MixedThe Financial TimesDunbar offers a reinvention of Shakespeare that is both free and relatively faithful … St Aubyn isn’t much interested in remixing the play’s ingredients, preferring to serve it to us straight, with a dash of added gall. Despite the 21st-century trappings — its characters employ ex-paramilitary bodyguards rather than knights, and prefer Fabergé eggs to real ones — this is Lear as curdled folktale, a fable of fatherly neglect and daughterly cruelty … Malevolently enjoyable as much of this is, the novel never feels sure which key it’s meant to be in, or in which direction it’s going...Part of the issue might be the book’s globe-trotting setting. Transplanting Lear into a world of transatlantic media buyouts and high-stakes helicopter chases, St Aubyn — so meticulous and merciless about a precise cross-section of the English moneyed classes — seems a little adrift.
