Jo Nesbø

A gritty thriller with an existential, alcoholic detective and some worthy musings on the similarities between vengeance and what we talk about when we talk about justice. "Nemesis, the goddess of justice and vengeance." "Which the Romans pinched off the Greeks...They kept the scales, changed the whip for a sword, bound her eyes and called her Justitia...Blind justice. Cold-blooded vengeance. Our civilization rests in her hands. Isn't she beautiful?"

Well...isn't she?

This is the latest of the Hogarth Shakespeare series which has contemporary authors retelling the Bard’s plays. I’ve read all of Nesbø’s Harry Hole novels, and in my 30-year career as an English teacher, I taught Macbeth numerous times. My conclusion: pairing Jo Nesbø with Shakespeare’s Macbeth was an inspired choice.

Nesbø sets his crime novel in the 1970s in an economically depressed, deindustrialized town. Macbeth is the head of the SWAT team; he answers to Duncan, the newly show more appointed police commissioner. Other members of the police force include Banquo, another member of the SWAT team; Inspector Duff, head of the Narcotics Unit; and Caithness, head of the Forensics Unit. Duncan is trying to clean up the corruption that has been rampant in the force and to take down Hecate, the local drug kingpin. Macbeth’s lover is Lady, a local casino magnate; she helps convince Macbeth that he should kill Duncan and become the chief commissioner himself. Anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s tragedy will be familiar with the rest of the plot to which this novel remains fairly faithful.

It is obvious that Nesbø has studied the play quite closely. For example, in his version, he incorporates Shakespeare’s clothing imagery (an ambitious man’s shoes always creak “because he always buys shoes too big for him” and Macbeth’s new uniform “rubbed against his skin and gave him the shivers”), animal imagery (Lady’s “pupils twitch, and this reminded him of something. Frogspawn. A tadpole trying to break free from a sticky egg”), and blood imagery (Lady has “full red lips” and “flame-red hair” and “long red nails” and favours red wine and red dresses). Like Shakespeare, Nesbø uses dramatic irony: Macbeth says, “You’ll be the death of me, Lady, do you know that?” Pathetic fallacy is used: it is almost always overcast and raining and sometimes the weather is described as “hellish.” Even soliloquies are adapted; Shakespeare’s Macbeth describes life as “a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing” (V, v, 26-28) and Nesbø’s Macbeth says, “Perhaps we’re just detached sentences in an eternal chaotic babble in which everyone talks and no one listens, and our worst premonition finally turns out to be correct: you are alone. All alone.”

What is largely missing is the comic relief found in Shakespeare’s play, though there is a nod to the Porter’s speech about alcohol causing “a colourful nose, sleep and pissing” and a humourous nod to Shakespeare’s dramas in the description of “the expensive national theatre with its pompous plays, incomprehensible dialogue and megalomaniac kings who die in the last act”. Nesbø’s Macbeth is a dark, brutal and bloody saga.

I appreciated that Nesbø tried to explain some ambiguous statements found in the play. For instance, Lady Macbeth tells her husband, “I have given suck, and know/How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me;/ I would, while it was smiling in my face,/ Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums/ And dashed the brains out” (I, v, 55-59). Nesbø gives an explanation for this child. He also examines Lady’s background which helps explain her ambitions for herself and her consort.

There are some missteps, however. “Brew” is a powerful drug prepared in a large container by Strega (the Italian word for witch) and her two sisters, too obviously evoking the three Weird Sisters and a cauldron. Later, Macbeth is introduced to an even more potent drug than Brew which Hecate calls “Power.” This metaphor is a tad heavy-handed. Accepting that Macbeth would bring home that shoebox and what it contains requires too much suspension of disbelief. And though Shakespeare does perhaps suggest a Satanic element to the character of Seyton, Nesbø’s portrayal is over the top.

