They did a bad, bad thing. Well, strictly speaking they haven't done it yet, but plans are afoot for Trudy and her lover, Claude, to really cement their commitment to their relationship by doing a murder. The couple that slays together, stays together, and all that.
There are a few complicating factors, though, as if doing a murder and trying to get away with it were not complicated enough already. The primary motive for the impending murder appears to be that the London townhouse Trudy and Claude currently inhabit actually belongs to Trudy's estranged husband, John. So if John were, hem hem, out of the way in some way, Trudy and Claude would be free to realise the value of this asset (likely to be several million quid). Hence, murder. Oh, a couple of other things: Claude is John's younger brother, and Trudy is deep into the third trimester of being pregnant with John's baby.
The complicating factor in terms of the structure of the book itself should be revealed at this point, and it's this: the first-person narrator of the events described here is Trudy's baby. Yeah, you heard me. Obviously there are a host of questions about this device, and we'll come to those later if that's all right with you.
So anyway, it transpires that John knows about the Trudy and Claude situation, may or may not have a lover of his own (slightly flaky younger poet Elodie) and is quite keen to have his house back. So Trudy and Claude decide to accelerate their plans, and take the opportunity of John and Elodie popping round for a mature adult discussion to slip John an ethylene-glycol-laced fruit smoothie.
You might imagine that there would be some plot machinations at this point that would prevent poor old John (who seems harmless enough if a bit pompous and prone to public poetry declamations at unwelcome moments) from getting offed, but no, the police soon pop round to break the tragic news that he's been discovered face-down on a grassy embankment by the side of the M1. So Trudy and Claude have got what they wanted. But have they got away with it? As some Scottish guy once said: to be thus is nothing; but to be safely thus. Do the police suspect? Were there any incriminating fingerprints on the smoothie container? What has Elodie been telling the police?
When Chief Inspector Clare Allison pops round for an informal chat and a cup of tea, Trudy and Claude's paranoia goes up a gear? Is this just routine? Or is the Chief Inspector doing some sort of Lieutenant Columbo thing and secretly knows far more than she's letting on? Well, the answer, as always, is that it's the Lieutenant Columbo thing, and as Trudy and Claude rush around trying to find passports for a last-minute dash to some Central American country before the police return with the van and the handcuffs our narrator friend (remember them?) decides it's about time they put in an appearance in person.
So on the one hand this is a fairly simple tale about greed, lust and murder, and the near-impossibility of bringing off the latter in such a way as to be able to enjoy the proceeds, which in most cases (of the premeditated variety, anyway) is the whole point of the exercise in the first place. Just about everybody who reviewed it spotted that it's basically a retelling of Hamlet with a few twists. Just as with A Thousand Acres (loosely based on King Lear) I think it's probably better - apart from having to confess to your own literary ignorance - not to be intimately familiar with the source material, as it allows a better appreciation of the book on its own terms. As far as Hamlet goes I know it's set in Denmark, some people die and the central character talks a lot, but I don't think I've ever actually sat through it either on stage or screen.
As it happens, Shakespearian allusions aside, I don't think the central concept here (i.e. the foetus as narrator) really works, partly because it just collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. It doesn't really make sense for the narrator to be musing about how he (or she, it's never made clear as far as I know) has literally no idea what basic outside-world concepts like "blue" and "green" are about, and then later go on to describe in some detail his mother's pink sunglasses, or wax lyrical about the black cherry notes in his mother's choice of Pinot Noir. The absurdity of this central plot device is bothersome, outside of that this is a novel - unusually in McEwan's recent canon and unlike, say, The Children Act - not weighed down by its own seriousness and the thoroughness of the author's background research. It's just a bracing tale of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, a bit of a throwback to McEwan's early work. That's all fine, but the nature of the narrator is a problem that some people will find it difficult to get past. Not so much the elephant in the room, more like the elephant in the womb, amirite? McEwan does acknowledge some of these problems in this Guardian interview, but basically laughs it off by saying: I felt like doing it this way, so deal with it. Which is fair enough, I suppose.
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