Macbeth. Ambition, power and madness according to Jo Nesbø

They'll talk about you for years, Macbeth.. This is one of the phrases that Duff (Shakespeare's McDuff) says in the novel he has written Jo Nesbø about the classic English bard for the Hogarth project. And yes, we've been talking about Macbeth already 500 years. But another 500 will pass and this universal story about the ambition, power and betrayal it will continue to be read and versioned.

I have finished this Macbeth that Nesbø took 2 years in writing. It has lasted for me 6 days, 100 pages a day and without wanting to stop. It is what usually happens to me with each book by this writer, weakness of my black weaknesses, as the usual customers around here already know. What I can say in two words: pure Nesbø. So those who do not agree with their religion or are purists of the classic, do not continue reading. But those who are not prejudiced, go ahead. The essence of the most twisted but fragile, dark and terrible of human nature is still there. And the Viking Nesbø is a master narrating it.

Macbeth and me

In my college years (studying F. Inglesa) I had to write an essay on Macbeth, my favorite work of William Shakespeare. I chose the evolution of the relation between he and banquo, also a general in King Duncan's army and his most faithful friend. It was what most attracted me to the play: a friendship that seems unbreakable and that is broken by betrayal in the cruelest way due to Macbeth's inordinate ambition, spurred on by his wife Lady Macbeth. I was also very attracted to McDuff's character development.

Macbeth and Nesbø

More than 20 years after writing that essay, I read this version and I feel the same disheartened guts with these characters as with the classic and for the same reasons. In other words, the essence has not changed one iota in this history suffocating by the permanent rain and darkness that covers a chaotic indeterminate city of the 70s. A city drowned by decay, the industrial crisis, drug trafficking and the moral poverty of its corrupt rulers and law enforcement. Almost everything can be summed up in this sentence:

«Maybe nothing makes sense, maybe we are just single phrases in an eternal and chaotic murmur in which everyone talks and nobody listens, and our worst premonition turns out to be true: we are alone. All alone.

This is how all the characters of the classic seem, plus the selfishness, ambitions and traumas that they drag. His characters are there too, but now they are mayors, police chiefs and police officers some are corrupt, and others who struggle not to be so even though they end up accepting it. They are also biker dealers, drug lords who manage everyone and whose service are the three witches potion cooks and poisonous "power." And they all walk and meet in nightclubs, dingy abandoned stations and factories, gray harbors or glitzy casinos like Inverness where it reigns Lady, unconditional love but also the madness and doom of a Macbeth who is also who he is and lives only for her.

«Women understand hearts and how to address them. Because the heart is the woman that we carry within us ».

That says Duff, and he says it very well. Because with a development similar to that of Macbeth, share all the leading role with him in this version. Here is Macbeth's friend and support since they met at the orphanage when they were young and having lost their families. They also share much darker moments and, as adults and become policemen, they end up estranged by Duff's selfishness and desire for promotion, the lack of ambition and even naivety of Macbeth and a woman, that of Duff (Meredith), in a love triangle important to the plot.

It will be they, the women, who mark the destiny of the two, as they also do in the classic. Duff will lose his wife and Macbeth will end up driven by ambition and also the madness of Lady, whom she meets in a masterful scene of a police operation in the casino that she runs. Older than him, dazzling, disturbing and deeply traumatized, the destiny unites them irremediably. What he lacks, she amply and unscrupulously makes up for. And it also condemns it. Or not.

"We never become anything that we are not already." Macbeth

Yes. He already knows. All for the people, for the people and with the people, because he is from the town. He has neither the blood nor the education nor does he belong to the elite who are, or pretend to be, Duff or Police Chief Duncan, or the Mayor. But that brings him to the paradox of becoming a murderer. Get carried away by induced ambition.

Can you read this Macbeth without knowing the Shakespearean classic?

Of course. Without complex.

Those of us who have read or seen it in so many film adaptations, this was the last, Found all of the classic: witches, curses, sabers, daggers, ghosts, predictions and a lot of style almost of theatrical language. There are also all the characters from duncan the castle gatekeeper (here a very relevant dealer for history) passing through the noble but expanding and crossing their stories in a Nesbø-style puzzle. There are also those house brand scene chaining and twists that manage to make you doubt even knowing the argument well.

The most reluctant to the reading of classics (or Shakespeare), whose verse and style are difficult for them even if it is a short work, have to find out (or not) in these 638 pages. They do not lack blood, nor violence in abundance. And they have intrigue, action, madness and a spectacular ending with that almost fantastic touch that Nesbø does not renounce either. He has been throwing you breadcrumbs all the way and there you end up, admiring how he solves that prediction what Macbeth believes that there will be no man born of a woman who can kill him. So that Duff scar means everything. And you go to flance avenging his father and you cry again for the great bench, here also become a father to Macbeth more than a friend.

Definitely…

For all. Lovers of crime novels, classics, Shakespeare, Nesbø and simply great stories that can be told in many ways.

Some more phrases

• «The desire to be loved, the ability to love give strength to people, at the same time that it is their Achilles heel. Give them hope to have love and they will move mountains; take it off and a breath of breeze will knock them down. " Hecate
• "It is your good qualities that have brought you down, your lack of cruelty." Duff.
• You have always known, all your life, that you are doomed to lose in the end. That certainty has been and is you, Macbeth. Duff
• "I became a murderer so that no one could dirty the name of the police, it was for the city, against anarchy." Macbeth