Book review: In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the title character’s wife is power-hungry and scheming. Seduced by the witches’ prophecy that Macbeth will be “king hereafter”, she convinces her husband that the way to secure this new job title is to murder the current king, Duncan. Macbeth obligingly does so, but the “borrowed robes” worn by the new king and queen soon fit poorly: he becomes increasingly paranoid and ramps up the body count before himself being killed; she is consumed by guilt and visions of blood, eventually committing suicide.
The play’s plot is only loosely grounded in historical fact, although Shakespeare did draw on a historical source: the second volume of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), which recounts the lives of the British monarchs. But Holinshed himself is notoriously unreliable, so the Scottish writer Val McDermid has set out to correct the record – particularly when it comes to the woman known in her new novella as Gruoch, or Queen Macbeth.
In McDermid’s take, we see the “facts” of 11th-century Scottish history from Gruoch’s point of view. Macbeth is the handsome and charismatic cousin of Gille Coemgáin, the boorish Scottish lord to whom Gruoch is married. Gruoch and Macbeth fall in love, and it is Gille whom Macbeth slaughters, in part so he can wed Gruoch, but also because Macbeth is – the book has it – a much better option for ruler of Scotland than Gille or any of the other rival names familiar from Shakespeare: Duncan, Malcolm, MacDuff. His reign over the unified kingdom leads to “peace and prosperity” and he and his wife are popular and devout, even making a pilgrimage to Rome. When Macbeth is finally killed in battle (or is he? – McDermid’s “facts” are overtaken by poetic licence here) it is while defending his realm from the usurping Malcolm after a long and stable reign.
This book isn’t very good. It is published as part of the Darkland Tales, a series of historical novels by contemporary Scottish writers who have been tasked with “re-imagining stories from [Scotland’s] history, myth and legend”.
It’s a shame that McDermid’s interpretation of this brief also involved – as the blurb for Queen Macbeth has it – “drag[ging] the truth out of the shadows” in terms of the Macbeths and the historical record. Her desire to hit the beats of the revisionist history weighs down the fictional narrative, which could otherwise offer an interesting feminist reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s account. The weird sisters from Macbeth, for instance, here show up as Gruoch’s beloved ladies-in-waiting, their witchy attributes recast more positively as valuable skills – farsightedness, an affinity with animals, knowledge of herbal medicine.
But this is ultimately a paint-by-numbers retelling, whose brief length allows little time for genuine character development.
The dialogue – presented as reported speech through Gruoch’s first-person narrative – has a clunkiness that suggests a commission dashed off at speed. (Macbeth tells his wife-to-be: “Gruoch, not a day has passed without thoughts of you filling my head. I have never missed anyone so much. I talk to you when I’m alone. I dream of you when I’m asleep. I have never felt like this about a woman before.” Shakespeare it is not.)
Although some of the other Darkland Tales may be worth seeking out, readers looking for a more sophisticated and more thoroughly researched retelling of the Macbeths’ story should turn instead to King Hereafter, the 1982 novel by Scotland’s pre-eminent historical novelist, Dorothy Dunnett. Let Val McDermid hang up her own “borrowed robes” and return to what she does best – contemporary crime fiction.
Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid (Polygon, $34.99) is out now.
