"Nutshell," by Ian McEwan

    The first person narrator in this compact novel by Ian McEwan, is, I believe, like no other narrator anyone has encountered. Most reviewers call the narrator a fetus or foetus (depending on their nationality). To me a fetus has always seemed to indicate a baby in the earlier stages of its life in the womb, and McEwan's fetus is getting ready to be born. I would be inclined to say it is already a baby, but the dictionary does tell me that a fetus covers conception to birth.
    Be that as it may, Ian McEwan has written a gem of a novel with a seven-month (at least) womb-bound baby as narrator, often disturbed by his mother's couplings with her brother-in-law and often made fuzzy by her drinking. Suspend belief that this baby knows as much as he does (it cannot all come from BBC Radio 4) and that his vocabulary is so extensive, and his modes of expression so sophisticated, and that he dreams.
    Trudy is married to John Cairncross, and she lives in his decaying mansion in a good part of London, and its value is well up in the millions of pounds. She has exiled John to a tawdry flat as she "needs to be alone"...and, on her own, she is having an affair with Claude, John's brother, whom our narrator rightly considers an evil idiot.
    And here we move to Hamlet. "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams,"says Hamlet. We know what Hamlet's mother and brother-in-law did to Hamlet's father....and there is the plot of "Nutshell."
    Thoroughly recommended...read it in a few enjoyable sittings.