Hagtale: A Macbeth Origin Story by Sally O’Reilly review: 'Lady Macbeth is reduced to a pawn'
As with most attempts to co-opt and re-write Shakespeare, all this novel does is remind us of the great subtlety of his work, writes Stuart Kelly
I suppose we can begin by blaming Dorothy Dunnett. Her 1982 novel, King Hereafter, had the conceit that the pagan Thorfinn Sigurdsson, Earl of Orkney, became Macbeth after his baptism. It gives a reason for rewriting the Shakespearean tragedy, albeit in a slightly kooky way. Since then there have been numerous engagements with the text, such as Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth, where the titular character is a Scottish cop and the witches are drug dealers. But it is Lady Macbeth to whom writers tend to gravitate as an “untold story”. Isabelle Schulers’s Lady Macbethad has her as a proto-feminist persecuted Christian. Val McDermid wrote Queen Macbeth for Polygon’s Darkland Tales, and she spares us the mad scene and has an on the run scene instead. I’ve not read Ava Reid’s Lady Macbeth, which apparently has a teenage French girl with supernatural fantasy powers; nor the Susan Fraser King Lady Macbeth, which promises “strong women… the ancient wisdom and secret practices of her female ancestors”. David Grieg’s play Dunsinane also allows Gruach/Lady Macbeth to outlive the original, and become a focus for opposition to English “nation building” in the aftermath. All this is to prove that this novel does not enter a pristine field.
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It is subtitled “A Macbeth Origin Story”, a term I associate more with comics and the bitten by a radioactive spider / saw his parents shot / came from another planet school of character building. Without wishing to seem obtuse, I do not see why O’Reilly had to hitch her novel to Macbeth at all, because it merely creates problems and provides no insightful readings. It would have been better to write an entirely fictional work, rather than expediently yoke this to Shakespeare.
So what does O’Reilly do differently? I suppose this is the magic realism version of the story. It features two narratives in parallel. Although there’s a preface about Birnam Wood in a slightly “high” style (“Men have left it wounded and in pain, murdering its sapwood before slaying their own kind. The ancient forest will rise and show its power”), we actually begin in Midlothian in 1354, in an abbey recovering from an outbreak of plague. Brother Rowan, who would just prefer to tend his garden, is sent by the Abbot to Saint Medard’s monastery, to locate manuscripts pertaining the early Scottish kingship. The reason for this, other than a McGuffin, is the dynastic claims and counterclaims in the wake of the Wars of Independence. He is to travel with Brother Kenneth, a former mercenary who brings military precision to his devotional duties.
The other narrative begins in 1054 with a female child brought up by wolves. The pack has been thinned by humans as the humans have been by plague later, and she is on the verge of death. She is rescued, perhaps, by three women – an ancient one with bloodshot eyes called Cailleach, one with “dragging bosoms” and “pendulous breasts” called Berthe and a young, green-haired one called Merrow who “is something like a jellyfish”. They confer, deciding the wolf-child is “untethered. It is wandering. It is empty. It is our vessel”. Eventually named Wulfa (geddit? But also, clearly, vulva) they educate her, humanise her, and send her off to live with the Macduffs and report back yearly on the ways of humans. These elemental spirits are especially keen to know what happens when one Macbeth turns up. Macbeth here is a sheer brute, unlike the vacillating and anxious character in Shakespeare, and note that Lady Macbeth, so determined in the play, is reduced here to a pawn.
Things pan out as one might expect. Rowan and Kenneth find the creepy abbey after an encounter with an Edinburgh necromancer who is making pig-humans, like a cross between The Island of Doctor Moreau and House on the Borderland. It has the genealogy, but also books by Hildegard of Bingen, Averroes and al-Idrisi, though it might as well have been the Necronomicon and The Book of Sand for all that this information adds.
Meanwhile, in the Wulfa section, Duncan is killed. Curiously, Wulfa is pregnant at the time. This is the Great Crux – Lady Macbeth’s “I have given suck” vs Macduff on Macbeth “He has no children”. The Justin Kurzel film deals with this beautifully by opening silently with the Macbeths burying their child, which also gives psychological acuity. Here, it is just another nasty gothic flourish. The narratives glance and wink at each other at the end, inconsequentially. What did the “witches” want? Wulfa is to make Macbeth their scourge, a human to eradicate humans, a kind of genocidal eco-terrorist, hence the prelude about wounded nature. As with most attempts to co-opt and re-write and weaponise Shakespeare, all this does is remind me how subtle a writer he was.
In my opening procession of Macbeths, I omitted the one I think most significant: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov, made into a wonderful opera by Shostakovich. The only real connection is a woman planning a murder, but - liberated from the original - it is a work of art(s) in its own right.
Hagtale: A Macbeth Origin Story by Sally O’Reilly, Scribe, £16.99
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