Scandinavia’s king of crime turns the tragedy into a deliciously oppressive page-turnerThe Hogarth Shakespeare project invites modern novelists to reimagine some of his most celebrated plays. After such entries as Howard Jacobson’s purchase on The Merchant of Venice,Shylock Is My Name, and Dunbar, and 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, or where the cops are just one more armed gang.
The Scottish play is here transplanted to a geographically agnostic area 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 account is set in 1970. (It turns out to be helpful to avoid the characters having mobile phones.) Nesbø piles on the forbidding atmosphere, or writing of “the soot and poison that lay like a fixed 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.
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Source: guardian.co.uk