She Treads Softly: Macbeth

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Macbeth

Macbeth by Jo Nesbø
Crown Archetype: 4/10/18
eBook review copy; 464 pages
ISBN-13: 9780553419054
Hogarth Shakespeare Series

Macbeth by Jo Nesbø is a highly recommended retelling of Shakespeare's Macbeth for the Hogarth Shakespeare Series.

Nesbø sets his updated version in a hopeless, gloomy industrial town during the drug wars of the 1970s. He keeps many of the original names from the play, so a comparison is easy to make. Duncan is the new chief of police, idealistic and determined to clean up the town by taking on the city's drug lord Hecate. Inspector Macbeth is the head of the SWAT team who is regarded as a natural leader, but he also has problems with addiction and craves power. Add in the other characters, three sisters/witches, and Macbeth's scheming wife, Lady, and you have the stage set for corruption, guilt, ambition, violence, greed, and murder on all sides.

Assuming readers will know the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth and have at least a little familiarity with the characters, it quickly becomes clear that Macbeth translates well to a crime novel and Nesbø is the perfect writer to tackle this play for the Hogarth series. It is more violent than the play, but that is to be expected with a Nesbø novel. He is an excellent writer and I felt he did a great tackling the rewriting while keeping some of the iconic scenes. Along with the adapting the plot of the original play to a novel, Nesbø adds the descriptive passages that his other novels are well known for, setting the scenes up in his own unique way. The novel does go on a bit longer than necessarily warranted and the opening is a bit slow, but as a whole this is a successful addition to the Hogarth Shakespeare Series.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Crown Archetype.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.