Dunbar: (Hogarth Shakespeare)

‘I really did have an empire, you know,’ said Dunbar. ‘Have I ever told you the story of how it was stolen from me?’ Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the family firm to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him doubting the wisdom of past decisions... Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District 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. Dunbar is a devastating family story and an excoriating novel for and of our times – an examination of power, money and the value of forgiveness.

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 etranger 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.

Review :
St Aubyn has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat… His prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect Malevolently enjoyable… A fable of fatherly neglect and daughterly cruelty Deeply affecting…and funny Powerful… Entertaining Of all the novelist and play matches in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, that of Edward St Aubyn with King Lear seems the finest. Shakespeare’s blackest, most surreal and hectic tragedy sharpened by one of our blackest, more surreal and hectic wits… It's an enticing prospect... His Lear is Henry Dunbar, the head of an international media corporation – like Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch – and is brilliantly awful… The other characters, even minor ones, are also wittily and cleverly updated He is an inspired choice to retell King Lear for Hogarth Shakespeare’s anniversary series. Dunbar emerges as one of the finest contributions in a line-up glittering with literary stars…He has transplanted the heart of the story into the present and made it feel remarkably authentic A piercing portrait of existential agony... savagely acute Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a family’s internecine struggle for control of a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the possibility of redemption… An Aubynesque simile can brighten a grey passage… Most of the novel is harsh; all of it is entertaining St Aubyn is excellent on the characters’ psychology... powerful and moving Malevolently enjoyable… The scenes that feel most real, interestingly, are those that are most fantastical, when we are drawn inside the chaos of Dunbar’s unravelling mind… Here the language feels sculpted and precise, Dunbar’s obsessive solipsism both violent and convincing… St Aubyn’s talent for brittle one-liners is as lethal as ever In Mother’s Milk – the fourth Melrose novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker – St Aubyn gave a terrifyingly believable description of senility, and he applies the same skill here as his hero’s sense of time and his own sanity fall away with a tragic semi-awareness… He is at his funniest when describing characters at their worst. He narrates their terrible inner thoughts with a bleakly comic ironic detachment As Dunbar wanders half-hallucinating in the Cumbrian wilderness, the only dialogue is between the mind and itself. A heartbreaking scrim of the broken and unspoken, image upon image flames up... Here, we can feel the writer feeling, and with Lawrentian clarity: a distillation of harrowed human pity Lively… Beautifully written and caperish in tone, St Aubyn’s Dunbar plays the Bard’s story for savage laughs Perhaps Edward St Aubyn’s most impressive achievement in this retelling…is to find a way of structuring the story so that it rattles along at a breathless pace from start to finish. Somehow, even though we know what’s going to happen…Dunbar is still a page turner… Even if you ignore all the intricate metatextual game-playing, this is still a magnificent book: a cautionary tale about what happens when people value power and money more than family and basic human decency, imaginatively re-tooled for our hyper-materialistic age St Aubyn’s Dunbar is a salvific story of familial breakdown animated by decadently wicked rich people on the one hand and the fragile optimism generated by expensive psychotherapy on the other… St Aubyn, the laureate of upper-class depravity and brittle recuperation, is the perfect author for a waspish, satirical take on King Lear’s family melodrama… Dunbar does not take up the challenge of redrawing the play’s gender politics. St Aubyn produces a deftly understated Dover Cliff sequence and avoids the hyperbole of Gloucester’s blinding, domesticating the play’s sublime into an insidiously sardonic depiction of depraved twenty-first-century glamour