A thoroughly enjoyable Lear for the 20th century. Dunbar is not a king but a Canadian media mogul whose daughters, Megan and Abigail, are manoeuvring themselves into position to take over his empire. They have had him committed to a care home in the Lake District where he is losing his mind due to the cocktail of drugs he is being drip fed. St Aubyn does a tremendous job of depicting Dunbar's descent into madness as he becomes lost in the wilderness of the fells.

"All the things he had ever felt ashamed of seemed to have been distilled into the elixir of his own cruelty. An eye for an eye: that was the law. They were holding him down to clamp his head in a vice and slice his eyelids off. No, please, not that. As he climbed higher his vision grew more blurred, feeding his fear of being blinded by the venom of his accumulated crimes. He clutched his head between his powerful hands, to show how tightly trapped it was, but also in the hope of somehow finding the strength to wrench it aside, to avoid letting the corrosive liquid fall, drop by blistering drop, on to his precious, defenceless eyes. No, please, please, please. His heart was bursting with anguish. He scrambled up the last few yards on all fours and collapsed on the brow of the hill.........He would have to linger on, cattle-prodded through a labyrinthine slaughterhouse of hunger, exposure, infection and insanity or, worse, be rescued, to be paraded at his daughters' triumph, like a conquered king in chains, pelted with filth and rotten food by the jeering populace."

Dunbar's estranged daughter, Florence, is trying to find him before her sisters do and it's not difficult to imagine Dunbar staggering around the fells with two helicopters in hot pursuit. It's not necessary to have an intimate knowledge of the play. It may be enjoyed on a different level if you are at least familiar with Shakespeare's characters but I'm sure it can be enjoyed as a bittersweet black comedy with no previous knowledge whatsoever.

5 stars because there are very few books that I want to re-read and even fewer that I want to re-read almost immediately.

With thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK for a review copy.

This is the first I've read in the Hogarth Shakespeare project, where acclaimed authors retell the stories.
Dunbar is set in the cut-throat world of business, share dealing and empire building; Henry Dunbar is the modern King Lear.
The themes of King Lear - madness, wisdom, foolishness, justice and fate and fortune are all explored. Abby and Megan are the scheming sisters plotting a takeover of the Dunbar empire, while the disinherited Florence demonstrates true love for her father.
This is a faithful reworking of Shakespeare's yet with a fresh slant. Well worth a read, and may well encourage you to pick up the original Shakespeare.

The titular character Dunbar is an 80-yr old megalo-maniacal media tycoon who's burned bridges, stabbed backs and stomped heads and shoulders of minions in order to get to the pinnacle of his success. Having neglected wives, children, friends and outside interests, Dunbar now finds himself at the opposite end of a hostile takeover, under attack by his personal physician, evil daughters, and other trusted advisors. I was a quarter of the way through before this story started making sense to me, what with the multiple point-of-views within single pages and chaotic pitch; and it wasn't until discovering the publisher is Hogarth Shakespeare in the Afterward that I understood this to be an adaptation of King Lear. The writing reminded me of Ayn Rand's, with its two-dimensional characters and hysterical plot.

Dunbar is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series – a series of commissioned novels to re-interpret Shakespeare plays in the modern world. Dunbar is King Lear.

The novel is set in the twilight days of Henry Dunbar, a Canadian media mogul. His two elder daughters, Megan and Abigail, have committed him to a secure nursing home in the Lake District having bribed a doctor to declare him insane. Their goal is to seize control of his multi-billion dollar business empire. Meanwhile, his third daughter, Florence, has fallen out with the family and lives in gilded seclusion on a ranch in Wyoming, cut out of the family business but seemingly still able to access the untold wealth. Florence decides to rescue Dunbar, but is thwarted as Dunbar has already made his escape from the nursing home…

King Lear works, as a play, because it uses the medium of theatre, the viewer accepts the difference in cultural values, and because at heart it was about language rather than plot. Retelling the story as a 21st century novel is problematic on a number of fronts. Firstly, the plot feels worn out; we know what happens. Secondly, Elizabethans may have felt sympathy towards an old king, abused by his ambitious daughters – but in today’s society it is hard to feel sympathy for a global media plutocrat. Thirdly, whereas on the stage we accept the immediacy of the action, by moving to a novel we feel more need of backstories that are simply not there in Dunbar; without them the characters’ motives are unknown and it just feels like a lot of running around furiously. And finally, no harm to Edward St Aubyn, but the language in Dunbar is ordinary.

