The reader will accept a certain amount of illogicality in fiction but when characters behave irrationally, the delicate architecture of a novel can begin to crumble. Perhaps it's the sex, which is frequent and vigorous, but that presents problems too, for although I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert on women's sexual appetites, I'm pretty sure that they're not doing it five times a day when their waters are about to break. Also it's not entirely clear why she's leaving her kindly husband for his dim-witted and cliche-spouting brother. Trudy and John are married, after all, and she's carrying his child it seems a little excessive to murder the poor man when she could simply divorce him, take him to the cleaners and not risk a life behind bars. The lovers' criminal motives are perhaps the least convincing part of Nutshell. Nutshell puts these disappointments to rest, however, for it is certainly his most intriguing book since that novella, recalling the darker short stories of his early career, the illicit family relationships that make up The Cement Garden, and the complex and deceitful relationships between men and women that lie at the heart of The Comfort of Strangers. The Children Act was a minor return to form but his last really substantial work was On Chesil Beach, almost 10 years ago. Solar came from the Howard Jacobson School of Comic Novels in that it never raised so much as a smirk, while Sweet Tooth seemed to betray, with a final, unforgivable twist, the unspoken agreement forged between writer and reader, an agreement referenced in that very book. He listens, constrained and unable to act, as his mother and uncle plot the death of his father, recounting the events in a tone of such erudition and profound wisdom that one wonders what must happen between the birth canal and the midwife’s hands to diminish a person’s IQ so dramatically.Īs a long-term admirer of McEwan, I must admit to being disappointed by much of his recent work. That book came to mind when I was reading Ian McEwan’s new novel, which has a similarly unconventional narrator: a foetus only days from birth who finds himself the unlikely eavesdropper on a murder plot.

Now in principle I have no objection to novels narrated by supermarket trolleys but the success or failure of the book depended on whether the author had the creative imagination to convince me that this what was a supermarket trolley would sound like had it been given a larynx and vocal chords instead of a basket and four wheels.

Twenty years ago, I read a novel narrated by a supermarket trolley.

Ian mcewan on chesil beach review