Review | Jo Nesbo gives Shakespeare’s Macbeth a Nordic-noir flourish, but fails to hit damned spot

Macbeth
by Jo Nesbo
Hogarth

3/5 stars

Jo Nesbo, the king of Nordic crime, has reworked one of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedies for his latest novel, Macbeth. The Norwegian writer’s books have sold more than 36 million copies, thanks, in no small part, to the popularity of the 11 bestselling thrillers starring alcoholic detective Harry Hole (featured in the disappointing 2017 Hollywood treatment of the story, The Snowman, starring Michael Fassbender), who battles his demons along with serial killers, disobeys his superiors’ orders and dispenses his own form of justice when it suits him.

So Nesbo is perhaps well placed to reimagine the story of another troubled man. “A main character who has the moral code and the corrupted mind, the personal strength and the emotional weakness, the ambition and the doubts to go either way [...] Macbeth does not feel too far from home,” he says on his website.

Nesbo describes his Macbeth as “a thriller about the struggle for power, set both in a gloomy, stormy crime noir-like setting and in a dark, paranoid human mind”. Unfortunately, his new take disappoints, as his story – just like Macbeth’s mind – unravels before the end.

Nesbo’s book is part of publisher Random House’s series of novels that “reimagine Shakespeare’s plays for a 21st-century audience”. The Hogarth Shakespeare project, which features leading novelists, was launched in October 2015 to mark the 400th anniversary, in 2016, of the Bard’s death.

The writers were asked to turn the plays into novels that would be “true to the spirit” of the originals. Beyond that, they could take the books wherever they wanted.

Jeanette Winterson’s novel of a reimagined The Winter’s Tale, published as The Gap of Time, was the first to appear, in 2015, followed by Howard Jacobson’s Shylock is My Name (The Merchant of Venice), Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (The Taming of the Shrew), Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (The Tempest), Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy (Othello) and Edward St Aubyn’s Dunbar (King Lear). Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn’s Hamlet will appear in 2021.