Overall, this feels like an unnecessary work that was commissioned by a patron rather than being led by the writer’s own heart. It re-tells a story that didn’t need retelling, through the wrong medium and focussing on the things in the original that mattered least. I didn’t believe in the story, the characters or the world they lived in. It has its moments – some of the scenes out in the Cumbrian wilderness were effective and the drip-feeding of Peter Walker’s fate was very well done, but not enough to really come together as a work in its own right.

Two and a half stars

This is one of the Hogarth Press series of Shakespeare modern adaptations and, in this novel, we have Edward St Aubyn (best known for the Patrick Melrose novels) re-imagining “King Lear.” Now, I must admit that St Aubyn is one of my favourite authors and so I am probably more inclined to enjoy this than those readers who are looking at it from the point of view of the original and how it has been portrayed. St Aubyn has to be in my top ten favourite authors and I never open a new novel by him without feeling a shiver of anticipation.

Here, we have Lear as Henry Dunbar, a Canadian media mogul, who has been sent for a ‘lovely long rest,’ at Meadowmeade, a care home in the wilds of the English countryside, where he is befriended by the alcoholic comedian, Peter Walker. Walker brings humour to this tragedy, as he encourages the befuddled Dunbar to escape. Having disinherited his beloved younger daughter, Florence, Dunbar has given the reins of power to his sadistic, vicious and spoilt daughters, Abigail and Megan. They are planning a coup to take total control, but their plans are thrown into disarray by Dunbar’s sudden disappearance. Along with Dunar's personal physician, ‘Dr Bob,’ they set off in pursuit, while Florence is intent on reaching him first and spiriting him to safety.

St Aubyn uses all his dark wit in this novel, with an interesting cast of characters. Dunbar has a sense of betrayal, compounded by his own guilt and grief. Meanwhile, those he betrayed - Florence and Dunbar’s long serving friend, and business ally, Wilson, who was summarily sacked by him, along with Wilson’s son, Chris, are the only ones who really care what happens. Even if you read this as a novel, without knowing about the Shakespeare connection, it works really well. It is truly modern; full of hostile takeovers, with everyone trying to stab everyone in the back, out for themselves, and with a real sense of family betrayal. I personally think St Aubyn does a good job of getting a sense of the original story and moving it to the present, but obviously this depends upon your own view of how well this is realised.

This is the first of the Hogarth Press Shakespeare novels that I have read, but I am now interested to read more in this series. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

Modern day Shakespeare adaptations are just not a good idea. St Aubyn shows why with this try-hard, unfunny, uninteresting reimagining of Lear - pointless, boring, a waste of time.

I first read King Lear when I studied it at school, it is my favourite Shakespeare play despite its deep darkness. It is an epic tale and tragedy, a traumatic, troubling, and gruesome story of a man more sinned against than sinning. Edward St. Aubyn has a monumental task in writing a contemporary reinterpretation that can match how I feel about the original and its emotional place in my heart. The truth is he cannot do that, but he has captured distinct elements from the original and weaved a different beast, beautifully written, imbued with the darkest of humour, and which cannot fail to enthrall. It has a Canadian Media Mogul in his eighties, Henry Dunbar, a flawed man, used to being in a position of command, whose rage and temper has him disinheriting his beloved youngest daughter Florence in favour of his ambitious and greedy older daughters, Abigail and Megan, with their instinct to flatter and ability to be disingenuous. Aided by Dr Bob, Dunbar's physician, Abigail and Megan betray their father, divesting him of all power and have conspired to have him hidden and medicated in a psychiatric/care facility, Meadowmeade, in the Lake District.

St. Aubyn's most masterful creation in this novel is the raging alcoholic and depressed comedian, Peter Walker, the fool to Dunbar, a man from whom insights tumble out, and who never once plays his own authentic self in his efforts to escape from himself. He is busy being a myriad of other characters, such as John Wayne and a Nazi. Peter hatches an escape plan which they manage to put into action. Dunbar has a fragile sense of self, he wants his old life and position back. He ends up alone, he feels an aching need to be solitary, to meet himself for the first time as he is. He is metaphorically naked, frozen amidst an icy snowstorm. He becomes conscious of his misdeeds and sin, his part in shaping his eldest daughters and his shame in his corporate actions. He is undone by his catastrophic errors in the sacking of his close friend and advisor Wilson and his unbearable betrayal of Florence, the two people who really cared about him. In the meantime, Abigail and Megan call on their vast resources to locate Dunbar to ensure he is no threat to their future plans. Florence is determined to find her father first.

