"Nutshell" by Ian McEwan
Where to begin describing the brilliant writing of Ian McEwan? He is a rare phenomenon who not only has the detached worldview that permits him to create captivating narratives but he also manages to introduce science, philosophy, and a wry description of the world we live in, all the while using the English language as few writers can: his novels contain segments that are prose poems of devastating beauty.
His latest book, “Nutshell”, is a spellbinding tour-de-force. Narrated by the ultimate “unreliable narrator”: an unborn child regales us with a tale of crime, retribution, and so much else from inside the womb. One is taken on a rollercoaster ride of rollicking emotions, hilarious predicaments and wise observations about a world yet to be entered.
To be or not to be? That is the question. Our unborn narrator is the child of Trudy who, with her lover Claude, is planning to murder her husband, the father of the extremely observant fetus in her womb. How to thwart this crime if you have not yet been born? Is it worth the effort to be born at all? How to reconcile the love for the mother whose body holds your very existence and supplies all your needs, who contains you, with the wish to punish her (and her vile lover) for the planned crime? While contemplating this question and keeping a keen eye on the growing inevitability of the approaching evil deed, our unborn hero is increasingly observant of the world just out of his reach but clearly manifesting itself in overheard TV news, TED talks, lectures, or just plain listening to the conversations surrounding him. This is a “late” stage of his existence: he waxes nostalgic for those long-gone days what he was a mere collection of cells and had all the room to swim around in. Now he is just weeks from being born and rather tightly housed in his amniotic sac; he can’t quite make up his mind whether impending birth means a longed-for freedom, or an extremely disturbing new state of being that may not be all it’s been cranked up to be. Or not to be.
He introduces himself at the very first sentence of the book in the most eye opening way imaginable: “So here I am, upside down in a woman,” he states, and he is off on a remarkably astute description of erotic obsession, the London real estate market, and whether the general state of the planet is to be considered beyond redemption or full of hope. To be or not to be.
When I was growing up in the Hungary of the 1950s, it was a time of dreadful hardship and, simultaneously, a time of proliferating jokes, political and otherwise. Two of the non-political ones were really just two versions of an eternal verity: that there are at least two ways of looking at very nearly all situations. One was the Swiss Cheese joke, the other was the Horse Manure joke. Here they go:
After much effort, A. manages to acquire a slab of Swiss Cheese (remarkable in that food-poor period), and brings it home to his wife, beaming with pleasure. She opens the wrapping and looks at it crestfallen: It is full of holes! she complains.
Parents of twin children despair: child A is a hopeless complainer and depressive, child B is too much of a cockeyed optimist; both extremes, in the view of the parents, in need of correction. Come Christmas, they give to child A all the gifts he had asked for, while for child B they put a carefully packaged box under the tree that contains a pile of horse manure. Child A unwraps his gifts one after another: the toy train doesn’t whistle right, the book is too large, the doll is too small; he retires sulking. Child B opens his box and beams: “I got a PONY for Christmas – true, it ran away, but still. . .”
The old question: is the glass half full or half empty?
