Macbeth

Ruthless Ambition

The Hogarth Shakespeare project invited modern novelists to reimagine some of his best-known plays. Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth is the latest, after writers like Howard Jacobson, Edward St Aubyn, Margeret Atwood Anne Tyler and Jeanette Winterson have taken a stab at Shakespeare.

Nesbo has turned Macbeth into a noir thriller, set in a lawless town in seventies' Scotland. Most cops are corrupt and on the payroll of the town’s rival drug lords, Hecate and Sweno. In a grim, damp, sooty town where rampant unemployment has driven people to drugs, Macbeth steps in with the aim to get crime off the streets.

A man with an ugly past spent in an orphanage, when he appears in the book, he is head of the armed SWAT unit, much admired by his men. Duff is his buddy from the orphanage days, and Banquo his mentor and friend in the force. Duncan is the chief commissioner of the police and Malcolm his deputy, Duff is the ambitious leader of the narcotics unit. Three of Hecate’s drug-brewing crew stand in for the witches, and Lady is the beautiful, read-haired, power-hungry owner of the town’s classy casino, Inverness.

The parallels are neatly built up and some lines from Macbeth deftly inserted, even though so much murder and bloodshed just to be the chief commissioner of a small town, does seem excessive. It also seems implausible that Macbeth could plot and kill so many with impunity and find others to blame.

Still, Nesbo layers on the darkness, guilt, blackmail, paranoia, remorse, revenge, and writes some vivid action sequences, that will no doubt look great on screen, should the novel be filmed—which it should be. Overlook the anachronisms, and this is a terrific page-turner, as nightmarish as the Shakespeare play.

Macbeth

By Jo Nesbo

Publisher: Hogarth

Pages: 464

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