Nutshell by Ian McEwan

How do you write about a book without giving anything away?

How do you convince a general audience to get out there, part with money, time and effort without telling them what it’s for?

No plot give aways, no setting of the stage, no premise, nada…

Just a simple, get out there, buy this book and read it.

Well, Vikid shall try…

For a start, for those concerned about the mechanics of reading, this book is not too long. Some two cent odd pages in a reasonable font with reasonable line spacing. If you passed through school, you should be fine. If you haven’t read in years, all the better, this a good one to start on. It’s in the Goldilocks zone.

The plot is simple, primarily taking place in one familiar location. The list of characters fit in one hand.

For those concerned with outcomes, the proverbial, “What do I stand to gain from this?”.

Ian McEwan’s mastery of the English language is second to none. In a world replete with the desecration of our linguistic heritage, where street talk, rappers and k-pop demon hunters rule our culture, where even people of high office speak nonsensical drivel designed to obfuscate rather than elucidate, where TV is built for the lowest common denominator and music is created via algorithm, Nutshell gives you something different.

It is within this milieu that McEwan weaves a narrative with deceptive simplicity, a kaleidoscopic story of fractal depth and possibility. He uses a clever literary device that just seems naff at first glance, an unusual narrator for the story***. A voyeur, a fly on the amniotic wall, so to speak…***

So what do you get out of it?

You stand to gain the world itself, expressive clarity, an ability to understand how so much can be done with so little.

It is with books like Nutshell that we get exposed to the great lie and consequently, the ingenuity within all of us. That perhaps our true future is not found in “compute”, it’s not found in an ever expanding sprawl of data centers, in complexity heaped on top of complexity.

Perhaps, true beauty, that elusive elixir that we all crave and chase, the purpose of our rat race can be found in a simple string of characters that we call literature.

And that’s,

The Vikid Truth

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