I picked this up at the library, a very safe selection, as I am generally a great admirer of McEwan’s work, but this 2016 novel remained on my tbr list. Still, it was more ‘novel’ than I had expected. The story is regular enough (reportedly drawing on the influence of Shakespeare’s Hamlet). Trudy is pregnant with her husband’s child, living in a London townhouse inherited by John, but he’s not there. The couple are separated. Instead Claude (John’s brother) has moved in, creating a triangle beset by additional tension and familial loyalties. What makes this book different is the author’s decision to make the unnamed baby the narrator and thereby providing an unseeing and unseen witness to the private deceit and decision to murder the baby’s father.
It’s ambitious and I believe few writers could have pulled it off, but of course Ian McEwan, at the height of his powers, is extraordinarily gifted. By making John a poet, the author also gets to quote Auden and Betjeman in the pursuit of what the reader might term, ‘poetic justice’. Perhaps not his best novel, in my view, though the trademark use of elegant language and interesting turns of phrase are present. However, it felt so ‘experimental’ that I wondered whether the author had simply set himself an unusual cerebral challenge. In any event, it’s worth reading simply for that sense of ambition!
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