One of the most affecting stories in the Mahabharata is that of Abhimanyu, the son of Subhadra and Arjuna. Abhimanyu was still in his mother’s womb when he first heard his uncle Krishna telling Subhadra about the secret of the almost impenetrable military formation known as the Chakravyuha. But then Subhadra fell asleep while listening to Krishna’s story, and so the unborn child was able to hear only part of the secret. This was to prove tragic years later, during the great war of the Mahabharata, by which time Abhimanyu had grown up and become a young warrior. His memory of what he had heard about the Chakravyuha before he was born took him all the way into the formation, but he could not emerge out of it. Abhimanyu died fighting his way out.
The story of Abhimanyu points to something that indigenous communities have long known and science has confirmed: that no child comes into the world as a blank slate; that some determinants of a child’s destiny, including layers of consciousness, are formed well before birth.
A crime thriller Ian McEwan’s new novel Nutshell (Jonathan Cape) also begins with what an unborn child hears and senses. The book is a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as a crime thriller set in modern-day London. The unborn narrator’s mother Trudy (Gertrude), a beautiful 28-year-old woman, is having an affair with her husband’s brother Claude (Claudius). Parts of the world are facing great challenges — war, terrorism, refugees, loss of freedoms. But something seems especially rotten in the 6,000 sq ft Georgian house in a posh London neighbourhood where pregnant Trudy lives after ejecting her poet-publisher husband to a rented flat. The mansion is dilapidated and filthy, but as Claude (a real estate developer with a penchant for fast cars) reminds Trudy often, it is nevertheless worth eight million pounds.
As the narrator overhears his mother and Claude plan how they will commit a crime, he is aware of the terrible moral and ethical implications of their plan. “They occasionally discuss the state of the world, usually in terms of lament, even as they scheme to make it worse.”
As the how, when, and where of the deed are being discussed — poison, antifreeze blended into a smoothie, the pretence of a cordial toast to mark a separation and new relationships — the narrator listens and frets: “What’s said hangs in the air, like a Beijing smog.”
The first thing about Nutshell is that no one writes about science in a novel better than Ian McEwan does. Here is the precocious narrator talking about his first moment of consciousness: “Many weeks ago, my neural groove closed upon itself to become my spine and my many million young neurons, busy as silkworms, spun and wove from their trailing axons the gorgeous golden fabric of my first idea, a notion so simple it partly eludes me now.”
As the narrator listens to the podcast lectures that his mother clamps to her ears obsessively and indiscriminately, he is acutely aware of how the words travel down to him: “So efficiently did sound waves travel through jawbone and clavicle, down through her skeletal structure, swiftly through the nourishing amniotic.”
Nutshell takes its title and epigraph from the burden of consciousness described in Shakespeare’s Hamlet : “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space — were it not that I have bad dreams.” The narrator is also, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, loquacious. He pays attention to everything: podcast lectures, audio books, television, most of all the conversations that take place in the world outside the uterus. Just as he is plugged into his mother’s world, his mother is plugged into the Internet. He picks up scraps of wisdom and information: Reith lectures, maggot farming in Utah, the physics of tennis, the state of the world. Indeed, he worries intensely about the state of the world: are we all doomed, as one speaker says in a podcast, because of the contradictory intelligent and infantile instincts of humankind; is it indeed “dusk in the second Age of Reason”? Or, he wonders, is this anxiety itself the very burden of consciousness: will humankind always be troubled by the way things are?
Much is despicable in the world, as the narrator reminds us. Destiny is an accident of birth in a profoundly unequal planet. “I could have arrived in a worse place in a far worse time.” But even in this privileged part of the earth, things can go terribly wrong. For example, a woman driving a car on a lonely road at night hits a golden retriever, smashes its head with a rock to put it out of its pain, and then comes on radio to talk about it. In other parts of the world, even basic things like freedom and food, which are taken for granted in western Europe, are in short supply.
Being Hamlet, the narrator is painfully self-aware. “In my confinement I’ve become a connoisseur of collective dreams. Who knows what’s true? I can hardly collect the evidence for myself. Every proposition is matched or cancelled by another. Like everyone else, I’ll take what I want, whatever suits me.”
Master of the form One of the great things about the novel is the narrator’s voice — intelligent, articulate, with a razor-sharp wit. Here is his description of Claude’s dullness: “Dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention… Who knows only clothes and cars. And has told us a hundred times that he would never buy or even drive such, or such, or a hybrid or a... or... That he only buys his suits in this, no, that Mayfair street, his shirts in some other, and socks from, he can’t recall... If only... but. No one else ends a sentence on a ‘but’.”
Hamlet , the most fascinating of Shakespeare’s plays, is also perhaps the one that has been most retold. Examples range from Tom Stoppard’s brilliant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to Vishal Bhardwaj’s flawed but affecting film set in Kashmir, Haidar .
Ian McEwan’s slim novel, less than two hundred pages, is surely one of the best-ever retellings of Shakespeare’s play.
Dialogue is everything in Hamlet , and McEwan has never done dialogue better than in Nutshell . The novel ranks with Amsterdam as one of McEwan’s finest works.
Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta is in the IAS, currently based in Bengaluru.
