The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 29.0181  Monday, 23 April 2018

 

From:        Hardy Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         April 22, 2018 at 7:39:37 AM EDT

Subject:    Jo Nesbo Sculpts ‘Macbeth’ Into Shadowy Crime Noir

 

The Norwegian crime writer turns Shakespeare’s tragedy into a fast-paced thriller about murder and corruption in 1970s Glasgow.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/books/review/jo-nesbo-macbeth.html

 

Jo Nesbo Sculpts ‘Macbeth’ Into Shadowy Crime Noir

 

By JAMES SHAPIRO

APRIL 16, 2018

 

MACBETH 

By Jo Nesbo 

Translated by Don Bartlett

446 pp. Hogarth. $27.

 

In 1937, The New Yorker published James Thurber’s “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” about an avid reader of Agatha Christie who picks up a paperback copy of “Macbeth,” mistakenly assuming it’s a detective story. She soon discovers it’s a Shakespeare play but is already hooked and reads it as a whodunit. It takes her a while to identify who killed Duncan, after initially refusing to believe the Macbeths were responsible: “You suspect them the most, of course, but those are the ones that are never guilty — or shouldn’t be, anyway.” Her prime suspect had been Banquo, but “then, of course, he was the second person killed. That was good right in there, that part. The person you suspect of the first murder should always be the second victim.”

 

It’s a very funny story and an insightful one, for Thurber shows how closely Shakespeare’s tragedy follows the contours of detective fiction. Thurber wasn’t the first to draw such connections; over a century earlier, in a brilliant essay about the play — “On the Knocking at the Gate in ‘Macbeth’” — Thomas De Quincey had reflected on how deeply Shakespeare understood the interplay of murder and suspense. If the many allusions to “Macbeth” in the works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James and other crime writers are any indication, Shakespeare’s play may be seen as one of the great progenitors of the genre, making Jo Nesbo, the celebrated Norwegian writer of thrillers, an ideal choice to update the play for Hogarth Shakespeare, a series in which best-selling novelists turn Shakespeare’s works into contemporary fiction.0

 

Nesbo has spoken of finding himself on familiar terrain here, arguing that “Macbeth” is essentially a “thriller about the struggle for power” that takes place “in a gloomy, stormy crime noir-like setting and in a dark, paranoid human mind.” True enough, yet many features of this 400-year-old tragedy don’t easily fit the demands of a modern, realistic thriller. One of the pleasures of reading this book is watching Nesbo meet the formidable challenge of assimilating elements of the play unsuited to realistic crime fiction, especially the supernatural: the witches, prophecies, visions, and the mysterious figure of Hecate.

 

Nesbo’s most consequential decision was when and where to set his story. While he follows Shakespeare in locating it in Scotland, rather than taking us back to the 11th century he places it in the early 1970s. He doesn’t name the city, though there are many hints that it’s Glasgow. This choice signals Nesbo’s ambitions for his novel, giving it a sharp social edge as well as a timely political resonance. The Glasgow of that era was a desperately grim place, not unlike those parts of America now ravaged by the opioid crisis: It was staggered by alcoholism, environmental hazards, high suicide rates, corruption, gang warfare, the loss of industrial jobs and a significant rise in drug abuse. Things were so bad that historians speak of the “Glasgow effect” to account for why Glaswegians died younger and suffered more than those who lived in comparable places.

 

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