An author whose books are brutal and exquisite novels of inheritance, wealth, families, and cruelty, he has never hesitated to inflict pain on his audiences, and the result here is a moving, brutal and apt adaptation of the play for the Hogarth Shakespeare series ... One thread of Lear that St. Aubyn picks up beautifully is the play's awful and intimate relationship to nature. Like Lear, Dunbar projects his inner confusion on outside objects ... Aubyn is one of the few authors I can think of whose novels are magnificent in spite of not having something I always assumed was necessary in great novels: generosity and empathy for people outside the protagonist. In fact, perhaps one reason King Lear suits him so beautifully is because no one in the play has anything like the pull of Lear himself, just as no one stands up to Patrick Melrose in St. Aubyn's autobiographical novel ... Aubyn has built a career out of family pain, and his language has a wonderful poetic density, dry, expansive, self-conscious, and savage, all at once.
In Lear, only Lear changes; everyone else stays two-dimensional, as frightful (Goneril and Regan) or virtuous (Cordelia) as they are at the start. St Aubyn chooses to maintain this intense, singular focus. His Lear is Henry Dunbar, the head of an international media cooperation – like Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch – and is brilliantly awful ...other characters, even minor ones, are also wittily and cleverly updated ... St Aubyn has always been a surprising writer with the power to shock: here, we know the plot already, and clever though Dr Bob’s machinations are, we can never suspect that things will end well for him ... St Aubyn’s Dunbar, in contrast, simply recounts the tale of how painful it is when an old, powerful man loses everything. It’s still a sad story, but it is also a more limited one than this immensely talented writer can tell.
Dunbar is the latest installment in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, a collection of modern prose retellings of Shakespeare’s plays...It’s an intriguing matchmaking exercise, but the pairing of St. Aubyn with Lear seems predestined … The immediate pleasure of Dunbar is in St. Aubyn’s mimicry of Shakespeare’s gift for banter. Dunbar and Peter spar back and forth, Peter adopting various guises as a career impersonator, Dunbar struggling to collect his fragmented thoughts. Peter’s patter is the classic nonsense-wisdom of the tragic clown, updated for modern vaudeville … St. Aubyn’s own women characters are much more nuanced, and it’s hard not to long for a more thorough engagement with female ambition. But St. Aubyn rivals Shakespeare in his magnificently scathing language.
...a flimsy, antic, disappointing adaptation of King Lear. Like a meteorite, it contains trace elements of its fiery origins, trace elements of brilliance; but it arrives to us inert, just barely smoking ... Take Dunbar's daughters, Abigail, Megan and Florence, the characters that most plainly expose the book's shortcomings. Abigail and Megan are mere psychopaths, farcically violent, both in need of 'ever-escalating doses of perversion to stimulate their jaded appetites.' Florence is correspondingly one-dimensional, a noble cypher ... Our idolatry of Shakespeare can feel overblown until you encounter an adaptation like this; every competition is lost as it's begun.
If it all sounds a bit melodramatic, that’s because it is — Shakespeare (whoever he/they might have been) had the advantage of a facility with language the likes of which has not been seen in English literature for centuries. While St. Aubyn is an elegant and at times even superlative prose stylist, his 21st century verbiage cannot live up to his predecessor’s ... Similarly, unlike the finale of Lear, the race to Dunbar’s finish line would make an excellent episode of Dynasty even though St. Aubyn has cut out a great deal of the political conspiring from King Lear; he can’t cut out the chase without sacrificing meaning. Fortunately, St. Aubyn shines at skewering the rich and profligate ... that is where the current author shines his light most beautifully — and also most usefully: on the aftermath of tragedy.
Dunbar, not unlike the play itself, turns out to be a thriller: a crime thriller, a corporate mega-mogul thriller and even, at least in one horrific scene, a sadistic thriller. Betrayals are betrayed, boardroom machinations proliferate, monstrous conspiracies beget more monstrousness ... With one exception, Dunbar — like the genre novel it mostly resembles — keeps the story and loses the meaning. The exception is the long central passage where, as Dunbar wanders half-hallucinating in the Cumbrian wilderness, the only dialogue is between the mind and itself. A heartbreaking scrim of the broken and unspoken, image upon image, flames up...Here we can feel the writer feeling, and with Lawrentian clarity: a distillation of harrowed human pity. Retelling becomes reliving, a fleeting wisp of Shakespeare’s elusive breath. All the rest, in the usual way of thriller fiction, is puppetry and plot.
Readers familiar with the play will recognize its elements, but Mr. St. Aubyn has mostly dispensed with the political machinations and fashioned a vicious critique of media empires and — a favorite target of the author’s — the lust for power and wretched behavior of the wealthy and privileged ... Dunbar maintains a frenetic pace throughout, an appropriate choice for a work about type-A sorts who will stop at nothing to satisfy their worldly and sexual appetites. Mr. St. Aubyn writes one masterful description after another, as when he describes Dunbar as the high priest of tabloid entertainment for the masses, the man 'who placed the wafer on their outstretched tongues.' If Dunbar’s late-novel epiphany and a couple of other plot resolutions are too abrupt, the book is still an enjoyable, breakneck ride through the misdeeds of one of the greatest stages of fools you’ll ever meet.
Dunbar 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.
Dunbar is King Lear re-imagined in the modern world. St. Aubyn — the acerbically witty author of the Patrick Melrose novels about family wealth, abuse, and deep psychological scars — is a nice match to take on Lear ...probably appeal more to those who remember the basic plot and premise of King Lear from a high school reading, rather than Shakespeare die-hards who deeply love what some consider the bard’s greatest tragedy ...first fifty pages of this novel show St. Aubyn at his best ...backstabbing intrigue is mildly interesting, but it’s too convoluted for such a short novel — it feels glossed over and cursory ... It’s a good read if you’ve enjoyed the series so far, or possibly a good starting point if you haven’t dove in quite yet.
Edward St. Aubyn’s new novel is a retelling of King Lear, an undertaking that the widely admired British author has approached with plenty of cheek. Dunbar is brisk, biting and, despite the untimely deaths of at least two innocents, easy to like … Though we know what awaits Florence and Henry, St. Aubyn manages to craft an inspired, allusive quasi-thriller … Dunbar works as both a moral tale and a biting satire of the 1 percent, a novel of depth and wit, with just the right amount of irreverence for its august source material.
St. Aubyn is a highly economic writer, and this is a compliment: his novels are single-sitting reads. When he addresses himself to the excesses of King Lear, then, it is little surprise that he trims so much. What is a surprise, however, is how much of the texture of the play he manages to smuggle back into his apparently unpoetic and light novel. That is: He messes up the Shakespearean plot (but who cares about Shakespeare’s plots, anyway?) but gets something deeply right about the language (and who doesn’t care about Shakespeare’s language?) … That so much is pastiche does not mean it is not moving, and, in these twisted repetitions and echoes, St. Aubyn catches something of the peculiar doubling of this play in which all things are connected strangely, and all things are an echo.
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.
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.
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.
