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Edward St Aubyn

Dunbar Hardcover – 3 October 2017

by Edward St Aubyn (Author)

103 ratings

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A reimagining of one of Shakespeare's most well-read tragedies, by the contemporary, critically acclaimed master of domestic drama

Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he hands over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan, but as relations sour he starts to doubt the wisdom of past decisions.

Now imprisoned in Meadowmeade, an upscale sanatorium in rural England, with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. But who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate?

Edward St Aubyn is renowned for his masterwork, the five Melrose novels, which dissect with savage and beautiful precision the agonies of family life. His take on King Lear, Shakespeare's most devastating family story, is an excoriating novel for and of our times - an examination of power, money and the value of forgiveness.

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Product details

Publisher : Hogarth Press (3 October 2017)
Language : English
Hardcover : 256 pages
ISBN-10 : 1101904283
ISBN-13 : 978-1101904282
Dimensions : 13.41 x 2.31 x 21.11 cm

Customer Reviews:
103 ratings

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Review

One of Town & Country's "6 must-read books for October"
One of Vulture's "8 must reads for October"
Praise for Dunbar

"The pairing of St. Aubyn with Lear seems predestined--who better to reckon with a play about frustrated power and familial resentment than the author of the Patrick Melrose novels, a five-book exorcism of ancestral demons? St. Aubyn rivals Shakespeare in his magnificently scathing language...There's no novelist alive who combines his gift for irony and his Wodehousian satire of the upper classes with his acute comprehension of the bleakness of existence." - The Atlantic

"St. Aubyn's writing has a lavishness that still retains precision -- he never allows mistiness to descend on his metaphors... St. Aubyn has built a career out of family pain, and his language has a wonderful poetic density, dry, expansive, self-conscious, and savage, all at once." - NPR.org

"St. Aubyn shines at skewering the rich and profligate." - The Los Angeles Times

"[Dunbar is] an enjoyable, breakneck ride through the misdeeds of one of the greatest stages of fools you'll ever meet." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Henry Dunbar--think Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone--breaks free of an English sanatorium, set on revenge." - Esquire

"A brilliant reworking of William Shakespeare's King Lear for our day." - Kirkus (starred)

"St. Aubyn's resplendent rendering of nature's grand drama and Dunbar's shattered psyche, Florence's love, and her sisters' malevolence make for a stylish, embroiling, and acid tragedy." - Booklist

"The tale is the perfect vehicle for what this author does best, which is to expose repellent, privileged people and their hollow dynasties in stellar prose." - Publishers Weekly

Praise for Edward St. Aubyn:

"Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation." - Alan Hollinghurst

"Nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St Aubyn's world - or more surprising - its philosophical density." - Zadie Smith, Harpers

"St Aubyn conveys the chaos of emotion, the confusion of heightened sensation, and the daunting contradictions of intellectual endeavour with a force and subtlety that have an exhilarating, almost therapeutic effect." - Francis Wyndham, New York Review of Books

About the Author

Edward St Aubyn was born in London. His superbly acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, which won a Betty Trask Award, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk, which won the Prix Femina étranger and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and At Last. He is also the author of the novels A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and Lost for Words, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

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5 star		59%
4 star		24%
3 star		13%
2 star		1%
1 star		4%

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Kindle Customer stuart wait

I found this book abit tedious. Characters did not seem believable and were not very well drawn. The concept of a rupert murdoch type character falling from power was interesting. Not sure how many more words i need to make 20 words.

Reviewed in Australia on 7 September 2018

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I found this book abit tedious. Characters did not seem well developed. Main character was an obvious reference to a rubert murdoch type

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Michael Fleming

Poor Tom was a bit cold on this

Reviewed in Australia on 28 June 2018

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Hard work but an interesting concept

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Two and a half stars

Reviewed in Australia on 2 January 2018

Dunbar is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series – a series of commissioned novels to re-interpret Shakespeare plays in the modern world. Dunbar is King Lear.

The novel is set in the twilight days of Henry Dunbar, a Canadian media mogul. His two elder daughters, Megan and Abigail, have committed him to a secure nursing home in the Lake District having bribed a doctor to declare him insane. Their goal is to seize control of his multi-billion dollar business empire. Meanwhile, his third daughter, Florence, has fallen out with the family and lives in gilded seclusion on a ranch in Wyoming, cut out of the family business but seemingly still able to access the untold wealth. Florence decides to rescue Dunbar, but is thwarted as Dunbar has already made his escape from the nursing home…

King Lear works, as a play, because it uses the medium of theatre, the viewer accepts the difference in cultural values, and because at heart it was about language rather than plot. Retelling the story as a 21st century novel is problematic on a number of fronts. Firstly, the plot feels worn out; we know what happens. Secondly, Elizabethans may have felt sympathy towards an old king, abused by his ambitious daughters – but in today’s society it is hard to feel sympathy for a global media plutocrat. Thirdly, whereas on the stage we accept the immediacy of the action, by moving to a novel we feel more need of backstories that are simply not there in Dunbar; without them the characters’ motives are unknown and it just feels like a lot of running around furiously. And finally, no harm to Edward St Aubyn, but the language in Dunbar is ordinary.

