King Lear in the 21st Century

Dunbar     Edward St Aubyn     (2017)

The Hogarth Shakespeare Project in London has been commissioning highly regarded novelists to produce new versions of many Shakespeare tales. Edward St Aubyn has tackled Shakespeare’s King Lear with his novel Dunbar.

In St Aubyn’s version, the monarch Lear is now a modern-day oligarch, the billionaire media mogul Henry Dunbar. Like Lear, Dunbar has three adult daughters, and he hands over his kingdom/empire to the elder two, Abby and Megan, cutting out the youngest, Florence, even though he loves her dearly. Abby and Megan are a wicked pair. Even if you don’t find their sadistic sexual practices alarming (yup, these pages are steamy), you’re not likely to sympathize with them as you learn how they’ve had their father drugged and then sequestered in a nursing home in a remote area of England. “These [two elder] Dunbar girls were arrogant, imperious, and tough, but toughness was not strength, imperiousness was not authority, and their arrogance was an unearned pride born of an unearned income.” (73)

Meanwhile, daughter Florence lives with her family in the United States and doesn’t really care if she inherits the family business. She has what she considers a more than adequate bankroll. “She was only capable of being independent because she had been adored in the first place, but a man as possessive as her father could not experience her autonomy as a compliment, or protect himself from mistaking her sisters’ acquisitiveness for love.” (43) Although she doesn’t relish a battle, Florence enters the arena with her two sisters out of concern that her father is being mistreated. What ensues seems scripted for an action movie, complete with suspenseful chase scenes.

You can, of course, buzz by all this conflict in your reading and busy yourself mentally by pairing up the characters in Dunbar with their Shakespearean counterparts. (As I read, I had always in the back of my brain the famed plot of the drama.) Dunbar’s lawyer Wilson is pretty clearly King Lear’s Kent, for example, and Dunbar’s physician, Dr. Bob, is Edmund. I liked the transformation of King Lear’s Fool into the retired comedian Peter, a sidekick to Dunbar in nursing-home imprisonment. Peter is funny in a grim way, but Shakespeare’s Fool has a lot better lines.

Face it: rewriting Shakespeare is a daunting task. Anne Tyler tried it with Vinegar Girl: The Taming of the Shrew Retold in 2016, and disappointed me, though Tyler is usually formidable as a novelist. With King Lear, a modern writer has to summon the extraordinary pathos of familial disloyalty as well as the ultimate futility of earthly life. St Aubyn doesn’t quite do that for me, though his Dunbar would be a serviceable standalone novel about the excesses of today’s moneyed classes—perhaps even a commentary on Donald Trump. While Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter inspires constant awe, St Aubyn’s prose soars only occasionally, as in this passage: “Nothing in his [Dunbar’s] ascent to power had prepared him for the experience of the last weeks and in particular of the last few days, which seemed to have overrun his mind with a kind of knowledge that he was unable to make sense of. Like a deluge rushing onto a flat, rocky plain, with no slope to direct it or soil to absorb it, it had obliterated all familiar landmarks without bringing any new life in return. How could she [Florence] reach him in the middle of that sterile flood?” (177)

I recommend reading Dunbar as simply a contemporary novel. If, however, you want a truly great retelling of King Lear, read Jane Smiley’s 1991 masterpiece, A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Drabble Tackles Mortality

The Dark Flood Rises     Margaret Drabble     (2016)

By taking her title and epigraph from DH Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death,” Margaret Drabble alerts readers that there’s going to be a lot about mortality in this book.

Drabble’s novels over the past fifty-plus years have often related to the period of life that she is in at the time of the writing. Since she’s now in her late 70s, The Dark Flood Rises features mostly characters who are advanced in age. It’s an ensemble cast, with Fran Stubbs as the one whose interior musings we learn most about.

Fran, who works as a consultant on housing for the elderly, is seventy-something but doesn’t want to retire. She still drives all around Britain inspecting housing facilities and attending conferences. Drabble takes us inside Fran’s head, where we hear her extended thoughts on architecture and traffic, on Vikings and soft-boiled eggs. Given her profession, Fran can’t help but have her attention directed to the subjects of old age and death quite frequently. In addition to Fran, we also meet an extended circle of her colleagues, family, friends, and friends of friends, who have an assortment of ailments and personal losses. Most live in Britain, but some are expats living off the coast of Spain in the Canary Islands, a popular tourist and retirement destination for Britons.

