Excerpted from NUTSHELL: A Novel by Ian McEwan Copyright 2016 by Ian McEwan.

Excerpted by permission
of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt

may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

NUTSHELL - One
So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who Im in,
what Im in for. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I once drifted in my translucent body bag,
floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion somersaults,
colliding gently against the transparent bounds of my confinement, the confiding membrane that vibrated
with, even as it muffled, the voices of conspirators in a vile enterprise. That was in my careless youth. Now,
fully inverted, not an inch of space to myself, knees crammed against belly, my thoughts as well as my head
are fully engaged. Ive no choice, my ear is pressed all day and night against the bloody walls. I listen, make
mental notes, and Im troubled. Im hearing pillow talk of deadly intent and Im terrified by what awaits me,
by what might draw me in.

Im immersed in abstractions, and only the proliferating relations between them create the illusion of a known
world. When I hear blue, which Ive never seen, I imagine some kind of mental event thats fairly close to
green which Ive never seen. I count myself an innocent, unburdened by allegiances and obligations, a free
spirit, despite my meagre living room. No one to contradict or reprimand me, no name or previous address,
no religion, no debts, no enemies. My appointment diary, if it existed, notes only my forthcoming birthday. I
am, or I was, despite what the geneticists are now saying, a blank slate. But a slippery, porous slate no
schoolroom or cottage roof could find use for, a slate that writes upon itself as it grows by the day and
becomes less blank. I count myself an innocent, but it seems Im party to a plot. My mother, bless her
unceasing, loudly squelching heart, seems to be involved.

Seems, Mother? No, it is. You are. You are involved. Ive known from my beginning. Let me summon it, that
moment of creation that arrived with my first concept. Long ago, 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. Was it me? Too self-loving. Was it now? Overly dramatic. Then something antecedent to both, containing
both, a single word mediated by a mental sigh or swoon of acceptance, of pure being, something like this?
Too precious. So, getting closer, my idea was To be. Or if not that, its grammatical variant, is. This was my
aboriginal notion and heres the crux is. Just that. In the spirit of Es muss sein. The beginning of conscious
life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism
over magic, of is over seems. My mother is involved in a plot, and therefore I am too, even if my role might be
to foil it. Or if I, reluctant fool, come to term too late, then to avenge it.

But I dont whine in the face of good fortune. I knew from the start, when I unwrapped from its cloth of
gold my gift of consciousness, that I could have arrived in a worse place in a far worse time. The generalities
are already clear, against which my domestic troubles are, or should be, negligible. Theres much to celebrate.
Ill inherit a condition of modernity (hygiene, holidays, anesthetics, reading lamps, oranges in winter) and
inhabit a privileged corner of the planet well-fed, plague-free western Europe. Ancient Europa, sclerotic,
relatively kind, tormented by its ghosts, vulnerable to bullies, unsure of herself, destination of choice for
unfortunate millions. My immediate neighborhood will not be palmy Norway my first choice on account of
its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine
and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead Ill
inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed
for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits
restively for his crown. This will be my home, and it will do. I might have emerged in North Korea, where
succession is also uncontested but freedom and food are wanting.
How is it that I, not even young, not even born yesterday, could know so much, or know enough to be wrong
about so much? I have my sources, I listen. My mother, Trudy, when she isnt with her friend Claude, likes the
radio and prefers talk to music. Who, at the Internets inception, would have foreseen the rise and rise of
radio, or the renaissance of that archaic word, wireless? I hear, above the launderette din of stomach and
bowels, the news, wellspring of all bad dreams. Driven by a self-harming compulsion, I listen closely to
analysis and dissent. Repeats on the hour, regular half-hourly summaries dont bore me. I even tolerate the
BBC World Service and its puerile blasts of synthetic trumpets and xylophone to separate the items. In the
middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. Shell wake, become insomniac, reach for
the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning.

And she likes podcast lectures, and self-improving audio books Know Your Wine, in fifteen parts, biographies
of seventeenth-century playwrights, and various world classics. James Joyces Ulysses sends her to sleep, even
as it thrills me. When, in the early days, she inserted her earbuds, I heard clearly, so efficiently did sound
waves travel through jawbone and clavicle, down through her skeletal structure, swiftly through the nour-
ishing amniotic. Even television conveys most of its meagre utility by sound. Also, when my mother and
Claude meet, they occasionally discuss the state of the world, usually in terms of lament, even as they scheme
to make it worse. Lodged where I am, nothing to do but grow my body and mind, I take in everything, even
the trivia of which there is much.

For Claude is a man who prefers to repeat himself. A man of riffs. On shaking hands with a stranger Ive
heard this twice hell say, Claude, as in Debussy. How wrong he is. This is Claude as in property developer
who composes nothing, invents nothing. He enjoys a thought, speaks it aloud, then later has it again, and
why not? says it again. Vibrating the air a second time with this thought is integral to his pleasure. He
knows you know hes repeating himself. What he cant know is that you dont enjoy it the way he does. This,
Ive learned from a Reith lecture, is what is known as a problem of reference.

Heres an example both of Claudes discourse and of how I gather information. He and my mother have
arranged by telephone (I hear both sides) to meet in the evening. Discounting me, as they tend to a candlelit
dinner for two. How do I know about the lighting? Because when the hour comes and they are shown to
their seats I hear my mother complain. The candles are lit at every table but ours.

There follows in sequence Claudes irritated gasp, an imperious snapping of dry fingers, the kind of obse-
quious murmur that emanates, so I would guess, from a waiter bent at the waist, the rasp of a lighter. Its
theirs, a candlelit dinner. All they lack is the food. But they have the weighty menus on their laps I feel the
bottom edge of Trudys across the small of my back. Now I must listen again to Claudes set piece on menu
terms, as if hes the first ever to spot these unimportant absurdities. He lingers on pan-fried. What is pan but
a deceitful benediction on the vulgar and unhealthy fried? Where else might one fry his scallops with chilli and
lime juice? In an egg timer? Before moving on, he repeats some of this with a variation of emphasis. Then, his
second favourite, an American import, steel-cut. Im silently mouthing his exposition even before hes begun
when a slight tilt in my vertical orientation tells me that my mother is leaning forwards to place a restraining
finger on his wrist and say, sweetly, divertingly, Choose the wine, darling. Something splendid.

I like to share a glass with my mother. You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good
burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta. Even
before the wine arrives tonight, a Jean-Max Roger Sancerre at the sound of a drawn cork, I feel it on my
face like the caress of a summer breeze. I know that alcohol will lower my intelligence. It lowers everybodys
intelligence. But oh, a joyous, blushful Pinot Noir, or a gooseberried Sauvignon, sets me turning and tumbling
across my secret sea, reeling off the walls of my castle, the bouncy castle that is my home. Or so it did when I
had more space. Now I take my pleasures sedately, and by the second glass my speculations bloom with that
licence whose name is poetry. My thoughts unspool in well-sprung pentameters, end-stopped and run-on
lines in pleasing variation. But she never takes a third, and it wounds me.