Overall, this feels like an unnecessary work that was commissioned by a patron rather than being led by the writer’s own heart. It re-tells a story that didn’t need retelling, through the wrong medium and focussing on the things in the original that mattered least. I didn’t believe in the story, the characters or the world they lived in. It has its moments – some of the scenes out in the Cumbrian wilderness were effective and the drip-feeding of Peter Walker’s fate was very well done, but not enough to really come together as a work in its own right.

Two and a half stars.

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Ralph Blumenau

Of the re-telling of King Lear there is - unfortunately in this case - no end.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2018

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Of the re-telling in a modern setting of the story of King Lear there is no end; and, however many times it has been done before, of course there was bound to be another one in the Hogarth Press’s project of re-telling all of Shakespeare’s plays.

Like Devraj in Preti Taneja’s “We That Are Young” (see my Amazon review), Henry Dunbar (Lear) is the mogul and despotic head of a business empire. We first meet him as he has been committed by his daughters Megan (Regan) and Abigail (Goneril) to a psychiatric sanatorium in the Lake District.

Another inmate was Peter Walker. I thought originally that Walker was the Fool, and that started me off with a great disappointment, because there is no wisdom behind the crazy things Walker says. A former actor, he is constantly role-playing the parts of various characters, with a variety of accents. He is also an alcoholic. But he does help Dunbar to avoid taking the drugs he is given against his titanic rages, and to escape from the sanatorium. He accompanies Dunbar for some way during the escape, but then leaves him and returns to the sanatorium – and we come to realize that he only partially stands for the Fool (though his end will be the same as that of Shakespeare’s Fool). Dunbar struggles alone through a difficult landscape and foul weather sets in.

Megan is as pathological as her father, and is shown as sexually voracious and a sadist from the beginning. Abigail shares some her sister’s weird tastes. Florence (Cordelia) is here the half-sister of Megan and Abigail. She had been her father’s favourite child until she had triggered his rage when she had told him that she wanted nothing to do with the business and planned to live the simple life with her husband and three children, in Wyoming. St Aubyn also invents Chris, the son of Charlie Wilson (Kent), and a special relationship between him and Florence.

Megan and Abigail did not tell Florence where their father was. When the evil sisters heard that he had escaped, they launch their henchmen to find him. These men, at the behest of Megan and Abigail, brutally torture Walker for information.

Dunbar becomes like a hunted animal, mad with fear but hanging on to shreds of sanity. True to Shakespeare’s Lear, he reflects on his life and repents of all the brutal and ruthless things he had done in his years of power. He comes across an Edgar-like figure, a former vicar called Simon Field, who had been disgraced as a gambler and a homosexual, and whom the Dunbar-owned press had hounded until he had disappeared and was believed to have committed suicide. They shelter together in a sort of cave Simon had found.

Florence, with the help of Charlie Wilson (the faithful Kent, who is here shown as having been, before his sacking, a member of the Company’s Board and fully involved in in all the financial aspects of the business) and hints from Mark (Albany, estranged from his wife Abigail, but who cannot be trusted not to change sides), finds out in which area her father had been imprisoned and flies into Manchester to find him. Two helicopters are out looking for Dunbar – one on behalf of Megan and Abigail; the other on behalf of Florence; and Florence finds her father first.

She safely got him to America, hoping that he would have a quiet life with her there, away from all business matters. But Dunbar had more or less recovered his sanity, and was aware that a company meeting was scheduled in New York at which the Board would finally put Megan and Abigail in charge of the company, he insisted on attending the meeting to frustrate that plan. After that, he thought he would retire to live quietly with Florence in Wyoming.

The novel had long ago taken off into describing complex financial shenanigans of various people ahead of the meeting, which are very technical and way beyond my understanding. They involve the idea of a take-over of Dunbar’s company by a predatory competitor. But all this has no bearing whatever on the Shakespeare play, and, so far from being a meaningful interpretation of it, is an irritating departure from and a debasement of it. The financial events leading up to the Board meeting are a mystery to me. But there are also at the end scenes of murderous violence and of the death of Florence and then the impending death of Dunbar – and these capture something of the end of the play – but only show how infinitely superior Shakespeare is to St Aubyn.

3 people found this helpful

Fly Me to the Moon

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 November 2017

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Sort of a dashed off novel that was all surface and no substance. The characterisation particularly felt very thin and was frequently cliche. To be honest I wish I hadn't spent the money on a hardback. St Aubyn is a really good writer and there are some fine passages but as a whole it was boring and not that funny.

3 people found this helpful

A&V Design

Not my type of reading...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 December 2018

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What can I say?.... this book was so shallow.... a superficial story with a description of screwed-up upper classes. Literarily very uninteresting... it reminded me of Fifty Shades of Grey, which I read against my choice in my bookclub. A superficial story written in basic language with a lack of style.

One person found this helpful

Rod Parker

A brilliant re-telling of King Lear

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 November 2019

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This book is well written. It puts the King Lear story in a modern corporate setting that should appeal even to those who don't particularly like Shakespeare. Well worth reading.

Headintheclouds

Modern Shakespeare brought to life

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2020

Verified Purchase

Great writing makes this Shakespeare play come alive.
The clarity of the story telling outlines the plot easily and makes it into a page turning masterpiece

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