A fresh twist to Macbeth
By eliminating rivals and superiors, Macbeth hopes to slay his way into the mayor’s office of the industrial city in which he lives, and then – well, to borrow from another Shakespeare play, perhaps there will be a tide in his affairs, taken at the flood.
To help the Scottish play’s heaping doses of mayhem go down, the author makes some crafty choices.
Many of the main characters, Macbeth included, ply a trade in which killing with impunity is relatively easy: police work.
To provide plausible modern substitutes for ghosts, Nesbo hooks many of his characters on a drug called (rather heavyhandedly) “power”, which can induce frightful hallucinations.
To make the drug kingpins au courant, the author endows them with a libertarian strain. “My religion is capitalism,” one of them explains, “and the free market my creed.”
And Nesbo adds another layer of addictive behaviour by making casino gambling his imagined country’s national pastime.
I don’t know whether Nesbo has read Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. But he astutely points out the Macbeths are the Bard’s most convincing portrait of a devoted couple, and Nesbo takes care to explain why they delight in each other.
In a drug lord’s words, Lady, as she is simply called, is Macbeth’s “beloved dominatrix”.
In turn, she views his submissiveness as an asset, exulting that he loves “that part of her which frightened other men. Her strength. Willpower. An intelligence that was superior to theirs and (that) she couldn’t be bothered to hide under a bushel. It took a man to love that in a woman.”
Nesbo tinkers with some elements of the play, as when he changes Caithness’s gender from male to female.
He had every right to do that sort of thing, even to skip certain episodes entirely – his fulfilment of the Birnam Wood prophecy is so over-the-top that he might just as well have left it alone.
Nesbo manages the balancing act of being true to the original play without slighting his own interests as a writer: bleak settings, loyalty (or the lack thereof) among crooks, clever escapes from tight spots, the affinities between policemen and the criminals they chase.
Nesbo’s Macbeth is the latest entry in a project in which topflight novelists are asked to reinterpret Shakespeare.
Already published are Jeanette Winterson’s The Winter’s Tale (retitled The Gap of Time), Howard Jacobson’s The Merchant of Venice (Shylock Is My Name), Anne Tyler’s The Taming of the Shrew (Vinegar Girl), Margaret Atwood’s The Tempest (Hag-seed), Tracy Chevalier’s Othello (New Boy) and Edward St Aubyn’s King Lear (Dunbar).
Nesbo has repaid what may have been a wild hunch on the part of his publisher.
Near the end of the novel, Macbeth raises his hand to give a certain door a momentous knock. He stares at that hand, expecting it to betray “the seven-year tremble. He couldn’t see one. They said it was worse when there wasn’t one, then it was definitely time to get out”.
That missing constabulary tremor is a nice touch, an embellishment of Shakespeare that is all the more striking when you recall that Macbeth is indeed about to “get out”, though not the way he intended. – The Washington Post