Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, historical fiction, retellings
Pages: 320
Published by Del Rey on August 13, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ava Reid comes a reimagining of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most famous villainess, giving her a voice, a past, and a power that transforms the story men have written for her.
The Lady knows the stories: how her eyes induce madness in men. 
The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed.  
The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of strategy, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive. 
But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world. 
She does not know this yet. But she will.

My Review:

This is another story we think we know.. We certainly do know how it ends, thanks to the Bard and “ Out, damned spot! out, I say!” although we usually get it wrong and misquote it as “Out, out damned spot!”

But do we really know anything at all? Shakespeare certainly played fast and loose with any history he got near, whether for dramatic license or to please the current monarch or, if at all possible, as much of both as he could cram into four acts.

Lady Macbeth, as a character in the play, comes off as an evil, villainous, witch – whether she actually practiced witchcraft or not. But was she really – and whether or not she was, how would Shakespeare know?

Because as much as we tend to think that all the past is just jammed together in a big ball of timey-wimey bits, the reality is that FIVE CENTURIES separate the historical Lord and Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare’s dramatically licensed interpretation.

In other words, he didn’t actually know a damned thing and neither do we, making his version entirely fictional and this book a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of that well-known fiction. This is a case where we don’t even know what we think we know.

So what do we have here? Lady Macbeth, the book in the hand and not the play in the mind, is part of the phenomenon of telling – or rather reinterpreting – a well-known story from the perspective of a female central character. A character who was either silent or just hard done by  in the male-centric version that put a man in the center of a story that may not even have been his in the first place – and didn’t bother to reckon with the restrictions and assumptions that hedged around women’s lives.

This Lady Macbeth, while she is certainly a schemer, is mostly scheming for her own survival in a world that makes her the property of her scheming father until he sells her to her murderous husband.

To put it another way, she’s doing the best she can to stay alive with the tools she has – her beauty, her position to a VERY limited extent, and the reputation her father has created for her as a powerful witch.

Which she might very well be, after all.

Escape Rating B+: I picked this one up and surprised myself by getting immediately stuck into it and couldn’t put it down. So definitely tick off the box for compelling. At the same time, I had the feeling that I’d read this one before. Not exactly this book, but something very much like it in its reinterpretation of a familiar character, and its female-centric but not feminist perspective.

(If you’re wondering – as I was – it reminds me of The Nightingale’s Castle by Sonia Velton, which gives Countess Bathory a similar treatment. Also, her portrait of Lord Macbeth reads like it owes a lot of its physical description to Henry VIII of England – which was just a bit weird. Plausible based on the limited information about the historical ‘King Hereafter’, but still odd to read.)

On the one hand, what makes this work is that we’re inside Lady Roscille Macbeth’s head, so we see her motivations and her mistakes, and intimately understand why she does the things she does. At the same time, we see her inexperience and naivete, because the poor girl is only 17 and a stranger in a strange land at that, when she is forced to marry Lord Macbeth.

One thing that her perspective emphasizes very clearly is that his is the power, not hers, no matter her reputation. Her choices are always circumscribed by his complete power over her very existence. He has all the choices – at least at the beginning. Towards the end it’s his previous acts that constrain those choices, not hers.

(Her angst over the things she has done, and their effect upon her ‘soul’ may go on just a bit too long for 21st century readers as it certainly did for this one. The past is another country, they did things differently there.)

In the end, she was the dagger, often, but he was always the hand wielding it, which is not at all what the play would lead one to believe. And has led most readers and viewers, over the centuries. Seeing that possibility, that perspective, through the eyes and mind of that dagger, kept me riveted to the story – as if at knife point.