Dunbar

“I must tell my story,” wailed Dunbar. “Oh, God, let me not go mad.”

Dunbar is the sixth book in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, and having read them all, I once again say, “Meh”. The idea of updating and reinterpreting Shakespeare's plays seems so doable – the themes that Shakespeare explored are universal ones, just transplant them into today's world – but none of these books really capture the humanity behind the drama of his most famous characters; maybe it can't be done. Once again for my experience with this series, this read was just okay.

It makes sense to reshape an historic king as modern billionaire businessman, and in Dunbar, the title character is a ruthless self-made media mogul, who when he turned eighty, decided to hand over the reins of his company to his two eldest daughters and semi-retire. At the same time, Dunbar cut his youngest daughter out of the company – the too good to be true Florence – because of her basic disinterest in turning billions into more billions (while enjoying the comfort that the millions of dollars her undisinheritable portion of the family trust generated for her). As the book opens, Dunbar is being held against his will in a remote British sanitarium, having been institutionalised through the machinations of his elder girls; the interchangeable and cartoonishly evil Abigail and Megan. Having suffered a fall that scrambled his brains, exacerbated by the drugs given him by his daughters' co-conspirator “Dr. Bob”, Dunbar isn't in full control of his faculties, but he does know that he doesn't belong in lock down. In this beginning chapter, Dunbar is railing against his situation in conversation with fellow patient Peter – a comedic actor known for his impressions and one-liners, an alcoholic being held in order to dry out as a condition for returning to prime-time television – and the dialogue between the muddle-minded old man and his “Fool” was good fun; my initial impression was that St. Aubyn had perfectly captured the feeling of a play on the page. 

These Dunbar girls were arrogant, imperious and tough, but toughness was not strength, imperiousness was not authority and their arrogance was an unearned pride born of an unearned income.

But then we meet Abby and Megan – literally in bed with Dr. Bob, conducting a sadistic threesome that sees the physician having a nipple chewed off – and their greed and evil knows no bounds; from setting a man on fire to hiring assassins with poison blowdarts, nothing will stand between the sisters and their sell-off of the family company at the first opportunity. Now, in the original King Lear, I can find it hard to keep straight all the characters and the behind-the-scenes machinations, but at least the plot involves identifiable double-crosses and soldiers and action. By updating the story to the modern business world, we get lost in business-speak; the debt leveraging and Board votes that had me not caring whether the Dunbar Trust was taken over by Eagle Rock or Omnicon; a secret phone call on a burner cell isn't quite as dramatic as a lie that leads to a man having his eyes gouged out. But my bigger complaint is that, after that first good bit of repartee between Dunbar and Peter, the novel form allows St. Aubyn to explore characters' interior lives, and pages can go on and on without any dialogue as this or that person mulls over how a demanding or absent mother made them who they are; the book very quickly loses the spirit of a play. (And one added complaint from this Canadian: Why have Dunbar be a Canadian? So he could be a fit old man, having spent his summers swimming and his winters skiing? Because St. Aubyn decided he should be not an American, and not a Brit, but somewhere in between? Besides nothing in his character actually marking Dunbar as identifiably Canadian, I will note that there's little chance one of us would use the terms “cavs” or “toffs” to derogate others.)

Why go on? Why drag his suffering body into the next valley? Why endure the anguish of being alive? Because endurance was what he did, thought Dunbar. He hauled himself up and straightened his body one more time and brought back both his fists against his chest, inviting that child-devouring sky-god to do his worst, to rain down information from his satellites, to stream his audiovisual hell of white noise and burning bodies into Dunbar's fragile brain, to try to split its hemispheres, if he could, to try to strangle him with a word-noose, if he dared.

“Come on,” whispered Dunbar hoarsely. “Come on, you bastard.”

And yet, there were good bits that came straight from King Lear: the dialogue with the Fool; Dunbar lost on the heath and ranting to the skies; the touching moment when he realises that he had cut off the only daughter who ever cared for him. And it should be stressed that these were all action scenes: it was the interminable backstories that I found tedious; only in the action was Shakespearean-like humanity revealed. As a novel, I don't think this succeeds at all; three stars feels generous.

Later edit:

The reason why I thought to pick up this book right now is that we were planning to see an adaptation of King Lear, and I wanted to refamiliarise myself with the play. After I read Dunbar, I went to Wikipedia and read what the scholarship has been around the play over the years, and I was intrigued to read that there are many who have focussed on the Freudian psychological aspects: that when King Lear asks his daughters to proclaim their love for him at the beginning, he is actually asking them to stand in for his absent mother; that this is the psychological subtext that we're engaging with as these mother substitutes eventually banish the helpless old man from heart and home. 

And I found this interesting because the production we were planning to see, Lear, features the formidable Shakespearean actress Seanna McKenna in the title role; playing it as a woman, and hence the title modification. Would it still be as engaging without the Freudian father-daughter-mother dynamic? I happened to catch Colin Mochrie - who plays the Fool in this production - on a talk show last week, and he said that putting a woman in the lead was transformative: That it's one thing to have a man curse his daughter's womb, but when that same curse comes from her own mother, it's downright chilling. I was unconvinced.

And then yesterday we went into Toronto to see the play and it was mesmerising. We saw King Lear at the Stratford Festival a couple of years ago, and I thought at the time that Colm Fiore had done a stunning job in the lead. But Seanna McKenna was pure genius - her command in the first scenes, her descent into madness and frailty: this was a powerful God-anointed queen and her downfall was as affecting as any that ever befell a man (it certainly helps that the actresses who play her elder daughters, Deborah Hay and Diana Donnelly, are wonderful as well: there is nothing cartoonish to their evil). The parallel between Lear and her daughters in the foreground and Gloucester and his sons in the subplot seemed natural in their same-sex exposition of efforts to usurp a parent's power and authority, and that's satisfyingly Freudian, too. This production is a masterwork and I am delighted that our whole little family was able to go see it together.

And a final note: When I saw that this year's Stratford Festival was going to engage in some gender-bent casting, I was kind of ambivalent. I understand that in Shakespeare's day the women roles were played by boys, and with so many of his plots involving boys playing girls pretending to pass as boys - not to mention the dearth of good and meaty roles for women to play - there's certainly artistic truth to putting a woman into a traditionally male role. But a few years ago we saw a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and there were women playing male characters as women (to put a lesbian spin to the lovers subplot) and the roles of Titania and Oberon were both played by large men (who rotated in the two roles) and the intentional drag queen vibe was distracting: I'm all for diversity and inclusion, but these seemed political choices instead of artistic ones. And when I saw that the wonderful Seanna McKenna would be at Stratford this year - playing the title role in Julius Caesar - that felt like another political choice. Yes, she knocked it out of the park playing Lear as a queen, but how will she do as a woman playing a man? After yesterday, I think she'll be amazing, and I can't wait to see it.

*****

Books in the Hogarth Shakespeare series:

Shylock is My Name

Vinegar Girl

The Gap of Time

Hag-Seed

New Boy

Dunbar

Macbeth

And Related:

Nutshell