In a book review published by The Guardian, Kate Clanchy wrote: "Trapped in the womb rather than his dreams, this Hamlet suffers his story in reverse: he wonders if he should be born rather than if he should die; he starts with his father’s life and goes on to his ghost; he begins in silence but ends in chaos.

"[2] The climax of the book takes place when the narrator's frustration and feeling of helplessness has reached its limit, so they decide to initiate their own birth to prevent Trudy and Claude from escaping: "I’ve come to a decision.

[8][9] In The Guardian, Kate Clanchy began by admitting: "This may not sound like an entirely promising read: a talking foetus could be an unconvincing or at least tiresomely limited narrator, and updatings of Shakespeare often strain at their own seams.

From the start, though, McEwan manages to establish both the groggy, gripping parameters of the uterus—'My limbs are folded hard across my chest, my head is wedged into my only exit.

Like TS Eliot's "Marina", also a riff on Shakespeare, it is a consciously late, deliberately elegiac, masterpiece, a calling together of everything McEwan has learned and knows about his art.

"[2] Also writing for The Guardian, Tim Adams noted: "There have been plenty of novels inspired by Hamlet—Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, even David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

[10] The Financial Times's Christopher Tayler judged that "The central gimmick, however, is that the novel is narrated from inside the Gertrude-figure's womb by her nearly due and highly loquacious son.

Global warming, the erosion of Enlightenment values, the rise of competing nationalisms: the narrator has heard about all these, and more, thanks to Trudy's love of the World Service.

... As you'd expect, these musings are fitted into McEwan's now-standard dramatic opposition between muddled artiness and cold rationality, and injected with a dose of irony.

Whilst judging McEwan to be "a master of suspense to just about keep a reader wondering how he's going to resolve the new book's murder plot without doing too much violence to his source material", Tayler concluded that "... the high-wire act doesn’t really come off.

McEwan's usual strengths—imaginative precision, narrative placement and control of story dynamics—can make even slim works like On Chesil Beach (2007) oddly resonant.