The countless iterations spawned by Shakespeare's Hamlet embrace a certain consistency: introspective in the extreme, they tend toward the dark but are – in essence – plainly human. In his latest novel, Nutshell, Ian McEwan briskly unpacks these conceits with the following interior monologue:
“So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for.”
McEwan is the author of 17 other books, including Atonement , Saturday and Amsterdam . In Nutshell, he tells a story of betrayal and murder— from the perspective of a fetus, still in his mother’s womb. McEwan joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio to discuss Nutshell, Brexit, and envisioning novels for the silver screen.
“The basic story is the story of Hamlet. My narrator (he doesn’t have a name, and no previous address) appears to know a great deal about the world. We’re in, I guess, the right place to say that he really appreciates the radio. He is amazed and pleased at the rise of radio in a digital age, so he will kick his mother awake in the middle of the night, she will get insomnia, and she’ll turn on the radio. He also listens to podcasts, so he has a pretty comprehensive sense of the world he’s about to join. That allows him and me to reflect on that world. At the same time, he becomes aware that his mother is having an affair, and the man she’s having an affair with is, in fact, his uncle. Worse than that, he realizes they’re plotting to kill his father (so there’s the Hamlet element). Like Hamlet, he reflects on death and suicide, he even has an attempt to strangle himself with his own umbilical cord, which the rest of the time he uses as worry beads. When you have a fetus narrator, it’s quite restrictive. The first thing to say about a fetus is; you can always trust a fetus. They’re straight-talking, there’s no spin—they really tell you as it is. This is a reliable narrator.”
Ian McEwan will be at the First Parish Church Wednesday night at 7:00pm, joined by Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. To hear his full interview with Boston Public Radio, click on the audio link above.
