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Jun. 16th, 2019 05:26 pmApparently this has been a week of Shakespeare adaptations, through coincidence rather than design.
Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth, a retelling of the play as a thriller set in a police department investigating organized crime, was the weakest, and an illuminating example of some of the perils of adaptation. Nesbo carefully matches up most of the plot points and characters of the play with modern equivalents, but the parallels read as shallow and superficial, losing the main emotional dynamics of the story. Partly I think it was the setting that didn’t work, in this example; the charge of becoming police chief just doesn’t have the same power as becoming king, and so the stakes weren’t high enough, either for Macbeth’s rise or Macduff and Malcolm’s response.
Nuance was especially lost in the representation of the witches, who here are a criminal gang seeking to overthrow the police department before they are caught. There’s no enigma to them or their motivations in the novel, which flattens everything, and eliminates the interest from any of the questions about morality, fate, and free will which wind through the play. And Nesbo makes Hecate (here the boss of the gang) a man! I was disproportionately irritated by this, I’ll admit, but it bothered me; creating a dynamic in which the witches are under the direction of a male leader (even though, by the way, Shakespeare directly states that they’re acting outside Hecate’s commands in Act One! Does no one fucking close read Hecate’s speech?) turns their role into something both insignificant and predictable.
By contrast, I found Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young, an audacious and glittering debut novel which resets King Lear in contemporary New Delhi, effective, smart, and powerful, despite some structural issues which I think are very much understandable in a first novel of this kind of scope. Taneja is actually not much less precise than Nesbo in her matching up of her plot and characters to Shakespeare’s, but her choices are clearly much more thought through, with an attention to what’s meaningfully different - what work can a novel do that a play can’t, what shifts in the setting.
The novel is split into five sections, one from the point of view of each of the younger generation of characters, a device I enjoyed but which I thought worked less well in the second half of the novel than the first. The first two sections, focused on her Edmund and Goneril equivalents (Jivan and Gargu) respectively, hooked me, and I liked the conceit of starting with the pov of the most unambiguous villain of the original play, and ending with Cordelia. But it meant that we lose sight of the Goneril, Regan, and Edmund trilogy just at the point in the narrative when things are starting to get most violent and chaotic, and when seeing their own self-justifications warp might have been most interesting. The voices of Edgar/Jeet and Cordelia/Sita were also not quite strong enough to do a Faulkner and get me fully invested that late in the novel; it was almost there, but not quite.
Taneja’s Lear is a businessman rather than a king, but the novel is engaged with the obscenity of extreme wealth and the depredations of capitalism with a kind of nuance that makes it work; I didn’t have any problem with the stakes here. Taneja’s narration in fact brings out the violence in Lear’s plot in a way that interested me; I was very struck by the scene in which Bapuji/Lear beats Goneril/Gargu’s servant, and the one in which she learns about it - I had a moment of remembering, even though I am very familiar with Lear and had not forgotten that element of the plot ‘oh yes, that is this story.’ The novel can do that in a way that the bantering scenes involving Oswald in the play can’t.
The combination of reading that novel and rewatching Akira Kurosawa’s spectacular Ran (1985) last week left me thinking that maybe Lear is uniquely well-suited to adaptation. Ran of course is a masterwork which one can watch on many level, not solely as an adaptation, but as an adaptation it is in fact extremely subtle and smart. It’s Lear in feudal Japan (a pretty easy translation), partially gender-swapped (Lear’s daughters are changed to sons, and our loose Edmund and Edgar stand-ins are women).
When dealing with the text of Lear you’ll always have the question of sides, of who’s right and wrong, which is partially an artifact of a critical tradition that misogynistically villainizes Goneril and Regan (and reactions against that like Jane Smiley’s A Thousand AcresLear Macbeth is much more my play, but I haven’t found retellings that do justice to the things I see in it.
(I also watched the recent film Lady Macbeth</> (2016), but that is not in fact a Macbeth adaptation, but an adaptation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk (which itself resembles Macbeth only insofar as it features a woman plotting murders). And, also, I hated it for its ridiculous levels of racism. Pretty hair and costume shots did not make up for that.)
Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth, a retelling of the play as a thriller set in a police department investigating organized crime, was the weakest, and an illuminating example of some of the perils of adaptation. Nesbo carefully matches up most of the plot points and characters of the play with modern equivalents, but the parallels read as shallow and superficial, losing the main emotional dynamics of the story. Partly I think it was the setting that didn’t work, in this example; the charge of becoming police chief just doesn’t have the same power as becoming king, and so the stakes weren’t high enough, either for Macbeth’s rise or Macduff and Malcolm’s response.
Nuance was especially lost in the representation of the witches, who here are a criminal gang seeking to overthrow the police department before they are caught. There’s no enigma to them or their motivations in the novel, which flattens everything, and eliminates the interest from any of the questions about morality, fate, and free will which wind through the play. And Nesbo makes Hecate (here the boss of the gang) a man! I was disproportionately irritated by this, I’ll admit, but it bothered me; creating a dynamic in which the witches are under the direction of a male leader (even though, by the way, Shakespeare directly states that they’re acting outside Hecate’s commands in Act One! Does no one fucking close read Hecate’s speech?) turns their role into something both insignificant and predictable.
By contrast, I found Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young, an audacious and glittering debut novel which resets King Lear in contemporary New Delhi, effective, smart, and powerful, despite some structural issues which I think are very much understandable in a first novel of this kind of scope. Taneja is actually not much less precise than Nesbo in her matching up of her plot and characters to Shakespeare’s, but her choices are clearly much more thought through, with an attention to what’s meaningfully different - what work can a novel do that a play can’t, what shifts in the setting.
The novel is split into five sections, one from the point of view of each of the younger generation of characters, a device I enjoyed but which I thought worked less well in the second half of the novel than the first. The first two sections, focused on her Edmund and Goneril equivalents (Jivan and Gargu) respectively, hooked me, and I liked the conceit of starting with the pov of the most unambiguous villain of the original play, and ending with Cordelia. But it meant that we lose sight of the Goneril, Regan, and Edmund trilogy just at the point in the narrative when things are starting to get most violent and chaotic, and when seeing their own self-justifications warp might have been most interesting. The voices of Edgar/Jeet and Cordelia/Sita were also not quite strong enough to do a Faulkner and get me fully invested that late in the novel; it was almost there, but not quite.
Taneja’s Lear is a businessman rather than a king, but the novel is engaged with the obscenity of extreme wealth and the depredations of capitalism with a kind of nuance that makes it work; I didn’t have any problem with the stakes here. Taneja’s narration in fact brings out the violence in Lear’s plot in a way that interested me; I was very struck by the scene in which Bapuji/Lear beats Goneril/Gargu’s servant, and the one in which she learns about it - I had a moment of remembering, even though I am very familiar with Lear and had not forgotten that element of the plot ‘oh yes, that is this story.’ The novel can do that in a way that the bantering scenes involving Oswald in the play can’t.
The combination of reading that novel and rewatching Akira Kurosawa’s spectacular Ran (1985) last week left me thinking that maybe Lear is uniquely well-suited to adaptation. Ran of course is a masterwork which one can watch on many level, not solely as an adaptation, but as an adaptation it is in fact extremely subtle and smart. It’s Lear in feudal Japan (a pretty easy translation), partially gender-swapped (Lear’s daughters are changed to sons, and our loose Edmund and Edgar stand-ins are women).
When dealing with the text of Lear you’ll always have the question of sides, of who’s right and wrong, which is partially an artifact of a critical tradition that misogynistically villainizes Goneril and Regan (and reactions against that like Jane Smiley’s A Thousand AcresLear Macbeth is much more my play, but I haven’t found retellings that do justice to the things I see in it.
(I also watched the recent film Lady Macbeth</> (2016), but that is not in fact a Macbeth adaptation, but an adaptation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk (which itself resembles Macbeth only insofar as it features a woman plotting murders). And, also, I hated it for its ridiculous levels of racism. Pretty hair and costume shots did not make up for that.)
