures of a Shilling (1710), a fourth dimension-honored convention themselves. In Nutshell McEwan hasn't failed by risking formal originality but by stuffing his book with his own shopworn chauvinisms and not a few pervy bits. Their heightened wording indicates that he took most please in composing Nutshell's many fetal-POV porn scenes:

Not everyone knows what information technology'due south like to accept your begetter'south rival's penis inches from your nose. By this belatedly stage they should be refraining on my behalf. Courtesy, if not clinical judgement, demands it. I close my eyes, I grit my gums, I brace myself against the uterine walls. This turbulence would shake the wings off a Boeing. My mother goads her lover, whips him on with fairground shrieks. Wall of Death! On each occasion, on every piston stroke, I dread that he'll break through and shaft my soft-boned skull and seed my thoughts with his essence, with the teeming cream of his banality. Then, brain-damaged, I'll recall and speak similar him. I'll be the son of Claude.

Such passages recur most every 20 pages. Then at that place's the teeming cream of McEwan's banalities — a phrase that neatly captures the vices of McEwan'southward always fluid style and his preference for ecstatic wording even when information technology's obviously disgusting. (An earlier example, from On Chesil Beach (2007), in which the hero Edward is "mesmerized by the prospect that on the evening of a given engagement in June the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, nevertheless briefly, within a naturally formed crenel within this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman.") McEwan's prose is always smooth — yous tin can most come across the sentences arcing like sine waves — yet there'south besides something drab about it. The fetal narrator tin't see the exterior world, though we are told the novel takes place during a hot summer (it'southward never really hot in London) but McEwan's prose always leaves the distinct impression of the gray London sky on a rainy twenty-four hours and the beige fields of Regent'southward Park in wintertime. In that sense he may be the perfect English author.

By indulging the narrator'due south incessant digressions, McEwan has used the fetus to make Nutshell a container for the things on his mind in the laziest of ways. The fetus loves adverbs and loves to call attention to his ain free use of them. He worries a scrap about global warming. He despises terrorists. He spends a chapter mocking campus-identity politics. He thinks Albanians are brutes. He's an atheist of the Hitchens/Dawkins school. He listens to Claude, a xenophobe, and John, a tolerant liberal, discuss immigration. Trudy is an alcoholic, and the fetus goes on about the wine she drinks (he especially loves a Sancerre contact loftier) almost as much as he does about her sex with Claude. Most of the same liberal North London baby-boomer hobbyhorses were on display in Saturday (2005) but in that book McEwan at least took the problem to implant them in a dramatic framework (if a rather preposterous ane). Even those familiar readers of McEwan awaiting one of his signature terminal twists will be disappointed. Perhaps needless to say, the baby is born. It at to the lowest degree has the side effect of shutting him up.

If This Fetus Could Talk: McEwan's Drab Nutshell