Dunbar

July 15, 2017
A brilliant reworking of William Shakespeare's King Lear for our day.Henry Dunbar, bearing a proud Scottish name and lamenting declining fortunes and capacities, may or may not be "more sinn'd against than sinning." At the outset of St. Aubyn's (A Clue to the Exit, 2015, etc.) retelling, shuffling the order of the play, Lear is in a pricey English sanitarium, fuming that his hydra-headed business has been wrested from him: "They stole my empire and now they send me stinking lilies," he howls, with no one but a fool named Peter to listen to him. Peter reminds him sympathetically, singsong, that he might as well cheer up, since the next step is the narrow grave: "How lightly we have tripped down those stairs, like Fred Astaires, twirling a scythe instead of a cane!" As in the original play, Dunbar is a sputtering font of righteous rage, indignant that daughters Abby and Megan have outmaneuvered him, incapable of separating out his "good" daughter, Florence, from all those he reckons have done him wrong; Florence, meanwhile, compounds his wrath by gladly living on her own out in the wilds of Wyoming, cut out of profits and out of the will. There's but one thing to do, Dunbar decides, and that's to bust out of psychiatric prison, go off the meds, and range the moorlands to work out a horrific realization: "there was no one else to blame for the treachery of everything; the horror, in the end, the horror was the way his mind worked." St. Aubyn uses the play as a guide more than a template at points, but the basic truth remains that the best of Shakespeare stands up readily to adaptation in every age, from West Side Story to Ran and Scotland, PA. St. Aubyn's recasting to make someone reminiscent of Rupert Murdoch at times, and perhaps Donald Trump at others, brings the Bard gracefully into our own day. A superb, assured reminder that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods--and that ain't good.

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August 21, 2017
In St. Aubyn’s retelling of King Lear, Canadian media mogul Henry Dunbar finds himself drugged and imprisoned in a sanatorium somewhere in deepest, darkest Cumbria by his two pernicious elder daughters and their sycophantic celebrity doctor. The monstrous girls intend a hostile takeover of their father’s empire. (Their younger sister, Florence, has denounced this empire, and Dunbar has, in turn, disinherited her.) After duping his nurses into thinking he’s swallowed his meds, Dunbar regains his wits just enough to escape from the sanatorium with the help of a fellow inmate, an entertaining, drunken fool named Peter. But Peter is caught, and there ensues a race among sisters, friends, and enemies to find Dunbar as the old man stumbles away through the countryside in a storm. St. Aubyn (the Patrick Melrose novels) eliminates or cleverly amalgamates characters from Shakespeare’s original, glossing over the messy political intrigue of the play’s middle parts. He concentrates on Dunbar’s suffering and inner conflict as he confronts his own demise and realizes his mistake in rejecting the love of the principled Florence. The end of this contemporary version is abrupt and unsatisfying, but the tale is the perfect vehicle for what this author does best, which is to expose repellent, privileged people and their hollow dynasties in stellar prose.

September 15, 2017
British writer St. Aubyn (A Clue to the Exit, 2015), prized for his lacerating wit, fluency in family dysfunction, and fascination with consciousness, joins the delectable Hogarth Shakespeare lineup, following Tracy Chevalier's variation on Othello, New Boy (2017). In his complexly vicious and profusely hallucinatory reimagining, King Lear is a besieged, aging, present-day billionaire, Henry Dunbar, with three daughters and a powerful global media empire. His two older, wildly depraved daughters have conspired with Dunbar's unsavory personal physician to take over the Dunbar kingdom, cutting out Florence, their despised younger half-sister. The evil ones secretly hustle their drugged father off to a remote Lake District sanatorium, but he manages to escape with the help of a famous alcoholic comedian and exemplary Fool. While the media monarch raves in mad despair on the snowy heath, Florence races to find him before her murderous sisters can complete their vile plan. St. Aubyn's resplendent rendering of nature's grand drama and Dunbar's shattered psyche, Florence's love, and her sisters' malevolence make for a stylish, embroiling, and acid tragedy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2017

The author of the beloved Patrick Melrose series joins the Hogarth Shakespeare fold with a contemporary retelling of King Lear. St. Aubyn's Lear is the wealthy and powerful Henry Dunbar, who is placed by his three daughters in the best Swiss sanatorium money can buy when he has a breakdown of sorts. Eager to reclaim his empire, he breaks out but comes up against the ambitions of his two avaricious elder offspring.

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