QUEEN MACBETH, feminist thriller set in medieval Scotland starring a reimagined Lady Macbeth

QUEEN MACBETH
VAL McDERMID
Atlantic Monthly Press
$22.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Shakespeare fed us the myth of the Macbeths as murderous conspirators. But now Val McDermid drags the truth out of the shadows, exposing the patriarchal prejudices of history. Expect the unexpected . . .

A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions—a healer, a weaver and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her—because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth.

As the net closes in, we discover a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it is one strong, charismatic woman, who survived loss and jeopardy to outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and power-hungry men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm a man. An old, white one.

I'm sorry to disappoint those who now expect me to whine about "ruining Shakespeare" and "making up feminism ahistorically" and suchlike nonsense, but I myownself think this novella is telling not only a cracking good story, but bringing a long-ignored reality to light. Women, modern, medieval, or ancient, were and are not passive, pointless victims or tiresome termagants. They are, were, and always have been people with agency, possessed of skills and ideas that motivate and support changing their world.

Every story that supports this reality, presents it without a dingy scum of patriarchal judgment of those women for exercising their power, gets my enthusiastic support. Queen Macbeth is no exception.

Riffing on the great stories of history and mythology is currently very much à la mode. The trend picked up steam most recently after The Song of Achilles appeared early in the teens. It was never exactly ignored, after all...John Erskine wrote Arthurian retelling Tristan and Isolde: Restoring Palamede in 1932; Thorne Smith wrote modern satires with horny, drunken Greek Gods until his death in 1934; Tolkien remixed Anglo-Saxon epic poetry to some modest success in the 1950s. The urge to put one's own stamp onto the greatest stories of the culture is never absent. Imagine all the lost Iliads wrought by bards before writing was reinvented! (Side note: why has Jodi Taylor not sent the disaster magnets back to record some of those?) The great plays of Athens's Golden Age retold the myths, too, and that was six hundred years before the common era is reckoned to have begun.

So a Scottish crime writer revisiting Lady Macbeth's truly awful characterization at Shakespeare's hands is unsurprising. Make that Scot an outspoken feminist lesbian and, well, go figure that she would find this retelling irresistible. I wish I'd loved it instead of simply, and inevitably, admiring it. Using her widely lauded storytelling chops to re-center the Bechdel-test failing character as a powerful ruler in her own right is delightful; the way she contextualizes her choice in her Author's note made me almost giddy with anticipation.

Then came reality swinging her mace of office.

Choosing to use Scottish words...well, okay, you're Scottish, the story's Scottish, but the huge majority of the world's readers have never seen, and don't care to see, those words. Climbing the hill with a Glossary is fine; putting said glossary at the end of an ebook is a worse idea than in a tree book. In the ebook, a hyperlink to the entry with that word is possible; links that take you there and back are possible; neither was made. I did not use the glossary once during the read and lost not only fine nuance but faith that I was being considered as a guest in this world. It feels very much like the divisive, arrogant attitude regrettably common...in every sense of the word...in internet discourse about cultural identity: "I don't owe you an explanation of my culture/language/art/thing under discussion!"

Then you do nor care if I, or any "outsider," understand you? Okay. Then you'll mostly get ignored.

Author McDermid and/or publisher(s) just put a hard limit on how many people will slug it out with unhelpfully untranslated Scottishness. The tree book might be a better choice than an ebook for those who can't or won't simply skip past wotds they don't know.

Pity, that; Gruoch as reimagined is a kickass character. Her struggles matter.