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Summary
Summary
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018
Shakespeare's dark and tragic play retold in a heart-pounding New York Times bestselling thriller from the author of The Snowman and The Thirst.
Set in the 1970s in a run-down, rainy industrial town, Jo Nesbo's Macbeth centers around a police force struggling to shed an incessant drug problem. Duncan, chief of police, is idealistic and visionary, a dream to the townspeople but a nightmare for criminals. The drug trade is ruled by two drug lords, one of whom--a master of manipulation named Hecate--has connections with the highest in power, and plans to use them to get his way.
Hecate's plot hinges on steadily, insidiously manipulating Inspector Macbeth: the head of SWAT and a man already susceptible to violent and paranoid tendencies. What follows is an unputdownable story of love and guilt, political ambition, and greed for more, exploring the darkest corners of human nature, and the aspirations of the criminal mind.
Author Notes
Jo Nesbø was born on March 29, 1960 in Molde, Norway. He graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics with a degree in economics and business administration. He worked as a freelance journalist and a stockbroker before he began his writing career. He is the author of The Harry Hole series and The Doctor Proctor series. The 2011 film Headhunters is based on his novel Hodejegerne (The Headhunters). In 2017 he made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title, The Thirst. He is also the main vocalist and songwriter for the Norwegian rock band Di Derre.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
Scandinavias king of crime turns the tragedy into a deliciously oppressive page-turner The Hogarth Shakespeare project invites modern novelists to reimagine some of his most celebrated plays. After such entries as Howard Jacobsons take on The Merchant of Venice, Shylock Is My Name, and Dunbar, Edward St Aubyns 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, where the cops are just one more armed gang. The Scottish play is here transplanted to a geographically agnostic place 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 story is set in 1970. (It turns out to be helpful to avoid the characters having mobile phones.) Nesbø piles on the forbidding atmosphere, writing of the soot and poison that lay like a constant 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. Macbeth leads a paramilitary Swat unit. He is a man of the people, unnaturally strong, with a thing for daggers: admittedly an unusual detail amid these modern warriors fitted out with assault rifles and sniper scopes. (He is so good at throwing knives, we are told, that he once nearly joined the circus.) Duncan, meanwhile, is the chief commissioner of the police and Malcolm his deputy. The leader of the narcotics unit, perhaps to avoid too many Scottish-sounding prefixes, is here known simply as Duff. The police are at semi-permanent war with a biker gang known as the Norse Riders, who serve as couriers for the top bad guy. This is Hecate: rather than Shakespeares queen of the witches, he is the towns untouchable drug lord, an old man also known as the Invisible Hand. (The reference to the political economy of Adam Smith is deliberate.) He manufactures a drug called brew: not the alcohol whose effects Shakespeares hungover Porter wryly describes, but a crack-like substance to which half the town is addicted. Three of Hecates henchwomen play the role of the witches, promising that Macbeth will get the top job if he does nothing to interfere with the drug business. (In a nice touch, these women are also rumoured to use toads glands, bumble bee wings, juice from rats tails when cooking the drug.) Its not long, then, until the murders start, with Macbeth egged on by his paramour, here known simply as Lady: a flame-haired femme fatale who runs a casino. Her scheme for him to murder Duncan is the same as Lady Macbeths, stabbing him while he sleeps and blaming it on his bodyguards arguably a terrible plan in the context of 20th-century forensics. But Macbeth gets away with it, and so wades deeper into the sea of blood that must finally engulf him. There follows much edgy paranoia within the police department and some excellent action sequences involving cars and guns. (A person is shot with the sound of a thud like hammer on meat.) Nesbø orchestrates scenes of blackmail and fighting with the slickness of a writer who has sold 36m crime novels. There are odd touches of the supernatural, sometimes with a naturalistic alternative explanation. (The ghost of the murdered Banquo turns up at a dinner, but Macbeth might just be hallucinating because hes high.) Nesbø finds some clever twists, too, on the source material. It would be invidious to give away what plays the role of Birnam Wood, but the sequence is majestically satisfying. At times the novel strains credulity: no one notices the possible connection between the manner of Duncans murder and Macbeths fondness for daggers for quite a while, and when the newly promoted Macbeth gives a press conference explaining how his team have just shot dozens of people, the assembled journalists lap it up uncritically. The books style, in Don Bartletts translation from the Norwegian, is workmanlike, but from the combination of simple materials a thought can arise that seems authentically, blackly bardic: For eternal loyalty is inhuman and betrayal is human. This is in the end a deliciously oppressive page-turner that, like The Tragedy of Macbeth itself, seems to harbour something ineradicably evil at its core. The main effect, indeed, of all the differences between this book and a standard modern potboiler is to remind you how weirdly nightmarish the original play is: what Shakespeare brewed up is still almost too over-the-top for modern, ultraviolent mass entertainment. - Steven Poole.
New York Review of Books Review
ELASTIC: Unlocking Your Brain's Ability to Embrace Change, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Vintage, $16.) Our capacity to stretch beyond the bounds of our preconceptions and other deeply held beliefs, what Mlodinow calls "elastic thinking," is essential to innovation, creativity and independent thought. He offers an engaging guide to the brain's power to solve new problems, weaving together scientific research, politics and literature. BRASS, byXhenet Aliu. (Random House, $17.) Elsie and Lulu, the mother and daughter whose potent relationship forms the core of this debut novel, are desperate to leave behind their hardscrabble lives. As our reviewer, Julie Buntin, put it, the book "offers a reminder that assumptions - whether about a place, or a person as close to you as your mother - never tell the full story." THE WINE LOVER'S DAUGHTER: A Memoir, by Anne Fadiman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) In her study of her father, the literary critic Clifton Fadiman, the author uses his infatuation with wine to explore the motivations that guide connoisseurship and hedonism. Though Fadiman does not share her father's ardent love of the drink, her wine-focused vignettes sketch a portrait of their complicated relationship. MACBETH, by Jo Nesbo. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $16.) In his reimagining of Shakespeare's tragedy, the Norwegian crime writer draws out the play's noir elements, transposing its moral choices and plot to 1970s Glasgow as the city strained under corruption, violence and addiction. Our reviewer, James Shapiro, praised the adaptation, calling the book "a dark but ultimately hopeful 'Macbeth,' one suited to our own troubled times, in which 'the slowness of democracy' is no match for power-hungry strongmen." THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg. (Bloomsbury, $18.) Ellsberg, best known as the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, makes an impassioned call for reducing the risk of nuclear destruction. Though widespread fears about nuclear war have largely receded since the end of the Cold War in 1991, Ellsberg argues that there's plenty of reason for concern. TANGERINE, by Christine Mangan. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Alice and Lucy were once close college friends, and a dark episode from those years haunts their reconciliation in Morocco. In a novel that borrows from Paul Bowles and Patricia Highsmith, the two characters, neither of them a trustworthy narrator, get caught up in a mysterious disappearance in Tangier.
