Hamlet in Utero 
 Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space--were it not that I have bad dreams. 
 I could check online, I suppose, but I suspect there is a story here. Is it a coincidence that, within months of the launch of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, in which famous authors (so far Jeanette Winterson, Howard Jacobson, Anne Tyler, and Margaret Atwood) are asked to retell Shakespeare plays in their own words, Ian McEwan (surely the equal of any of them) should come out with his own version of Hamlet, but not part of the series? Was he not asked? Or did he think he would simply do better on his own? Whatever the answer, his novel contains better writing than any of those actually in the series--one might say McEwan's best writing to date, in terms of the brilliance of his handling of words, ideas, and references. In short, an intellectual masterpiece. 
 But as a retelling of the Hamlet story, it strays farther from the canon than even the liberal approach of the other commissions; perhaps that is the point, that he demanded this freedom? Not that this matters; since it is not a Hogarth book, fidelity is no longer a criterion; you can judge it on its own merits. More important to me, though, is whether it tells enough of a story at all--whether Shakespeare's or McEwan's. For the first half or more, I felt that its brilliance as a literary tour-de-force detracted from its value as a novel, in the sense of narrative with rounded characters and a plot. It was not until much later that I changed my mind. 
 For this is Hamlet in utero. Yes, the first line of this 200-page soliloquy is: "So here I am, upside down in a woman." Hamlet's third-trimester interuterine viewpoint may be limited--he has no understanding of colors, for instance--but he more than makes up for it with his other senses; here is is, for example, as an oenophile: 
 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. 
 Hamlet's (he's not actually named) front-row balcony viewpoint on the intercourse between his mother Trudy and his uncle Claude is bizarrely pornographic, and his knowledge of the outside world, gained ostensibly through his mother's addiction to podcasts, rivals that of the baby Stewie Griffin in Family Guy. This is a very funny book--far more so that McEwan's previous satire, 
 Solar 
 --though there were times when I wondered if the author's creation of an all-knowing fetus was simply a device to enable him to pontificate on the state of the world today: 
 Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, capitalism corrupt, destructive and in disgrace, no alternatives in sight. 
 Well, let him pontificate now and then. For the brilliance of McEwan's wordplay, his vast range of reference, and his deftness in conjuring almost subliminal Shakespeare echoes throughout is worth the price of a little preaching. And there are times when he is nothing less than beautiful: 
 There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already. 
 I think it was reading this passage on page 162, four-fifths of the way through, that first convinced me that what I was reading was more than a jeu-d'esprit but an often profound meditation. Up until then, there had been that little matter of the story. For the characters, though sharply drawn, could not be said to be rounded, and how much of Hamlet can you tell with the title character still unborn? But then I realized the freedom McEwan had gained by not writing within the Hogarth requirements. We may know how the play turns out, but there is no need for any of it to be replicated in the novel: there need be no revenge plot, no ghost, Hamlet's father need not even be killed. We can read with suspense, because William Shakespeare has no necessary hold over an independent Ian McEwan. In fact, he does not totally depart from the original story, but by the time things get moving in the last fifty pages or so, he manages to create surprises that make the novel increasingly satisfying, not only for style but also for plot.