King Lear retold
Tale of wealthy egomaniac has a Canadian connection
Timed to coincide with Shakespeare’s recently passed 400th deathday, the Hogarth Press’ Shakespeare Series set out to demonstrate the Bard’s chameleonic, trans-epochal relevance by asking eight bestselling novelists to “reimagine” his works. Of all the matchups — whose published authors include Jeanette Winterson (for “The Winter’s Tale”), Howard Jacobson (for “The Merchant of Venice”), Margaret Atwood (for “The Tempest”) and Anne Tyler (for “The Taming of the Shrew”) — assigning Edward St. Aubyn to “King Lear” always struck me as the most inspired.
St. Aubyn is best known for his semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, which mercilessly skewered the English upper class of which he was both a member and victim: his father’s repeated molestations of him as a child, condoned by his mother, led to a heroin addiction. St. Aubyn, in other words, knows what it is to be in a family, like Lear’s, that values status and money over love and loyalty.
His Lear is Henry Dunbar, a taxevading Canadian billionaire media-mogul mash-up of Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black (Dunbar’s starter-paper was the Winnipeg Advertiser, Black’s the Eastern Townships Advertiser) and Donald Trump (he’s prone to meltdowns and privately owns a 747). Though most of the novel ranges between New York, Manchester, London and the Lake District of England, where Dunbar/Lear’s madness comes into full bloom via a car park, Canada gets frequent call-outs as a bastion of pleasant mundanity.
We begin with Dunbar plotting his escape from the sanatorium (he refers to this as a “jailbreak” — presumably another unsubtle reference to Lord Black of Crossharbour) to which he was committed after his traitorous personal physician, Dr. Bob (Edmund the Bastard), slipped him a “non-specific disinhibitor” that left him ranting on Hampstead Heath.
Having arranged for a soft retirement as “non-executive chairman” that would allow him to continue reaping his empire’s riches, Dunbar has unwittingly played into the hands of his rapacious daughters, Megan and Abby (Goneril and Regan) who are cynically strategizing their own takeover of the Dunbar Trust.
Though Dr. Bob despises the Dunbar girls (he privately describes Megan, who in one scene bites his nipple so hard he has to sew it back on in the washroom, as “a (bleeping) psychopath, whose displays of affection should be confined to a hospital that was equipped to deal with the consequences”), he accepts his role as drug supplier and object of their sadistic kink for a future board position, mega-salary and stock options.
The fun St. Aubyn’s having here is infectious. The only time we feel the pull of “serious” writing is during the scenes of Dunbar’s madness, which are ably handled. Full advantage is taken of Shakespeare’s nuance-challenged minor characters, particularly Dunbar’s fool, here a depressive ex-comedian and raging alcoholic named Peter who supplies some of the funniest lines
Dunbar’s periodically madcap pacing calls to mind 1970s episodic TV. As the newly fugitive, Dunbar bounces across the countryside on a quad driven by Peter, the latter morphs into “a car bore, shouting technical information with boyish enthusiasm over the roar of the engine.” But the shark jumping is left to Florence (Cordelia), who takes to the skies to find her ailing father in the company helicopter. Being the only one to put her father’s well-being over the company share price doesn’t save poor Florence from St. Aubyn’s sword, however. As “a passionate advocate of workers’ rights, environmental concerns and high standards of journalistic integrity” her clichéd, bleeding-heart liberalism is matched only by her vanilla personality.
The risk with the Hogarth series was that it would come off like a high school English assignment for literary A-listers. Happily, that has not been the case so far, midway through the project. Recognizing, perhaps, the futility of taking on Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies within their own genre, most of the writers have wisely taken a comedic approach, but none rivals Dunbar for laugh-outloud moments and vicious capitalist critique. This tale of a wealthy, arrogant, insecure egomaniac who surrounds himself with mutiny-ready incompetents confirms the series’ inarguable premise: that Shakespeare is a writer for all ages, but it also confirms that St. Aubyn is one of the sharpest of our own.
Emily Donaldson is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries. Special to the Star