The insurmountable obstacle to the appreciation of McEwan's 17th novel isn't its Hamlet-inspired plot but rather the acceptance of its narrator, a very precocious and preternaturally aware foetus. Told from inside the womb of his mother - the drink-loving, bored Trudy - the story follows our foetal hero as he discovers that Mom and her lover, Uncle Claude, are planning a horrible end for his estranged father and Claude's brother John, a poet who still yearns for Trudy.McEwan's excuse for his narrator's hyper-intelligence is Trudy's love of Radio Four and podcasts. This means that the foetus can expound like a world-weary dinner party intellectual on everything from Joyce's Ulysses to the future of mankind and the state of the British tertiary education system - all very interesting and well argued but a little hard to stomach as the thoughts of an eight-month-old foetus.The tension between the voice of the character and that of the author is too far- fetched and McEwan's attempts to provide rational explanations for how his as yet unborn narrator is able to have such knowledge are not entirely convincing.While the prose is an elegant mix between precise and dryly comic, the whole feels a little too conceptually reliant rather than believably realised. That been said, the strength of the book lies in McEwan's handling of the thriller aspects, which are deftly paced and masterfully drawn out, up to the clever twist arising from the foetus's determination to get out and do something about the nefarious plot he's been listening to.While it's a return to the strangeness of early McEwan works such as The Cement Garden, The Child in Time, Black Dogs and The Comfort of Strangers, it unfortunately lacks the careful balance between plot and character that made On Chesil Beach such an eerie and quietly destructive piece of tightly-wound, hard- hitting literature. - Tymon SmithPublished by Jonathan Cape, R395BOOK BITESBob Dylan - the musician's silence on whether or not he will go to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize in Literature prompted Swedish Academy member Per Wästberg to describe Dylan as "impolite and arrogant". It seems the singer's lack of acknowledgement provides further fire to the flames for those who see his win as outrageous.$100 000 - the not insignificant prize money for the Nine Dots Prize which is awarded to a book ... not yet written. The award is given for the best response to a question: "Are digital technologies making politics impossible?" Authors are invited to submit 3000-word responses and plans for the development of their argument into a short book. The question will be reset every two years. The deadline for entries is January 31 2017, with the winner to be announced in May.Love Books in Melville - where you can see Ralph Matheka in conversation with Stephen Grootes at the launch of Mathekga's book 'When Zuma Goes'. Tomorrow at 6.30pm. - Tymon Smith..