Nutshell (novel)

Nutshell

First UK edition
Author	Ian McEwan
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Publisher	Jonathan Cape
Publication date	2016
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	208 pages
ISBN

Nutshell is the 14th novel by English author and screenwriter Ian McEwan. Published in 2016, it retells William Shakespeare's play Hamlet from the point of view of an unborn child.

Interviewing McEwan for The Wall Street Journal, Michael W. Miller explained: "The idea for the extremely unusual narrator of Ian McEwan’s new novel Nutshell first came to him while he was chatting with his pregnant daughter-in-law. 'We were talking about the baby, and I was very much aware of the baby as a presence in the room,' he recalls. He jotted down a few notes, and soon afterward, daydreaming in a long meeting, the first sentence of the novel popped into his head: 'So here I am, upside down in a woman.'"

Nutshell received generally positive reviews from book critics. Book Marks, the review aggregator of Literary Hub, assigned the book an average grade of B+. In The Guardian, Kate Clanchy began by admitting: "This may not sound like an entirely promising read: a talking foetus could be an unconvincing or at least tiresomely limited narrator, and updatings of Shakespeare often strain at their own seams. From the start, though, McEwan manages to establish both the groggy, gripping parameters of the uterus – 'My limbs are folded hard across my chest, my head is wedged into my only exit. I wear my mother like a tight-fitting cap' – and that this foetus, Hamlet-style, is 'king of infinite space'". She found the book’s retelling of Hamlet to have "a strong forward momentum" and to be not only a "brutally effective" thriller, "but many other sorts of book too". Despite finding some faults with the novel's social satire, characterisation, and portrayal of contemporary life, she concluded that "[…] the architecture wins. This book is organised so thoroughly, in its plot, characters and themes, around the central image of the foetus suspended in the churnings of gravity and time […]. Like TS Eliot's "Marina", also a riff on Shakespeare, it is a consciously late, deliberately elegiac, masterpiece, a calling together of everything McEwan has learned and knows about his art."

Also writing for The Guardian, Tim Adams noted: "There have been plenty of novels inspired by Hamlet – Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, even David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. And there have been one or two novels told in the voice of foetuses in the womb – Carlos Fuentes's Christopher Unborn, for example. But Ian McEwan's virtuoso entertainment is almost certainly the first to combine the two." He added, "Biology was always Hamlet's destiny – 'The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right'– but never has it seemed quite so graphically chromosomal." Adams found the book to be "both alive with wild and whirling wordplay and capable of all sorts of antic dispositions" but warned that "As with all novels based on self-consciously clever conceits, the danger is always self-consciously clever conceit".