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Amazon.co.uk Review
As in the bulk of his fiction--and most conspicuously in the underrated In the Beauty of the Lilies--Updike sacrifices artistic firepower when he goes archaic on us. That explains why Gertrude and Claudius gets off to a wobbly start, with the author's medieval diction careening all over the page. But once his narrative gets up to speed, the author dispenses one brilliant bit of perception after another. Gertrude and Claudius also amounts to a running theological argument, in which men constantly impale themselves on metaphysical principle while the adulterous queen is willing "to accept the world at face value, as a miracle daily renewed". (That would explain Gertrude's snap diagnosis of her neurotic son: "Too much German philosophy".)
A superlative satellite to Shakespeare's creation, Updike's novel is likely to retain a kind of subordinate rank, even within his own capacious body of work. Still, it's packed with enough post-Elizabethan insight about men and women, parents and children, to suggest that the play's not the thing--not always, anyway. --James Marcus, Amazon.com
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THE KING was irate. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
This three-part work combines the ancient legends to present a psychological portrait of the lives of the royal family up to the outset of Shakespeare's play. In the process it offers stunning insights into the play itself. Another Updike tour de force.
It is delightful! I was amused by the shifts reflected by the name-changes and the subtle costume changes that reflect the different versions of the story (Saxo Grammaticus, Belleforest, & c.). Part One is 11-12C, but by the end of Part Three, where the novel finally catches up with the play, we are approaching the Renaissance. The falconry symbolism is particularly lovely.
The main characters are engaging: Gerutha/Gertrude is a likeable, warm-hearted woman. She is Queen by birth, but because of her sex, real power eludes her: it is always wielded by men. Horvendil/Old Hamlet is an unimaginative, rather crude Viking war-lord: a tough killer, a rapist, yet there is poignancy in his remark about wanting to show his bride his "morning self", in explanation of his drunken sleep on their wedding night. Feng/Claudius is a cosmopolitan, imaginative adventurer who has fought his way across Europe to Byzantium, and quotes the songs of Bertran de Born. (I was reminded of Rognvald Kali, the Jarl of Orkney who wrote trobador songs for Ermengarda of Narbonne.) Corambis/Polonius and his sensitive daughter Ophelia are also well-drawn. Amleth/Hamlet himself is mostly off-stage, but even as a child, he shows signs of selfishness and spite. (Updike rightly points out, in a quotation from a critic in the Afterword, how destructive the prince's quest for vengeance is: for one man's death, many others, including innocents, will die.)
What also appeals (especially to the older reader) is that the novel gives us a passionate, tragic love story about experienced middle-aged people - a plump 48-year-old matron and a grizzled warrior in his late 50s - *not* glamorous young romance-novel stereotypes. The apparently 'happy ending' of the novel is heartbreaking. By the end, the reader, who knows what Shakespeare has in store for the characters, is actively willing the play to end differently, willing them to "get away with it". Updike has not just expanded the protagonists' lives; he has enabled us to *love* them. It seems to me that not many modern novelists have that gift.
Of course he does so with remarkable prose, high quality research and a slightly unfamiliar patina of academia,indeed a great deal of time seems to have been spent poring over sources as diverse as National Geographic and Scandanavian folktales.
Gertrude and Claudius has all the hallmarks of excellence one has come to expect - beautifully written with a lyrical musicality which sometimes matches and indeed echoes Shakespeare but also contains the odd (conscious?) inconsistency - did the Danes really have 'fall' before winter? The book effortlessly creates a cold world of intrigue and has many of the set piece qualities we have come to expect from a man who wrote Brazil after a visit of a few days and equally succeeds in creating Denmark with perhaps as little familiarity.
Indeed it would be easy to see Gertrude and Claudius as ancestors of the residents of Tarbox with their infidelities masked in the beauty of Updike's wonderful stylistic gifts - but is that enough to make this a worthwhile addition to perhaps America's greatest living novelist?
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