Saturday 18 October 2008

Lady Macbeth's Tale

It’s the smile! The teasing smirk of a woman who knows what she wants and knows how to get it. The gilt-framed painting dominating the reception area of Tralee’s Grand Hotel is an absolute mistresspiece of feminine seduction! As a regular guest at the hotel I’ve spent many transfixed moments trying to work out the mystery of that smile; in its way as curious as the Mona Lisa’s. The painting of a woman sprawling on her fur rug seems to be depicting one of those Biblical temptresses such as Delilah. Yet with her golden pre-Raphaelite tresses and rouged cheeks, she’s what the Victorians would instantly recognise as the fallen woman incarnate. Not least because of her smile with its unashamedly wanton invitation. A leer that buttonholes the viewer as impudently as any 19th century Haymarket harlot. There she lies on the skin of a flayed animal (no prizes for guessing what that represents) offering herself to the presumably male gaze. A good-time bad girl. Certainly no Victorian angel of the hearth. And yet ... still I couldn’t get that smile out of my head. Because it’s not just naughtily seductive ... there’s something else. Something almost uncanny. A smile of delighted malevolence! Which got me thinking about all those mythical women who get their rocks off on ruining the male of the species: Medea, Medusa and yes, those Biblical babes, Salome and Delilah. But the queen of them all, as far as I’m concerned, is Lady Macbeth herself. The great shrew of literature who nags her husband into murder. Just exactly what it is - that hold Lady Macbeth has over her husband - has been another puzzle I’ve worried at like a dog with a bone over many years of teaching the play. So there I was in the Grand Hotel, looking at one wicked woman and being reminded of another.
But it was in the grounds of yet another Kerry Hotel that my inchoate thoughts coalesced into some solid ideas for a new novel. As I stood on the ruins of the medieval fort at the edge of the achingly beautiful Lough Lein - the site of Killarney’s inimitable Lake Hotel - I suddenly saw it all: Lady Macbeth’s sexual hold over her husband resulted from a deeply rooted sense of disappointment. Disappointment in men!
And so my journey into the past began. A journey which would take me back into my own Irish roots in ways I couldn’t have possibly imagined.

I was born in West London but have been regularly making trips to Tralee, Eire, where my mother’s people are from, since childhood. And it’s the breathtaking Kerry scenery itself which has turned out to be the final ingredient in the cauldron of ideas and emotions which went into writing my latest novel, Lady Macbeth’s Tale. For once I started researching the eleventh century history behind Shakespeare’s mythic play, I discovered that the histories of the peoples of the British Isles were more deeply intertwined than I had imagined. Travelling to and fro between Scotland, Wales, England and Ireland was just as much a habit back in the Dark Ages as it is now. Even if rape and pillage have been replaced by business and tourism.
But it wasn’t until I began researching the historical Macbeth that I discovered something closer to home. For the real Macbeth was a member of the royal house of Scotland which had its roots in Ireland. The Dal Riada, Kings of Scotland, hailed from Northern Ireland. Riada - anglicised to Reidy. The Reidy tribe! Recent researches into my own family had turned up a Reidy great grandmother. So was it possible Macbeth was my own - fifty million times removed - cousin? An exhilarating thought. But in fiction more than history, anything is possible.
So although I made my Lady Macbeth half Cornish, I had her abducted to Ireland by the Thane of Cawdor and was able to use all those haunting Irish landscapes to colour the novel. Thus, the lushly wooded region of Killarney, the tranquil Loch Lein, Caragh Loch and the misty Slieve Mish mountains figure as part of Lady Macbeth’s magical journey into her own destiny. A fictional destiny which functions as a dark prologue to the events in Shakespeare's play. So while I must ultimately acknowledge the Bard himself for inspiring this novel, I have to record my debt of gratitude to the Management of The Grand Hotel, Tralee, for allowing me to reproduce their stunning painting for the cover of Lady Macbeth's Tale.

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