Toil and trouble
When best-selling crime writer Jo Nesbo was offered the chance to reimagine one of Shakespeare’s plays, he would only do it for Macbeth, which he sets in an imaginary contemporary Scottish city awash with drugs, crime and corrupt cops.
Crime writer Jo Nesbo talks to Janet Christie about his take on Macbeth for his latest thriller
Afearless hero is given a prediction of greatness by a trio of ‘witches’ and takes it to heart. Consumed by murderous ambition and spurred on by his lady, he is corrupted, then mired in guilt, becomes master of his own downfall. You know how it goes… Macbeth, a play so dark that those of a superstitious bent – and we’re not just talking thespians – believe it cursed and insist on referring to it as ‘The Scottish Play’.
So who better to take on Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy, shake it up and give it a contemporary treatment, than crime writer Jo Nesbo? One of the world’s bestselling proponents of Nordic noir, the Norwegian has a reputation for serving up plotlines so grisly with his Harry Hole detective series that his multitude of international fans have perfected the art of reading at arm’s length. And now it’s time for them to screw their courage to the sticking-place with the Nesbo version of Macbeth as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project. Aiming to reinterpret The Bard for a modern audience, it sees Nesbo retelling his works alongside the likes of Margaret Atwood interpreting The Tempest and Howard Jacobson revisiting The Merchant of Venice.
“When it was suggested to me, my first reaction was thanks, but no thanks,” says Nesbo. “Usually when it’s not my own ideas I say no. Then I realised it was my chance to revisit Macbeth. I said if I can have Macbeth, I will do it.”
Now 58, Nesbo has been a writer, footballer, musician, economist, puppet, pauper, pirate, poet, pawn and a king. Actually only the first four of those job titles, but you get the idea. The man is a versatile polymath, seemingly hard-wired for success. After a promising soccer career at Norway’s premier league team Molde fell foul of injury, he did his national service then went to business school. While there he formed a band Di derre (Them There) and on graduation combined a career as a financial analyst with that of musician. Commissioned to write a book about the band’s life on the road, he turned to crime instead and came up with his first noir novel, The Bat, featuring Oslo Crime Squad detective Harry Hole.
Nesbo has now written 11 thrillers in the series, selling 40 million books in 50 languages and made a killing. Two of the books have been adapted for the big screen: The Snowman, starring Michael Fassbender last year and Headhunters in 2011. There are also his children’s books, a series focused on crazy professor Doktor Proktor that he started writing for his now 18-year-old daughter, and more crime in the The Olav Johansen series, also due to hit the big screen shortly with a Tobey Maguire version of Blood on Snow.
Nesbo’s insistence on revisiting Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy is no surprise, as the play shares the crime writer’s obsessions, in particular those explored in his Harry Hole books. There’s a main character with a moral code in conflict with his overweening ambition, a protagonist who is strong yet weak and could go either way, then there’s the gloomy setting, the grisly murders and paranoia, the general hurlyburly and a whole lot of double toil and trouble.
“I didn’t have a close relationship with Shakespeare,” says Nesbo. “In Norway our Shakespeare is Ibsen and we hear about Shakespeare, but don’t read him. But I did have a relationship with Macbeth because I saw the Roman Polanski movie when I was young and I knew the story.” Nesbo also knew Othello and The
Tempest, the latter with its magical world of monsters and spirits he not altogether surprisingly dismisses as “foolish”. Murder and revenge are much more up his alley.
Rather than try to rewrite Shakespeare, Nesbo decided early on that there would be none of the original prose in the novel. Instead he took the bones of the story, the plot and atmosphere, and wrote his own tale of ambition, bloodbaths and treachery set in an imaginary contemporary Scottish city awash with drugs, crime and corrupt cops.
“Nobody needs a book where the writer is trying his best to be William Shakespeare, so I decided this would be my take on the story,”