Admittedly, I picked up Lady Macbeth because its cover presents a spectacular incongruity: the brash modernity of neon pink letters set upon the quiet elegance of a classical, large-eyed portrait. The pink seizes attention like a fluorescent anachronism—something new foregrounding something old—much like Ava Reid’s book itself, which departs from Shakespeare more than it adheres.
In the simplest terms, Lady Macbeth, like its source text, is a story of ambition. A man ravenous for glory and titles. Three witches hidden underground who foretell of his rise. And, most importantly, the woman caught in his path. Lady Macbeth is recast as Roscille, a seventeen-year-old plucked from her homeland and shipped off to marry the towering Scottish Thane of Glamis. She wants out, but from their first meeting, an uncanny possession defines their dynamic.
Upon reading, more aspects of the cover portrait grow salient: Roscille’s dark open eyes become those said to drive any man into a craze; her anomalous white hair becomes a feature of her deviance; and the translucent veil glossing her face becomes a symbolic barrier between her interiority and the bustling world of men surrounding her.
The story is set in medieval Scotland, and everything is a bit hazy, dark, and grim. Female characters are few; Roscille lives in a state of isolation, without trusted friends to turn to, as the men around her are threatened by what they perceive in her as witchcraft. The remote setting of a Scottish fortress—we see little outside of these walls—echoes the architecture of her psychological enclosure. This situation of lonely powerlessness and the male characters’ underestimation of her political prowess give rise to readerly indignation.
Roscille’s dances with romance came as an antidote to this anger while also being a weaker part of the novel’s trajectory. Lisander, the son of the visiting King Duncane, captivates Roscille with his ghostly appearance and rare tenderness, but the romance falls flat without ample development. Though her sexual craving is palpable, any chance of fully realizing her desires is corked by the book’s overpowering doom, which puts a damper on the reading experience: Roscille was constantly stuck, sour, sad; I wished she had more beats of hope or joy besides the end’s somewhat rushed and incongruous ribbon-tie, which jarringly subverted the book’s all-consuming despair.
Notwithstanding, Ava Reid finds strength in lyrical prose. She describes the King’s eyebrows as “threaded with silver,” a handmaiden’s sleeves as “yawning mouths,” and Macbeth’s chair as “too small for him.” Her attention to detail reaches broader observations about human perception; when she writes about Lisander’s hand on his brother’s shoulder following their father’s death, she engenders a theory of tenderness and masculinity: “How easy these metamorphoses are: men crawling backward to their boyhoods, cold masks slipping to reveal the stricken faces beneath.”
To read Lady Macbeth is to submit to a fever dream of sorts, one that is hauntingly immersive. Roscille is not the archetypal Lady Macbeth. Reid does not offer her the space to be. She often yields to subservience, but is smart, conjuring clever ideas when it counts. Reid reimagines an infamous villainess as a girl trying hard to survive in a world that is cruel to her kind.