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I like the idea of this, turning Macbeth into a novel, and in some respects, I thought the authors did an excellent job. Specifically, the way a novel can supply so much more about a character than a play allowed them to make the story really plausible. The Shakespeare tragedies often leave me feeling that no-one would act as their tragic heroes do, no-one be so gullible, or so blind, or so foolish. In this version, the Macbeths are quite ordinary people, with thwarted ambitions of non-pathological dimensions, who embark on the events of the story for good reasons and whose descent into the morass in which they end up is believable and, yes, really tragic.

In fact, when reading it, and thinking how I would describe the book's relation to the play, I thought one way to put it would be to say that the novel gives the events play plus the psychology of the characters. But then I imagined the reaction. Do I mean that Shakespeare, the very inventer of the modern self if Bloom is to be believed (is it Bloom?), doesn't provide us with psychology? Well, I need to re-read the play in the light of these thoughts, but I have to say that, in some sense, he doesn't. As I indicated above, I don't find the tragic heroes plausible as real people. There is some element, in their representation, of theatre's more ancient and formulaic roots.

Anyway, for all this virtue, the novel is, at the end of the day, a bit dull. With such a cracking story, and such a well-spring of wonderful language to echo, it was just too flat, too prosaic.