Next up in our cast for Ian McEwan's revisiting of Hamlet is Claude, the hero’s uncle. He conspires to kill his brother, John, with the help of his lover (and sister-in-law), Trudy. She is pregnant with our hero-narrator, whose hatred of Claude has some roots in the man's musical ignorance. The patronym brings about the first mention of a European composer. Whenever he introduces himself, the plotting uncle says “Claude, as in Debussy,” so as to help with the pronunciation of his name. This does not fail to disgust our narrator. (Chapter One, p. 5). For the man seems to revel in his ignorance. Claude conjures up the French composer's name as a mere icebreaker, without any interest for the composer’s works. Our fetus-narrator sets us right immediately: “This is Claude as in property developer who composes nothing, invents nothing.” At the beginning of Chapter Three, the narrator tries to understand who his uncle really is. The description addresses the musical featu
Bilingual blog on music and literature. We review the presence of music in fiction.