There are odd touches of the supernatural, sometimes with a naturalistic alternative explanation. (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 follows much edgy paranoia within the police department and some excellent action sequences involving cars and guns. But Macbeth gets away with it, and so wades deeper into the sea of blood that must finally engulf him. Her scheme for him to murder Duncan is the same as Lady Macbeth’s, stabbing him while he sleeps and blaming it on his bodyguards – arguably a terrible plan in the context of 20th-century forensics. It’s 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.
(In a nice touch, these women are also rumoured to use “toads’ glands, bumble bee wings, juice from rat’s tails” when cooking the drug.) Three of Hecate’s 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. (The reference to the political economy of Adam Smith is deliberate.) He manufactures a drug called “brew”: not the alcohol whose effects Shakespeare’s hungover Porter wryly describes, but a crack-like substance to which half the town is addicted. This is Hecate: rather than Shakespeare’s queen of the witches, he is the town’s untouchable drug lord, an old man also known as the “Invisible Hand”. 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. The leader of the narcotics unit, perhaps to avoid too many Scottish-sounding prefixes, is here known simply as Duff. (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. 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. (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. From one clue we deduce that the story is set in 1970. But we spend most of our time in a grim northern town where industry has shut down and it nearly always rains. 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. 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. After such entries as Howard Jacobson’s take on The Merchant of Venice, Shylock Is My Name, and Dunbar, Edward St Aubyn’s King Lear, we now have a Macbeth by the king of Scandi-noir crime, Jo Nesbø. T he Hogarth Shakespeare project invites modern novelists to reimagine some of his most celebrated plays.
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