Author Ian McEwan. Photo / NZ Herald
Ian McEwan's narrators have often been edgy, fractured, disturbed or disturbing, but none has come near the voice that drives his latest novel. It's the voice of a nearly full-term foetus, still growing within the womb.
He - a "shrimp-like protuberance" establishes gender early on - busily absorbs details of
the outside, imminent world via overheard conversations, podcasts and umbilical information. It's contemporary, carnivorous London, where mum-to-be Trudy has done the dirty on poet husband John, and moved in with his brother Claude. They're planning a fraud and a murder, as one does (or two do).
Our narrator hears all, even half-sees some, as light shifts outside his warm, wet home. So his voice transgresses the Laws of Nature and possibility? So what? In McEwan's virtuoso hands, it anticipates your objections ("I've got no choice, my ear is pressed against the bloody walls"), encourages suspension of disbelief and allows the plot to pace along. It's a triumph.
You noticed the names of mum and lover? Yes, this is Hamlet re-wrought. Quotations, paraphrases, semi-soliloquies, synopses thread it, always ingeniously, sometimes floridly. A rearranged Ophelia droops in then storms back to hint at revenge.
It's a busy life in-utero. Our nameless narrator (well, one name fills the reader's mind) keeps in shape by slow-motion tumbles; uses his birth-cord as a rosary. He frets about global warming and foetal alcohol syndrome.
