I promise you, the person isn't born that can harm a hair on your beautiful head. And old Bertha will roll again before anyone can push you out of office. Isn't that good enough for you, Macbeth?
I've not much enjoyed the Hogarth Shakespeare adaptations (my ratings for the seven books in the series, including this one, average out to 2.8 Goodreads stars), but the idea of Jo Nesbø – the undisputed king of Nordic noir – reimagining the Scottish play as a 1970s gritty crime thriller seemed such a natural fit that I happily picked up Macbeth as soon as I could. And the plot is perfectly clever: Macbeth is a young cop in a corrupt town, and as an orphan and reformed drug addict, he has little social clout – but high ideals about civic responsibility. After he is promoted to the plum position of the head of the Organized Crime taskforce, Macbeth's girlfriend Lady – a social climbing casino owner – starts to whisper in his ear that if the upperclass longtimers at the head of the police department were, ahem, removed, Macbeth himself would be made Commissioner and he'd have the power to fight entrenched crime and corruption; to usher in a renaissance that would benefit the entire town. One murder leads to another, as they do, motives become confused and ideals compromised, and as the police and the government and the competing local criminals all blackmail, doublecross, and dispatch one another, it almost seems like anything could happen – until you remember that eventually, Birnam Wood must come to Dunsinane; Macbeth's fate was sealed centuries ago through the ink of Shakespeare's quill. Ultimately, as in my least favourites of the Hogarth series, the creativity of this Macbeth was hobbled by a too-close adaptation of the source material, it dragged with far too many subplots and double-crosses, and worst of all, I simpy didn't like the writing at the sentence level. Mildly spoilerish beyond here.
The action takes place in an unnamed, depressingly rainy town – and I don't know why it's unnamed, but as its upperclass suburb is called Firth, I assume that it's in Scotland – and with local industry all closed down and corruption rampant in the Police Department and City Hall, the locals look for escape from their miserable lives in gambling and drugs. A biker gang imports cheap dope but they find it hard to compete with the local product – a powerful Methamphetamine cooked up by a couple of weird sisters called “the brew” (I loved this interpretation for the witches). And I also loved that when Lady talks Macbeth into committing the foul deeds, he turns back to the brew in order to screw his courage to the sticking place: tweaking on meth makes sense of Macbeth (and later, Lady herself) hallucinating and seeing ghosts and muttering in the night. But that's all I really liked – characters didn't have recognisable motivations, self-centered (but apparently ordinary) people betray and kill and suffer little remorse, women are mostly secondary to the storyline (Lady is given a bizarre but trite backstory that allows her to be dismissed as “nuts” and the only female cop is more important as a love object than a detective), and the story just goes on and on.
As for the writing: It's sometimes clunky in a way that made me wonder if it's a question of translation. I didn't like phrases like “show some political nous so as not to lose control at HQ” or “neighboring counties referred to the tunnel as a rectum with an anal orifice at each end”; something isn't translating and it happens all the time. And I didn't like the frequent improbable speechifying:
Perhaps we know the difference between right and wrong even without using this wonderful big brain of ours. But with it we can assemble some really sophisticated arguments which, individually, sound good and, as a whole, can lead us to exactly where we want to go, regardless of how steeped in insanity this all is.Or:
Capitol is an elegant town, isn't she? It's difficult not to like her. To fall in love with her even – such a smiling blond beauty with sunshine in her eyes. But you and I can never love her, can we? For we've given our hearts to the foul, rotten city up on the west coast. I've disowned her, thought she didn't mean anything to me. Me and my career were more important than the town that has done nothing but darkened our moods, corrupted our hearts and shortened our lives. Absurd, wasted love, I thought. But that's how it is. Too late we realize who we really love.And while I did like the winking self-awareness of a character who hates the capital city and the “expensive national theatre with its pompous plays, incomprehensible dialogue and megalomaniac kings who die in the third act”, I really didn't like the attempts at rephrasing famous monologues:
And what if death came now? It would of course be a meaningless end, but isn't that the case with all ends? We're interrupted in mid-sentence in the narrative about ourselves, and the end hangs in the air, with no meaning, no conclusion, no unraveling final act. A short echo of the last, semi-articulated word and you're forgotten. Forgotten, forgotten, not even the biggest statue can change that. The person you were, the person you really were, disappears faster than concentric rings in water. And what was the point of this short, interrupted guest appearance? Of playing along as best you can, seizing the pleasures and happiness life has to offer while it lasts? Or leaving a mark, changing the direction of things, making the world a slightly better place before you yourself have to leave it? Or perhaps the point is to reproduce, to put more suitable small creatures on the earth in the hope that humans will at some point become the demigods they imagine they are? Or is there simply no meaning? Perhaps we're just detached sentences in an eternal chaotic babble in which everyone talks and no one listens, and our worst premonition finally turns out to be correct: you are alone. All alone.I had only read one other book by Jo Nesbø before this (The Son, which didn't wow me), and I don't know if I'll pick him up again; at least in translation, I don't find this to be good writing. The bigger question is if I'll keep picking up books in the Hogarth Shakespeare series – I remain unconvinced that they're doing something worthwhile.
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
