Macbeth by Jo Nesbø review – Shakespeare reimagined
The Hogarth Shakespeare project invites modern novelists to reimagine some of his most celebrated plays. After such entries as Howard Jacobson’s take on The Merchant of Venice, Shylock Is My Name, and Dunbar, Edward St Aubyn’s King Lear, we now have a Macbeth by the king of Scandi-noir crime, Jo Nesbø. It turns out to be rather an inspired choice: the bloody tragedy of political ambition translates well to a corrupt police department in a lawless town, where the cops are just one more armed gang.
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| Michael Fassbender as Macbeth in Justin Kurzel’s 2015 film. |
The Scottish play is here transplanted to a geographically agnostic place that mixes terms of Scottish and Scandinavian origin (the area is Fife, the sharpshooter named Olafson), along with allegorical touches: the capital city is known simply as the Capitol. But we spend most of our time in a grim northern town where industry has shut down and it nearly always rains. From one clue we deduce that the story is set in 1970. (It turns out to be helpful to avoid the characters having mobile phones.) Nesbø piles on the forbidding atmosphere, writing of “the soot and poison that lay like a constant lid of mist over the town”, and several chapters open with the equivalent of an establishing shot in cinema, as the prose follows a single raindrop or seagull over the blasted town before happening upon major characters who are about to speak.
Macbeth leads a paramilitary Swat unit. He is a man of the people, unnaturally strong, with a thing for daggers: admittedly an unusual detail amid these modern warriors fitted out with assault rifles and sniper scopes. (He is so good at throwing knives, we are told, that he once nearly joined the circus.) Duncan, meanwhile, is the chief commissioner of the police and Malcolm his deputy. The leader of the narcotics unit, perhaps to avoid too many Scottish-sounding prefixes, is here known simply as Duff.
The police are at semi-permanent war with a biker gang known as the Norse Riders, who serve as couriers for the top bad guy. This is Hecate: rather than Shakespeare’s queen of the witches, he is the town’s untouchable drug lord, an old man also known as the “Invisible Hand”. (The reference to the political economy of Adam Smith is deliberate.) He manufactures a drug called “brew”: not the alcohol whose effects Shakespeare’s hungover Porter wryly describes, but a crack-like substance to which half the town is addicted. Three of Hecate’s henchwomen play the role of the witches, promising that Macbeth will get the top job if he does nothing to interfere with the drug business. (In a nice touch, these women are also rumoured to use “toads’ glands, bumble bee wings, juice from rat’s tails” when cooking the drug.)
It’s not long, then, until the murders start, with Macbeth egged on by his paramour, here known simply as “Lady”: a flame-haired femme fatale who runs a casino. Her scheme for him to murder Duncan is the same as Lady Macbeth’s, stabbing him while he sleeps and blaming it on his bodyguards – arguably a terrible plan in the context of 20th-century forensics. But Macbeth gets away with it, and so wades deeper into the sea of blood that must finally engulf him.
There follows much edgy paranoia within the police department and some excellent action sequences involving cars and guns. (A person is shot with “the sound of a thud like hammer on meat”.) Nesbø orchestrates scenes of blackmail and fighting with the slickness of a writer who has sold 36m crime novels. There are odd touches of the supernatural, sometimes with a naturalistic alternative explanation. (The ghost of the murdered Banquo turns up at a dinner, but Macbeth might just be hallucinating because he’s high.) Nesbø finds some clever twists, too, on the source material. It would be invidious to give away what plays the role of Birnam Wood, but the sequence is majestically satisfying.
At times the novel strains credulity: no one notices the possible connection between the manner of Duncan’s murder and Macbeth’s fondness for daggers for quite a while, and when the newly promoted Macbeth gives a press conference explaining how his team have just shot dozens of people, the assembled journalists lap it up uncritically. The book’s style, in Don Bartlett’s translation from the Norwegian, is workmanlike, but from the combination of simple materials a thought can arise that seems authentically, blackly bardic: “For eternal loyalty is inhuman and betrayal is human.”
This is in the end a deliciously oppressive page-turner that, like The Tragedy of Macbeth itself, seems to harbour something ineradicably evil at its core. The main effect, indeed, of all the differences between this book and a standard modern potboiler is to remind you how weirdly nightmarish the original play is: what Shakespeare brewed up is still almost too over-the-top for modern, ultraviolent mass entertainment.
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