Macbeth

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Jo Nesbo's Macbeth is the third of the Hogarth Shakespeare books I've read (the other two were Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood, based on The Tempest, and Vinegar Girl, by Anne Tyler, based on The Taming of the Shrew. NONE of them have been good. Maybe it's because, let's be honest, not all of Shakespeare's plots stand up three hundred years later. What makes Shakespeare's plays great is the writing. The dialogue, the soliloquys, and most especially the insults are still classic. But almost all the comedies are the same story line, set in a different Italian city, with different names. So when you strip away the details, the plots aren't always great. Or, maybe, it's because it's hard to do a good re-write, as many of the recent reboots of '90s and '00s TV shows and movies have proved.

Nesbo's Macbeth is a SWAT team leader set in drug- and crime-riddled 1970s Scotland, and MacDuff (here just Duff) is the head of the narcotics unit, desperate for promotion to the chief of Organized Crime. Lady Macbeth is a former prostitute turned casino owner. Nesbo keeps the Duff C-section storyline, which was frankly always a cop-out that drove JRR Tolkien so crazy that he had Eowyn kill the Witchking in response.

I had high hopes for this one because I loved Nesbo's Blood on Snow, a standalone crime novel with an unreliable narrator that was a thrilling whodunnit about a supposedly reformed hitman. However, I thought this book was a stretch. There are a lot of points where Nesbo clearly tries to work in one of Shakespeare's philosophical soliloquys, and they are terribly out of tone with what is meant to be a gritty psychological thriller. The transitions from a dirty, poisonous failing factory town to high-falutin' deep-minded philosophy are awkward and unfortunately break up the story's momentum.

Nesbo changed the witches to drug pushers, and their magic potions to a toxic type of heroin called brew, which, while creative, removed the supernatural aspect of the tale, which, for my Halloween-loving self, was the best part. I am disappointed with this one because I thought that the tale of Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth, in the hands of a master like Nesbo, had a great chance of being a delicious, spine-tingling thrill that would be perfect for a chilly autumn read.

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