Vivid and Harrowing

Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When I heard that various top writers had been asked to tackle the big Shakespeare plays and turn them into prose fiction I really wasn't interested. I mean, quite apart from the small detail of Shakespeare being a genius, he wrote for the theatre; it's called drama, and with good reason. But then someone said Edward St. Aubyn had made a very good fist of 'King Lear', which triggered the happy memory of once, a million years ago, sitting round a small table with Edward himself studying - of all things - King Lear, when we were both students trying to get into university.

The thing about Edward St. Aubyn is that he is extremely clever. Round that small table he did not speak often, but when he did all assembled jaws hit the floor because what he said was so original, so intelligent, so apt. And so it is with his novel 'Dunbar' in which St. Aubyn has proved that the impossible feat of turning Shakespeare into a modern novel is in fact possible.

The novel is set in the high-octane world of money. Henry Dunbar, once the all-powerful head of a global media corporation, has handed over the care of his company to his eldest daughters, Abby and Meghan, only to regret the decision very quickly as they freeze him out. While Florence, his youngest daughter, plays the Cordelia role, of not needing to make declarations about a love that is intrinsic and self-evident and at first suffering for her integrity. What Edward St. Aubyn brings to this chaos is his deep knowledge of dysfunctional individuals - the same knowledge that makes his autobiographical Melrose novels, charting sexual abuse and drug use, at times almost too unbearably painful to read. Henry Dunbar is a man in meltdown. His evil eldest daughters are so far down the road of avarice and cruelty that they are beyond reason or salvation. As the story unfolds Henry's world steadily crumbles, taking his personality with it.

The novel reaches its climax when Dunbar flees from the Lake District care-home in which he has been incarcerated into the wild and hostile cold of the surrounding landscape. Lear in the storm becomes Dunbar disintegrating mentally and physically as he attempts to escape from the clutches of his grasping, sadistic offspring, with only a fellow inmate - a demented alcoholic comedian - as company. Florence alone has the power to save him, but there is no easy path to her doing so.

Evil eventually turns in on itself, as Shakespeare knew and as St. Aubyn demonstrates beautifully in his denouement. Greed makes the greedy greedier. The sisters fight like the demons they are and start to implode; while goodness surfaces via Florence, in the form of the love that never needed words to be made true and the elixir of forgiveness that lies at its heart. Dunbar is a powerful story, meticulously and vividly told, offering a fresh and plausible perspective on one of the greatest and most harrowing plays ever written.



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