This is my first foray into the Hogarth Shakespeare project, but hopefully it won't be my last. I love the idea of pairing contemporary authors with Shakespearean plays, and, although I haven't read much from Jo Nesbø, Macbeth envisioned as a crime novel is a premise that appealed to me.



I loved the way Nesbø writes, almost overwrites, Macbeth as he pulls the reader into the dark and twisted world he has created. I especially loved the declining town the story is set in, and I think fans of Scandi-Noir won't be disappointed. This town, and its corrupt police force, are the perfect setting for the greed and ambition at the heart of Macbeth, and although some of the narrator's references were a bit obvious, I thought the updated setting added a lot to the relevance of these themes. I liked the addition to the story of drug addiction, which, again, could be a bit obvious at times, but which also added to the instability of Macbeth in interesting ways.

Nesbø didn't always seem to know what to do with the supernatural elements of Shakespeare's Macbeth, and I thought some approaches worked better than others. I thought his borrowing of Shakespeare's ghosts worked really well, and I liked the way Hecate's knowledge had worldly explanations but still remained something to be feared. I was less convinced by the other 'witches', especially Strega, whose description I found unnecessarily offensive but also confusing.

Macbeth is a glorious slice of crime noir, and I (perhaps controversially) would love to see more crime fiction of this length. Women characters are often done a disservice in this genre, and I was disappointed that more of the characters weren't gender-swapped (it is never made clear that the story's setting bars this from being a possibility). Despite some initial scepticism, however, I soon came to love what Nesbø had done with Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth.

I really enjoyed reading this one. I think Jo Nesbø has captured the heart of Shakespeare's Macbeth, and that was always bound to be a good read. I often find it difficult to differentiate between characters when reading a play, so I like to read Shakespeare's plays with the actors from a performance in mind, but I think that next time I pick up his Macbeth, it will be Nesbø's characters that I imagine.