2025 Reading Challenge 37 Nutshell
I wanted something very different to Black Easter, so I swapped around a few books to settle on Ian McEwan. I last read his book On Chesil Beach, and I could recognise his style, though this is a completely different feel. I was intrigued to see how he constructed a murder mystery from the perspective of an unborn fetus.
The morality tale is told with humour and passion by an unborn fetus. There are just a few months until it is born, but it sure does have some robust opinions of its mother, father, and adulterous uncle. Some of this is affected by a wine-fuelled placenta, ‘Even before the wine arrives - tonight, a Jean-Max Roger Sancerre - at the sound of a drawn cork, I feel it on my face like the caress of a summer breeze. I know it will be a good evening.’
It seems from the start all is not well; the father, a poet, is estranged from the mother, and we quickly see that the father’s brother, Claude, an accountant, is planning to run off with both the mother and fleece the father out of his savings, and perhaps darker outcomes are on the horizon.
Much of the remaining story sees this situation escalate as the fetus ponders life and how it will operate within it: ‘We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage.’
The prose and writing style are a real joy. I kept stopping to scribble down so many quotable lines and just enjoyed how precise and beautiful some of this writing is; every word has purpose. It is a short two-hundred-odd-page novel, but even then, some moments dragged, the words coming out of the fetus seemingly at odds with the situation and its nature and distracting from the outside drama, but you just have to suspend those thoughts to get on with this tragic-comic story.
A unique story, told so well, and I haven’t even mentioned the Hamlet reimagining!
I gave this novel 7.7 out of 10.
TTRPG Thoughts:
I was thinking through a possible Drama System scene between all four protagonists. It could be a lot of fun to see scenes play out between mother, father and uncle and then have them reflected on by the fetus.
There is a good idea here for an NPC that PCs have to engage with that only hears what others say and interprets events in its own way. A blind man witnesses a murder. A magical statue hears all but sees nothing. Elements that could generate tension and mystery.