This is a terrific reinterpretation which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It is dark, intelligent, comic and funny, particularly when it dwells on the twisted sexual proclivities of Megan and Abigail, and Dr Bob, their sexual plaything. It captures the heinous actions that often go into the building of the modern corporations, just how Dunbar came to be who he is, his dawning horror that he is the architect of his own desperate misfortune. I think there will be those who will not like this reinterpretation, but I don't compare it with the original, I see it as a work of art in its own right, and the author has done a great job using King Lear as the source of inspiration. Brilliant and highly recommended! Many thanks to Random House Vintage.

Dunbar is a modern retelling of King Lear in which Henry Dunbar, a Canadian media mogul, finds himself battling two of his daughters after they get him confined to a care home in the Lake District whilst they take over his company. At the same time, his youngest daughter Florence, who he recently removed from the company due to her lack of interest in his business, is on a mission with some of his other former allies to find and save her father before her scheming half-sisters succeed in their plan.

The novel is St Aubyn’s contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, which aims to retell Shakespeare’s stories in novels by bestselling modern writers. The series has been a varied one, and Dunbar is another instalment with its hits and misses. King Lear is a fairly obvious choice for a business-related retelling and this world of Murdoch-esque media empires strikes a modern chord whilst giving Dunbar a questionable morality even in the face of the more overt amorality of his eldest daughters.

One of the main issues with the novel is the fact that the plot line—old man wrongfully imprisoned in care home and escapes, whilst daughters battle for power and deal with their own personal issues—is more darkly comic than tragic. This retelling takes the ridiculousness of Lear with its infamous Fool and dashing about in the dark and doesn’t quite make it feel more than the narrative of a dark comedy drama (there is also a similarity to one of the plot lines in Cloud Atlas). Even keeping somewhat to the ending of King Lear, the novel’s ending does not feel tragic, particularly as Florence, the Cordelia figure, isn’t really given enough space to be anyone (though the same could be thought about Cordelia).

This isn’t to say that Dunbar can’t be an enjoyable read. The transformation of Lear's Fool into Peter Walker, alcoholic TV comedian who Dunbar befriends in the care home, is a good choice, and the way his storyline gets bolstered by some of Gloucester’s from the original text adds nastiness to Abigail and Megan, St Aubyn’s Goneril and Regan. Indeed the earlier parts, with Dunbar and Peter’s strangely witty conversations and references to Freud are a clever opening and more enjoyable than Lear’s discussions with the Fool in the play.

Dunbar turns King Lear into a dark caper for the most part, and whilst this might make it more enjoyable for people who don’t enjoy the tragedy of Lear, it is a retelling that has definitely chosen some elements of the original over others in a specific way. In this context, the exaggerated villainy of the modern counterparts to Goneril and Regan makes them almost comic bad guys, sometimes too busy having sex to keep an eye on their plotting, and Dunbar is not so much caught out in a storm than rambling around the Lake District. There’s no reason why King Lear shouldn’t be turned into this kind of story, of course, and Dunbar is a decent novel, but it doesn’t really say or do anything interesting with Lear beyond highlighting elements of ridicule.

'Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly?'

Apart from a misstep with Othello, the Hogarth Shakespeare series of modern re-engagements with the plays has been excellent to date, and this is no different. It's both faithful and yet iconoclastic, and while purists may hate it, St Aubyn has made some bold and audacious moves to re-imagine a modern Lear as a Canadian media mogul, incarcerated in a care home by his wicked daughters and making a bid for freedom with Peter Walker, an old comedian who speaks in many voices but rarely his own.

One of the things that this re-telling achieves is to bring out the latent comedy that always hovers beneath the surface of Lear but which modern performances tend to erase given its canonical status. This is Lear by way of Beckett - a bit Godot, perhaps more Endgame, a tragicomedy for sure, and one which made me laugh out loud at points (Megan, the Regan character, and her outrageous antics with Dr Bob, Kevin and J!). The laughter co-exists with the suffering, and stark moments ('Peter hanged himself in the shower early this morning'; Dunbar's acknowledgment of need and love: 'I think I can walk if you help me') take us straight back to the original.

A daring enterprise on St Aubyn's part, and one which has paid off very well.