Edward St. Aubyn - Dunbar

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Excellent

I thought Dunbar was excellent.  I approached it with a little trepidation because a modern re-imagining of the King Lear story could have been worthy or turgid or forbidding or just plain terrible.  In fact I found it gripping, witty, touching and very readable.

Henry Dunbar, the Lear character, is a billionaire media mogul and the machinations of the characters are in the business and financial worlds which, given the events of the last couple of decades, works extremely well.  In the characters of  Abigail and Megan (Goneril and Regan), St. Aubyn catches the lazily indignant sense of entitlement and the unthinking, self-absorbed cruelty of the over-privileged sisters.  Dunbar escapes from an institution in the Lake District to which these two have secretly committed him, and we get a brilliant picture of a disintegrating mind as he wanders the fells…and so on. 

The plot is recognisable without being slavish to the original, and St Aubyn uses it for some very well-aimed barbs at modern finance, the behaviour of the super-rich and other aspects of contemporary life.  He writes beautifully, in prose that is elegant but simply carries you along without drawing self-regarding attention to itself.  I marked lots of neat passages and phrases, like an institution which "could not keep up with the modern demand for a place in which to neglect the mad, the old and the dying," or the rich, powerful man who "knew what it was to be surrounded by a halo of hollow praise," which seemed especially apt in 2017.  The humanity and pity of the play are all there, too, and in the context I found, "Florence, is that you?  I've been looking for you everywhere," every bit as moving as,

" Do not laugh at me;
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia"

which for me is really saying something.

In short, I found Dunbar readable, gripping, witty, moving and insightful and I can recommend it very warmly.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)