Our unborn narrator of "Nutshell" has a riff on this theme in the midst of contemplating the conflicting information he had absorbed about the state of the world he is about to enter. Here is what he had heard about it:
On the one hand:
“An expert in international relations, a reasonable woman with a rich deep voice advised me that the world was not well. She considered two common states of mind: self-pity and aggression. Each one a poor choice for individuals. In combination, for groups or nations, a noxious brew that lately intoxicated the Russians in Ukraine, as it once had their friends, the Serbs in their part of the world. We were belittled, now we will prove ourselves. Now that the Russian state was the political arm of organized crime, another war in Europe no longer inconceivable. Dust down the tank divisions for Lithuania’s southern border, for the north German plain. The same potion inflames the barbaric fringes of Islam. The cup is drained, the same cry goes up: we’ve been humiliated, we’ll be avenged. The lecturer took a dim view of our species, of which psychopaths are a constant fraction, a human constant. Armed struggle, just or not, attracts them. They help to tip local struggles into bigger conflicts. Europe, according to her, is in existential crises, fractious and weak as varieties of self-loving nationalism sip that same tasty brew. Confusion about values, the bacillus of anti-Semitism incubating, immigrant populations languishing, angry and bored. Elsewhere, everywhere, novel inequalities of wealth, the super rich a master race apart. Ingenuity deployed by states for new forms of brilliant weaponry, by global corporations to dodge taxes, by righteous banks to stuff themselves with Christmas millions. China, too big to need friends or counsel, cynically probing its neighbors’ shores, building islands of tropical sand, planning for the war it knows must come. Muslim-majority countries plagued by religious Puritanism, by sexual sickness, by smothered invention. The Middle East, fast-breeder for a possible world war. And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa yet to learn democracy’s party trick – the peaceful transfer of power. Its children dying, thousands by the week, for want of easy things – clean water, mosquito nets, cheap drugs. Uniting and leveling all humanity, the dull old facts of altered climate, vanishing forests, creatures, and polar ice. Profitable and poisonous agriculture obliterating biological beauty. Oceans turning to weak acid. Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the ruinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care. And soon, with demographic transition, the reverse, populations in catastrophic decline. Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, no alternatives in sight. In conclusion, she said, these disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful but now we are doomed.”
Thus, clearly, Not To Be.
On the other hand:
“I’ve heard enough of such talks to have learned to summon the counterarguments. Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. And now in commentaries. Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived? When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before – and more knowledge, more truth by way of science, was never so available to us all? When tender sympathies – for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners – swell daily? When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched subsistence? When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of a galloping horse? When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public executions and routine state torture have been banished from many countries? Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere. When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation? When the worldwide migration to the cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs? What of commonplace miracles that would make a manual labourer the envy of Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, with the best music the world had known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures? We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon. As for the Russians, the same was said of Catholic Spain. We expected their armies on our beaches. Like most things, it didn’t happen. The matter was settled by some fireships and a useful storm that drove their fleet round the top of Scotland. We’ll always be troubled by how things are – that’s how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.”
So, perhaps, To Be after all.
Let me say – spoiler! – that the narrator, though he is unable to prevent the crime, does get his revenge in the end. A unique version of the Prince of Denmark.
All in a “Nutshell”.
His latest book, “Nutshell”, is a spellbinding tour-de-force. Narrated by the ultimate “unreliable narrator”: an unborn child regales us with a tale of crime, retribution, and so much else from inside the womb. One is taken on a rollercoaster ride of rollicking emotions, hilarious predicaments and wise observations about a world yet to be entered.
To be or not to be? That is the question. Our unborn narrator is the child of Trudy who, with her lover Claude, is planning to murder her husband, the father of the extremely observant fetus in her womb. How to thwart this crime if you have not yet been born? Is it worth the effort to be born at all? How to reconcile the love for the mother whose body holds your very existence and supplies all your needs, who contains you, with the wish to punish her (and her vile lover) for the planned crime? While contemplating this question and keeping a keen eye on the growing inevitability of the approaching evil deed, our unborn hero is increasingly observant of the world just out of his reach but clearly manifesting itself in overheard TV news, TED talks, lectures, or just plain listening to the conversations surrounding him. This is a “late” stage of his existence: he waxes nostalgic for those long-gone days what he was a mere collection of cells and had all the room to swim around in. Now he is just weeks from being born and rather tightly housed in his amniotic sac; he can’t quite make up his mind whether impending birth means a longed-for freedom, or an extremely disturbing new state of being that may not be all it’s been cranked up to be. Or not to be.
He introduces himself at the very first sentence of the book in the most eye opening way imaginable: “So here I am, upside down in a woman,” he states, and he is off on a remarkably astute description of erotic obsession, the London real estate market, and whether the general state of the planet is to be considered beyond redemption or full of hope. To be or not to be.
