Macbeth by Jo Nesbø
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a really good idea - take one of the original noir stories, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and add a modern master of crime-writing, Jo Nesbo - but, while there are many things to like and admire about the book, it is a little less than the sum of its parts. The parts I enjoyed most are essentially all Nesbo - exciting and visceral car chases, a showdown with drug-dealing gangs, the action scenes, elements that he has inserted into the gaps in the source material where much of the ‘action’, such as Duncan’s murder, famously happens off-stage. Nesbo updates the play to an unnamed, largely Scottish, city in the 1970s - think Glasgow pre-City of Culture - and it gives the story a suitably dark and violent background. Unfortunately, I found the dialogue stilted and a little too much of a homage to the original Shakespeare. The best productions of the play bring the language to life and make it exciting and perhaps that is the biggest problem - the play is meant to be performed rather than read. Perhaps this would work as a dark, Scandinavian series along the lines of The Bridge or The Killing, and I would certainly watch it. Macbeth is not a terrible novel by any means, a worthwhile exercise, but it doesn’t match Nesbo’s best. Nor Shakespeare’s.

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