The main takeaway is how remarkably contemporary the most traditional of Shakespeare’s great tragedies remains, whether it’s...
The reigning king of Scandinavian noir (The Thirst, 2017, etc.) updates the Scottish play.
Most of the cast members retain their own names, or something very like them. The setting—an indeterminate town during the drug wars of the 1970s—is, like the settings of earlier entries in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, both the same and different. Nesbø’s Inspector Macbeth is the respected leader of the SWAT team whose efficiency and honesty mark him as a natural leader when he takes charge of the otherwise spectacularly botched stakeout of a drug transfer to the heavily armed members of Norse Riders. Swiftly leapfrogging his old friend Inspector Duff to become head of Organized Crime, he’s pressed by his wife, Lady, to get ahead even further and faster by killing Chief Police Commissioner Duncan while he sleeps in the Inverness Casino, which Lady owns. As in Shakespeare, Duncan’s murder unleashes the powers of hell, which here take the form of massive and spreading corruption—everyone on every conceivable side of the law seems to be double-crossing someone else—more fully fleshed-out accounts of Lady’s background, Duff’s escape, Macbeth’s tangled alliances, and a body count even higher than the Bard’s. Reimagining Shakespeare’s royal tragedy as just another chapter in the essentially unending struggle of working towns against the familiar tokens of criminal blight, though it produces a less offbeat update than the film Scotland, PA, is eminently in the tradition of the gangster remake Joe Macbeth, and Nesbø’s antihero has a chance to get off some trenchant one-liners about himself, his legion of enemies, and his town, which “likes dead criminals better than duplicitous policemen.” On the whole, though, this brutal account is no tragedy.
The main takeaway is how remarkably contemporary the most traditional of Shakespeare’s great tragedies remains, whether it’s updated or not.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-41905-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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SEEN & HEARD
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