in the murky setting of 21st century scotland, a cowless land full of bears, i heard of a book about Lady Macbeth, a book billed as a reimagining, to give her a voice. i was excited, if not a little confused; after all, is Lady Macbeth not the driving factor in the events of the scottish play? i liked Juniper & Thorn enough though, so was willing to give it a go. 

i shouldn’t have. 

this is a book plagued with issues that never should have made it to print. fact was malleable fiction, everything from unicorn symbolism, to clan tartan, to Æthelstan historically out of place. languages minoritised in the current day were muddled with each other, the alleged Scots more frequently Gaelic and more than once Irish instead. the way it spoke about the people, their voice, their names, their bodies, their culture; everything was uncouth, uncultured, ugly. there was even a point i’m fairly sure waulking was made a mockery of, reduced to nothing but laundry. 

if i keep on with the ahistoric misinformation in this book i will never dry up. for a while i was reduced to madness myself, wondering if all highland cows were bears or if women really do exist. i was broken from my cowless, bearful existence only by my half forgotten knowledge of Macbeth from high school English. after all, the history is nonsense but the retelling part has to be better. right? right?!

no!

Lady Macbeth is perhaps the most famous middle aged woman in the literary canon, ambitious and shrewd, the driving force in the play of Macbeth. here she is gone, replaced by but a teenager in a book billed as a reclamation, who were are told is canny but actually cannae. the book is framed as men bad, no women, also most other women bad, one man pretty (he’s also half-English and don’t you forget it). maybe it’s just me but i do not particularly find much place in liberation for self-insert, confusingly xenophobic narratives with dour romances. 

i feel like i am barely scratching the surface of my grievances. at one point it was implied we don’t know how to party. our languages are described as grime. chapter 9 in particular was just one thing after another, starting bizarrely ableist and quickly descending into bizarre unprecedented violence. perhaps Roscille was to be an unreliable narrator and this simply lacked any textual evidence at all to back it up. 

it was a bizarre, awful reading experience, rarely a page untarnished by a slight or insult that prey on long overtired stereotypes that were rarely textually sensible. the prose was overwrought, suffering from repetition (ermine, lamprey, Bellona). it so badly wanted to be clever yet relied on inconsistent characters who turn from wife guys to monsters when it was convenient for the plot. to top it all off, if you do manage to persist through, genuinely, deeply boring. 

i understood what this book was trying to do but it failed at every hurdle, starting with the very thing it is a retelling of. it made a mockery of Lady Macbeth, of Scotland, of us the readers. if the only way you can give a character a voice is to fundamentally change everything about her story, maybe you aren’t retelling anything at all. 

genuinely would have rather shited in my hands and clapped.