The plot of The Dark Flood Rises is somewhat diffuse but nevertheless engrossing, as Fran helps out her bedridden ex-husband, her son (whose girlfriend has died suddenly), and friends in various states of ill health. Drabble describes Fran as living “in the world of obituaries now, in the malicious crepuscular light of memorial services.” (178) Meanwhile, elderly Britons in the Canary Islands are surrounded by picture-postcard delights, but the clock ticks for them also. All these characters are drawn in detail as they turn to drugs or alcohol or denial or opera or religious ritual or adaptive technologies to ease their situations. This summary makes the novel sound grim and macabre, but it actually has many comic incidents:  Fran getting her car stuck in a muddy field, her ex-husband trying to seduce his young caregiver, her friend Josephine teaching an adult education class.

Along the way we get magnificent tours of the English landscape and extended historical observations about the Canaries. The language is very rich, as you might expect from Drabble. Her cumulative adjectives are especially impressive—for instance, “the flowing sunlit electric-green weed-fronded depths of the slowly flowing water” or “the faded painted peeling pale blue of the woodwork.”

Bubbling below the surface narrative of The Dark Flood Rises, alarming destructive forces on a planetary level reflect the grappling of individuals with transience. Flood waters inundate Britain, perhaps due to global climate change. Hordes of refugees fleeing the Middle East and Africa point to failures of political systems. Volcanic and seismic activity in the Canary Islands seem to indicate that Earth itself is groaning tectonically. Is the apocalypse near? Are people too obsessed with their own petty concerns—or even with major humanitarian issues—to notice? Is it better to over-prepare for death or to under-prepare? Is a lingering death or a sudden death preferable? In The Dark Flood Rises, life churns on, but disaster lurks in the rivers and under the mountains.

Readers over the age of about 50 will likely appreciate The Dark Flood Rises most. However, for readers at all stages of life, it’s an excellent examination of the vagaries of aging, set against the large-scale environmental and ethical challenges that humanity faces.

A Cure for Loneliness

Our Souls at Night     Kent Haruf     (2015)

Right in the first chapter of Our Souls at Night we know the premise: One evening in May, elderly widow Addie Moore asks elderly widower Louis Waters if he would come to her house occasionally and spend the night, not for sex but for conversation and companionship. Addie and Louis are neighbors in the fictional small town of Holt, Colorado, and both are intensely lonely. She has a son, and he has a daughter, but these adult children live hours away.

Addie and Louis embark on their conversational adventure, scandalizing the townsfolk but finding joy in each other’s company. Through their dialogue, which forms the core of this book, we learn about their family histories, their disappointments, their secret pleasures. When Addie’s son and daughter-in-law have marital and business troubles, their young son comes to stay with Addie for the summer. Addie and Louis are able to cheer up this forlorn grandchild with unpretentious entertainments, but, alas, the magic of their summer together doesn’t last.

All you punctuation geeks out there should be aware that author Kent Haruf uses no quotation marks in his writing. This practice causes reader confusion once in a while, but I think I understand Haruf’s motives. The text as it appears on the page is exceedingly spare and unadorned, just as the narrative is simple and stripped down. We get the essence of the story, the bare essentials, which nevertheless say plenty about issues like friendship, trust, love, and family duty. Every single word of Our Souls at Night seems carefully chosen to enhance the whole book.

Haruf depicts small-town America deftly in this novel. (At 179 pages, I’d say that it’s more of a novella.) He doesn’t stereotype the characters or sentimentalize their relationships. Rather, he creates complex, fallible people trying to make sense of their lot in life. Addie and Louis carve out their own version of happiness in spite of setbacks; readers can tuck their story away as a tutorial in how to cope with old age and the inevitability of mortality.

This understated jewel of a book is one you should not miss.

Sadly, Kent Haruf died in 2014, shortly after completing Our Souls at Night. His previous novels (all set in Holt, Colorado) include a loose trilogy (Plainsong, Eventide, and Benediction), Where You Once Belonged, and The Tie that Binds, plus the photobook West of Last Chance (with photographer Peter Brown).