It is the portrayal of Duff which is outstanding. In Shakespeare’s play, MacDuff is an upright man who acts mostly in the background. In Nesbø’s prose version, Duff is more morally ambiguous. He too is ambitious and has a desire for recognition. He is also described as a “selfish, arrogant bastard” and “the most selfish person I’ve ever met.” He dominates in several scenes; there is even an extended section showing his escape after the slaughter of his family, a massacre made even more poignant because of its timing. Duff ends up serving as Macbeth’s foil: as Macbeth devolves, Duff evolves.

This novel can be read without the reader having any knowledge of Shakespeare’s play, but a familiarity with the drama will increase the reader’s appreciation of what Nesbø has accomplished. He has touched on all the major themes found in the Bard’s work, and even though I knew what was going to happen, I still found the book a compelling read.

There have been many film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; I can well imagine a film version of Nesbø’s novel which is an excellent example of the crime noir genre.

Note: I received a digital ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). show less

Look up at the star rating I gave this book. It's pretty high. But despite the high rating, I just didn't like this particular iteration of Harry. The characters continued to evolve, their depiction brilliant. The writing was fantastic. The twists and turns enough to make anyone lose their direction. But I still didn't like it. The fault is within my own psyche, I think. The damaged souls that kill others prey on my mind. I'm a healer, and I ache for all the illness, physical and mental, show more that esbø weaves into his stories. I care about his characters, perhaps too much. And he is perhaps too good a writer for me at times.

This was a marvelous book. It just hurt me to read it. I think I need a break from wounded male detectives of the Scandinavian sort. show less

Reviewed for Reviewing the Evidence; reposted with permission.

Jo Nesbø is a man of many talents. His official biography seems like a randomly-selected set of words from a careers test: musician, economist, footballer, writer. He's best known for his Harry Hole series, in which a tortured but brilliant detective, battling alcoholism and a corrupt system, solves complex crimes in a Norway that is inexplicably overrun by clever serial killers. These are long books full of meticulous show more plotting, vivid characters, lots of creative gore, and emotional drama lightened with touches of humor. Recent departures from the series include THE HEADHUNTERS (a short stand-alone featuring an unlovable corporate recruiter/art thief) and THE SON (a long stand-alone in which a spiritual drug addict assassinates people who wronged his father while remaining curiously charming).

BLOOD ON SNOW launched a new series about a small-time drug dealer in 1970s Oslo who reluctantly becomes a hitman for a drug lord before becoming a target himself. As MIDNIGHT SUN opens, we meet this man who has decided to call himself Ulf, because – why not? He has taken a bus to the northernmost county in Norway that reaches across the top of Sweden and Finland to border Russia. He's on the run and he knows there's no place to hide, but he'll try, in the vast, bleak emptiness of the Finnmark plateau. "It's like Mars," he thinks. "A red desert. Uninhabitable and cruel. The perfect hiding place."

It's not uninhabitable, as he discovers, meeting a joker of a Sami herder and a kind woman at a church, where he's gone to sleep after getting off the bus in the middle of the night with the midnight sun in his eyes. There's also her son and a preacher and various other townsfolk who make a hardscrabble living. He begins to feel at home, but it's not a place where he can hide for long. The harsh weather isn't as cruel as the southerners he's running from.

This novel is the opposite of the plot-intensive Harry Hole series. Though the threat is always around the corner, "Ulf" takes a philosophic approach to his new and possibly short life, setting up camp in a borrowed hunting cabin and spending time with the woman, who belongs to a Laestadian fundamentalist sect but is chafing under its strict rules and her abusive husband. He gets to know her young son, Sami herders, and villagers, coming to appreciate the strangeness and austere beauty of this remote part of the world.

This is a short book that pays more attention to the narrator's state of mind and the landscape than to intricate plotting (though there are plot threads that offer some knots to untangle). The hitman is actually an easy-going fellow who would rather not kill anyone and isn't very good at it, anyway. It's a gentler and funnier book than one might expect and, apart from one gruesome moment which is almost folkloric in nature, the violence is relatively minimal. When Nesbø leaves the mean streets for the far north, readers are in for something different – and it's a surprisingly pleasant journey. show less