By Michael Mackenzie
Reviewing a popular 1934 potboiler, the celebrated writer Jorge Luis Borges voiced his disgust that the author chose ‘implausible and cowardly tautology’ over the ‘quite beautiful’ fantasy that the story had hinted at.
The idea, Borges said, that ‘a magical explanation is inferior to an unbelievable one’ was absurd. The Argentine would perhaps caution writers today to forsake magic at their peril.
Magic drives the plot of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, carrying the Scottish anti-hero to glory as thane and then king before his downfall completes the witches’ prophecy. But as Scottish crime writer Val McDermid notes in the preface to her new novella, this is a fantasy version of MacBeth that barely resembles historical fact.
Queen MacBeth, McDermid’s attempt to ‘set Shakespeare straight’, is the latest in Polygon’s ‘Darkland Tales‘ series of novellas reimagining Scottish legend and history. As a reworking of a piece of classic literature from a woman’s perspective, it also falls in with a string of recent novels including Madeline Miller’s Circe, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, and last year’s Lady MacBethad by Isabelle Schuler.
In McDermid’s Queen we find, not a Machiavellian noblewoman of murderous ambition but Gruoch, the historical Lady MacBeth, whose royalty is little protection from the patriarchal rulers of 11th-century Scotland and who schemes, not for power but self-preservation.
That the book begins after King MacBeth’s downfall, with Gruoch in hiding from the new king, Malcolm, demonstrates this queen’s vulnerability against the powerful men of the time. This point is hammered home in the second part of this dual narrative, which travels back to Gruoch’s youthful marriage to a brutal lord to recount how she met MacBeth.
In this retelling of the MacBeth legend, the witches are almost inevitably recast as Gruoch’s ladies in waiting, sources of female solidarity who practice not magic but herbalism and loom craft. One of them does, admittedly, come out with the odd prophecy. But while Shakespeare’s hags and their self-fulfilling prophecy drive the plot, McDermid’s seer, Eithne, serves a more decorative function as McDermid restrains the story under the yoke of historical accuracy.
And indeed, McDermid’s MacBeth does kill Duncan on the field of battle (that is, honourably) and not in the treacherous murder depicted by Shakespeare. His rule is long and stable, as the record will tell you, and not the reign of terror unleashed in the play. And he does have time, with Gruoch, to visit the Vatican before his demise which comes in pitched battle – at Lumphanan, near Aberdeen, rather than the play’s Dunsinane.
The trouble with all this historical accuracy is that a novel does not become real to the reader by presenting the correct facts in the correct order; rather the trick is to put the right words in the right order – thus incanting a kind of magic spell.
In this vein, a brush with the fantastic can bring the greatest sense of reality to a work of historical fiction, and that which is most alienating to the modern audience can be the thing that evokes a distant period and its people most vividly.
The most impactful scenes in another recent reimagining of a Shakespearean legend1, Robert Eggers’ film The Northman, were the most strange. Presented suddenly and with little explanation, the hallucinogenic ceremony in the hut or the berserkers’ frenzied ritual dance seemed authentic (regardless of their actual historical veracity) because they immersed us in a world and a perspective that was radically different from our own.
Some historical novels – Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole and Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake are two recent examples – achieve a similar effect by challenging the reader to make sense of an unfamiliar vernacular.
Opening these books is like stumbling into a conversation mid-stream; the world and its language seem to exist already at a distance to us, and as we come to understand their unfamiliar speech, it opens the way too to new patterns of thought.
Despite its three-page glossary of Scottish and Gaelic terms, there’s no such artifice in Queen MacBeth, which is told instead in spare, efficient register that would suit a Tartan Noir novel.
When an unfamiliar term is thrown in, it seems more superfluous than authentic. Given that the bulk of the book is written in English, do we need to know, for example, that Celts’ word for their equivalent of chess was fidchell?
In fact, the most notable feature of McDermid’s language in Queen MacBeth is how it closely it hews to the generic. Besides the mild seasoning of Celtic terms, this is the vaguely old-timey language you’ll find in any setting from Ancient Rome to Regency England (or Westeros, for that matter). People don’t touch but ‘lay hands on’ one another, women are not pregnant but ‘with child’, characters ‘hold their tongues’, ‘call down blessings’, ‘spill their seed’ and so on.
The nondescript quality this brings to Queen MacBeth extends beyond the language. The characters, no longer driven by ambition to murder and madness, are instead unimpeachably noble. There is still betrayal – as Gruoch instigates MacBeth’s murder of her first husband and his cousin, Gille Coemgain. But Gille is a brutal man whose violence and impotence force the queen’s hand. Besides, Gruoch finds true love with MacBeth, a strapping hero with ‘hair like a flame’ who can ‘dance like a man possessed’ and whose father Gille may have slain.
Thus, the MacBeths, wholly justified in usurping power, begin an era of ‘peace and prosperity’ in which Macbeth ‘[rules] the land by consent; [settling] disputes with other Moravians and with our neighbours not by warfare but by inviting them to parley.’
Everyone’s happy: even Gruoch’s companions can relax, knowing their Queen has found a beloved who values her wisdom to the extent that even the clergy is ‘surprised at [her] contribution’ to discussions of state.
McDermid has created heroes in Gruoch and MacBeth that suit modern sensibilities and which, laden with anachronisms, say little about those of 11th-century Scotland. Freedom-loving MacBeth is shocked to discover slaves during his pilgrimage to the Vatican; ‘the notion that one human could own another was foreign to us.’
Would this really be so alien to these clanspeople, when the Domesday Book recorded a tenth of neighbouring England’s population as slaves, and when taking captives as slaves was common practice among the raiders operating on Scotland’s embattled West Coast?
Even more jarring is the single paragraph McDermid devotes to explaining so colossal a societal shift as the conversion from paganism to Christianity. ‘One superstition is as good as another,’ MacBeth says. ‘Our people like that their Christ suffered as we suffer.’ And so they all became Christian, as Gruoch puts it.
The other books in the Darkland Tales series have each displayed the immersive ‘magic’ that makes their worlds real. In Jenni Fagan’s Hex, it’s literal magic carrying us with a medium back to the 17th century. And Alan Warner’s stark and striking images, starting with an opening in which Bonnie Prince Charlie publicly grapples with a bout of diarrhoea, bewitch in Nothing Left to Fear from Hell.
It’s a shame, therefore that in ‘setting Shakespeare straight,’ Queen MacBeth has abandoned the magic of the famous play in favour of a story that is, in the end, often hard to believe.
- Egger’s film adapts the story of Amleth, a figure from Scandinavian legend and also the inspiration for Hamlet. ↩︎
About our contributor
Michael Mackenzie is a Glasgow-based freelance writer and editor with a background in translation, journalism and travel writing. He spent five years contributing to Turkish and Middle Eastern news sites and has edited more than 20 titles for Lonely Planet. His published translations include a short story by Turkish writer Asli Akarsakarya in the Edinburgh-based Interpret Magazine.
Your message has been sent
Leave a Reply