When I was growing up in the Hungary of the 1950s, it was a time of dreadful hardship and, simultaneously, a time of proliferating jokes, political and otherwise. Two of the non-political ones were really just two versions of an eternal verity: that there are at least two ways of looking at very nearly all situations. One was the Swiss Cheese joke, the other was the Horse Manure joke. Here they go:
After much effort, A. manages to acquire a slab of Swiss Cheese (remarkable in that food-poor period), and brings it home to his wife, beaming with pleasure. She opens the wrapping and looks at it crestfallen: It is full of holes! she complains.
Parents of twin children despair: child A is a hopeless complainer and depressive, child B is too much of a cockeyed optimist; both extremes, in the view of the parents, in need of correction. Come Christmas, they give to child A all the gifts he had asked for, while for child B they put a carefully packaged box under the tree that contains a pile of horse manure. Child A unwraps his gifts one after another: the toy train doesn’t whistle right, the book is too large, the doll is too small; he retires sulking. Child B opens his box and beams: “I got a PONY for Christmas – true, it ran away, but still. . .”
The old question: is the glass half full or half empty?
Our unborn narrator of "Nutshell" has a riff on this theme in the midst of contemplating the conflicting information he had absorbed about the state of the world he is about to enter. Here is what he had heard about it:
On the one hand:
“An expert in international relations, a reasonable woman with a rich deep voice advised me that the world was not well. She considered two common states of mind: self-pity and aggression. Each one a poor choice for individuals. In combination, for groups or nations, a noxious brew that lately intoxicated the Russians in Ukraine, as it once had their friends, the Serbs in their part of the world. We were belittled, now we will prove ourselves. Now that the Russian state was the political arm of organized crime, another war in Europe no longer inconceivable. Dust down the tank divisions for Lithuania’s southern border, for the north German plain. The same potion inflames the barbaric fringes of Islam. The cup is drained, the same cry goes up: we’ve been humiliated, we’ll be avenged. The lecturer took a dim view of our species, of which psychopaths are a constant fraction, a human constant. Armed struggle, just or not, attracts them. They help to tip local struggles into bigger conflicts. Europe, according to her, is in existential crises, fractious and weak as varieties of self-loving nationalism sip that same tasty brew. Confusion about values, the bacillus of anti-Semitism incubating, immigrant populations languishing, angry and bored. Elsewhere, everywhere, novel inequalities of wealth, the super rich a master race apart. Ingenuity deployed by states for new forms of brilliant weaponry, by global corporations to dodge taxes, by righteous banks to stuff themselves with Christmas millions. China, too big to need friends or counsel, cynically probing its neighbors’ shores, building islands of tropical sand, planning for the war it knows must come. Muslim-majority countries plagued by religious Puritanism, by sexual sickness, by smothered invention. The Middle East, fast-breeder for a possible world war. And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa yet to learn democracy’s party trick – the peaceful transfer of power. Its children dying, thousands by the week, for want of easy things – clean water, mosquito nets, cheap drugs. Uniting and leveling all humanity, the dull old facts of altered climate, vanishing forests, creatures, and polar ice. Profitable and poisonous agriculture obliterating biological beauty. Oceans turning to weak acid. Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the ruinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care. And soon, with demographic transition, the reverse, populations in catastrophic decline. Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, no alternatives in sight. In conclusion, she said, these disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful but now we are doomed.”
Thus, clearly, Not To Be.
On the other hand:
“I’ve heard enough of such talks to have learned to summon the counterarguments. Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. And now in commentaries. Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived? When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before – and more knowledge, more truth by way of science, was never so available to us all? When tender sympathies – for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners – swell daily? When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched subsistence? When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of a galloping horse? When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public executions and routine state torture have been banished from many countries? Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere. When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation? When the worldwide migration to the cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs? What of commonplace miracles that would make a manual labourer the envy of Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, with the best music the world had known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures? We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon. As for the Russians, the same was said of Catholic Spain. We expected their armies on our beaches. Like most things, it didn’t happen. The matter was settled by some fireships and a useful storm that drove their fleet round the top of Scotland. We’ll always be troubled by how things are – that’s how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.”
So, perhaps, To Be after all.
Let me say – spoiler! – that the narrator, though he is unable to prevent the crime, does get his revenge in the end. A unique version of the Prince of Denmark.
All in a “Nutshell”.
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