Dunbar (Hogarth Shakespeare)

Of the re-telling in a modern setting of the story of King Lear there is no end; and, however many times it has been done before, of course there was bound to be another one in the Hogarth Press’s project of re-telling all of Shakespeare’s plays.Like Devraj in Preti Taneja’s “We That Are Young” (see my Amazon review), Henry Dunbar (Lear) is the mogul and despotic head of a business empire. We first meet him as he has been committed by his daughters Megan (Regan) and Abigail (Goneril) to a psychiatric sanatorium in the Lake District.Another inmate was Peter Walker. I thought originally that Walker was the Fool, and that started me off with a great disappointment, because there is no wisdom behind the crazy things Walker says. A former actor, he is constantly role-playing the parts of various characters, with a variety of accents. He is also an alcoholic. But he does help Dunbar to avoid taking the drugs he is given against his titanic rages, and to escape from the sanatorium. He accompanies Dunbar for some way during the escape, but then leaves him and returns to the sanatorium – and we come to realize that he only partially stands for the Fool (though his end will be the same as that of Shakespeare’s Fool). Dunbar struggles alone through a difficult landscape and foul weather sets in.Megan is as pathological as her father, and is shown as sexually voracious and a sadist from the beginning. Abigail shares some her sister’s weird tastes. Florence (Cordelia) is here the half-sister of Megan and Abigail. She had been her father’s favourite child until she had triggered his rage when she had told him that she wanted nothing to do with the business and planned to live the simple life with her husband and three children, in Wyoming. St Aubyn also invents Chris, the son of Charlie Wilson (Kent), and a special relationship between him and Florence.Megan and Abigail did not tell Florence where their father was. When the evil sisters heard that he had escaped, they launch their henchmen to find him. These men, at the behest of Megan and Abigail, brutally torture Walker for information.Dunbar becomes like a hunted animal, mad with fear but hanging on to shreds of sanity. True to Shakespeare’s Lear, he reflects on his life and repents of all the brutal and ruthless things he had done in his years of power. He comes across an Edgar-like figure, a former vicar called Simon Field, who had been disgraced as a gambler and a homosexual, and whom the Dunbar-owned press had hounded until he had disappeared and was believed to have committed suicide. They shelter together in a sort of cave Simon had found.Florence, with the help of Charlie Wilson (the faithful Kent, who is here shown as having been, before his sacking, a member of the Company’s Board and fully involved in in all the financial aspects of the business) and hints from Mark (Albany, estranged from his wife Abigail, but who cannot be trusted not to change sides), finds out in which area her father had been imprisoned and flies into Manchester to find him. Two helicopters are out looking for Dunbar – one on behalf of Megan and Abigail; the other on behalf of Florence; and Florence finds her father first.She safely got him to America, hoping that he would have a quiet life with her there, away from all business matters. But Dunbar had more or less recovered his sanity, and was aware that a company meeting was scheduled in New York at which the Board would finally put Megan and Abigail in charge of the company, he insisted on attending the meeting to frustrate that plan. After that, he thought he would retire to live quietly with Florence in Wyoming.The novel had long ago taken off into describing complex financial shenanigans of various people ahead of the meeting, which are very technical and way beyond my understanding. They involve the idea of a take-over of Dunbar’s company by a predatory competitor. But all this has no bearing whatever on the Shakespeare play, and, so far from being a meaningful interpretation of it, is an irritating departure from and a debasement of it. The financial events leading up to the Board meeting are a mystery to me. But there are also at the end scenes of murderous violence and of the death of Florence and then the impending death of Dunbar – and these capture something of the end of the play – but only show how infinitely superior Shakespeare is to St Aubyn.

Shakespeare is lost on me as a rule, despite being introduced to it at school in the 1960's, however this re-writing of the play as a novel had me gripped. It moved at a good pace, the characters were believable to the same extent that any dramatic character is believable. Moving in parts, funny in parts, a great read, I may even have another go at reading the original. Perhaps some of the criticism comes from people who are very familiar with the play and have read it and seen it performed numerous times?

I loved this book from start to finish. It is exquisitely written and at times painful to read because the plot is all too familiar, knowing where all Shakespearean tragedies lead. (Sorry if that's a spoiler). St Aubyn writes about Dunbar's insanity with insightful sympathy and gives the reader depth and clarity into toxic family dynamics, business betrayal and human greed. I'm so sad to have finished it - I was enjoying it so much.

Sort of a dashed off novel that was all surface and no substance. The characterisation particularly felt very thin and was frequently cliche. To be honest I wish I hadn't spent the money on a hardback. St Aubyn is a really good writer and there are some fine passages but as a whole it was boring and not that funny.

What can I say?.... this book was so shallow.... a superficial story with a description of screwed-up upper classes. Literarily very uninteresting... it reminded me of Fifty Shades of Grey, which I read against my choice in my bookclub. A superficial story written in basic language with a lack of style.

This book is well written. It puts the King Lear story in a modern corporate setting that should appeal even to those who don't particularly like Shakespeare. Well worth reading.

I enjoyed the story plot and the way it moved back or forth with the key actors as the framework developed. Some parts were a bit repetitive or overblown but still a good read

This is more or less what i would have done with the plot of Lear had I rewritten it, so I was intrigued to know how the idea developed.