Ian McEwan’s latest novel is narrated by a disconcertingly precocious unborn child who has caught on to his mother and uncle’s diabolical scheme to murder his father. Nutshell is loosely based on Hamlet and is loaded with musings on fine wine (decanted, of course, “through a healthy placenta”), poetry, politics and the general state of the world.



“He’s a sort of left-of-centre foetus,” McEwan told a Guardian Live event on Monday. “I don’t know where he’d stand on Corbyn [and] Owen Smith, but he has quite a strong sense of social justice. He’s easily indignant; not all his views are mine.”

But many certainly do seem to be. The Booker winner found himself at the centre of a Twitter storm earlier this year, when he was criticised by campaigners for comments made in a speech to the Royal Institute that appeared to question transgender people’s right to choose their gender. In Nutshell, the foetus, too, touches on gender identity.

“His hand brushes past this shrimp and he realises it’s part of himself, and his first reaction is great disappointment that it’s either or, pink or blue, because he thinks the human form, the human mind, is so infinite and various and extraordinary – how disappointing that there are only two sexes. When he learns that there are loads, his first reaction is this is definitely a cause for celebration,” McEwan explained.

The author went on to describe an instance in his own childhood when he told his apparently unsympathetic mother he’d “really love to be a girl”, saying: “I don’t think I wanted to change sex so much. I just thought in the playground the boys just wanted to hit each other and play football, and the girls stood around in groups talking, and I could be with them.”

He’s clearly positive about the growing appreciation of the complexity and diversity of identity, but he and the foetus appear less so about the current state of universities and the “twist that the intellectual life has taken, with no-platforming and safe spaces and trigger warnings”.

Of his aggrieved narrator, he explained: “He thinks that people should be a little more robust and expect to go to university and hear opinions that are not their own. And I can’t imagine … no, I can imagine people disagreeing with that because I’ve already experienced it, but it seems unexceptional to me.”

Speaking more overtly for himself, he elaborated: “You can’t make identity the entirety and the outer limit of your politics, because you’ve got to think of other people on the planet. And what alarms me about politics on American campuses especially, but it’s spreading here, is that people are not addressing climate change or income distribution or poverty … they’re all caught up in tiny worlds of the self – even though, of course, the self is extremely important and that tiny world is crucial, especially when you’re young. So it’s an interesting mix, for me at least.”