The Worst Version of Hamlet

Nutshell by Ian McEwan

Pages: 208 Genre: literary fiction, retelling

Rating: 1 Star

Kindle Highlights

Trudy and John's marriage is over (at least, as far as she's concerned). She's kicked him out of the house and taken up with Claude, his brother. But this isn't enough. Trudy and Claude want John out of the picture entirely. They want him dead, and with no one around to catch them, they devise the perfect plan. Except, they're not entirely alone. Trudy is pregnant, and her 8-and-a-half month old fetus is hearing everything.

As far as Hamlet retelling premises go, this one was a weird one. But for all my hopes of new perspectives and interesting twists on the classic play, this book delivered on exactly nothing. After I finished the book, I truly had to sit with myself before giving it a rating. There were some things I liked, but that's because I like the original play; there was nothing about this book specifically that drew me in. Instead of using the fetus' perspective to elevate the story and give a new look at the story of Hamlet, all this book does is rob the beloved character of everything that makes him worth caring about and leaves us with a funnel for the author's bewildering rants and snobby attitude.

In fact, this book proved that the author has a gross misunderstanding of Hamlet, the character. Real Hamlet talks a lot and rambles about all kinds of things, but its not random babbling. This author clearly had some things he wanted to rant about and no avenue to do so, so he picked poor Hamlet to be his conduit. But I get it — without these pointless rants, you'd be left with maybe only 50 pages of actual plot, where Fetus Hamlet doesn't even know what's going on, and that's not really a book you can make money off of, is it?

By making him not a person, Fetus Hamlet loses all the personality that Real Hamlet has. He is nothing, because what is there to be? It's hard to fault a literal fetus for having the personality of a wet rag, but it still makes for a bad story. Even Real Hamlet's most identifiable trait — his indecisiveness — gets stolen from him, because what in a fetus possibly going to do?

This book has boiled Hamlet down its bare essentials, stripping it of every character, plot line, and engaging question that comes with it, leaving us with just the murder plot that happens before the story actually starts. Perhaps there's a reason that Shakespeare left this part out of the official canon.

I also had plenty of issues with this book outside of being a Hamlet fan. The way Trudy was written made me deeply uncomfortable. There was too much focus on how beautiful she was in a way that was odd considering the story is written from the perspective of her son (hello, Oedipus complex). I also think it was clear that the men blame her more for her (admittedly not great) sexual habits more than her murder plans. It's hard to really put this into words, because I do think that her not-really-incestuous-but-not-NOT-incestuous relationship (as it's portrayed in the original play) with her brother-in-law is inappropriate. But this book wanted to call her a slut SO badly.

And I'm sorry, but hearing about Claude's penis getting close to the fetus over and over again was just gross. Yes, you got me with the shock factor, but I think he talked about it every chapter. I did some Googling because I'm certainly no pregnancy expert, and it says there's no issues with having sex that late in your pregnancy, so I'll give the book that one. But the description of Claude's penis getting that close to the fetus was just so off-putting that it felt like something you shouldn't do during pregnancy. Again: it felt like this was the author's way of shaming a woman for having sex, not for genuinely critiquing the actions of a morally-grey character.

Honestly, everything about the pregnancy was written strangely. Trudy certainly didn't act pregnant. Granted, there's no one way for pregnant women to act, but if it wasn't for Fetus Hamlet repeatedly referencing being inside her, you'd genuinely have no idea. She drinks a lot, much to the fetus' enjoyment. He openly enjoys being drunk and is the youngest sommelier ever (highlighting very distinct differences between various wines in way that would impress even most adults). There's also the fact that her fetus was an obnoxious old man with a superiority complex, but I don't think that one is Trudy's fault.

There was also a weird multi-page transphobic rant about halfway through. I'm not sure why. It had no relevance to the plot, other than to compare delusional Trudy to, in the author's mind, delusional trans people: just as she is a murderer who falsely identifies as innocent, trans people are falsely identifying as the wrong gender. I'm not (as the author tries to claim) tragically offended by this — sure, it's wildly transphobic, but more than that it's just bad writing. Especially for book based on the Shakespeare canon. There was also an undertone of "whiny snowflakes can't handle the truth" and "facts don't care about your feelings." I get it, the old man is yelling at a cloud. But complaining about snowflakes and prioritizing feelings in a book based on Hamlet? The man who is infamously all feelings? I'm sorry, but this author has clearly never read Hamlet. Or any other Shakespeare plays, if I had to hazard a guess.

Overall, this book was just 200 pages full of nothing. The world's most pretentious fetus describes an already well-known murder plot in between far too many pages of boomer complaints about the world while masquerading as a Hamlet story. I'm a fan of the original play, and there's some part of me who loves every iteration of these characters and this story. But everything in this book is so unrecognizable that I couldn't even bring myself to pretend to enjoy it.

Congratulations, McEwan. You've written the first retelling of Hamlet that even I couldn't find it in myself to like.