Ever felt you knew everything you needed to know about Shakespeare's Hamlet? Still feeling confident about your interpretation? Should you also be yet another of those students who not only examined every word of the sacred and complex text but acted in it as well, think again. There appears to be a great deal yet left to discover about one of the most famously dysfunctional of royal families. John Updike, an undisputed master prose stylist and unforgivably canny writer, has turned away from contemporary US middle-class life to concentrate on domestic happenings at the court of medieval Denmark.
The result is a ripe, atmospheric romance complete with sexual frustration, intrigue, frenzied adultery, some comedy and an ingenious murder. Divided into three long chapters or acts, the narrative quickly develops into a psychological opera with each sequence beginning with what proves to be a pivotal phrase: "The king was irate". Each refers to a different king; three acts, three kings. These contrasting monarchs walk one by one to the centre stage. Even at his most linguistically opulent, and Gertrude and Claudius certainly showcases Updike's extraordinarily beautiful use of language, he demonstrates a cool, unsettling deliberation in his imagined prelude as it were to the play, the early life and young womanhood of Gertrude. This deliberation is intensified in the final sequence, which develops into a stylish and imaginative variation of Shakespeare's play.
It is a highly erotic book of smells, tastes and physical as well as emotional need, not a mere flight of indulgence undertaken by a veteran though still hyperactive writer in late career with nothing left to prove. Instead it exudes exactness and wisdom, coupled with flair and daring.
Seldom has extensive historical research sat as lightly on a fiction narrative as it does here. Updike has decided that the root of Hamlet the play lies less in the disaffected prince than in the fulsome personality of his mother who, as a girl, had been given to a worthy man who loved her in a fond but detached fashion. At 16 the young Gerutha faces her father, King Rorik, who has decided she must marry Horwendil the Jute, "a beefy warrior in every way suitable". Gerutha's mother, Queen Ono, having died when the child
seems in death to reside over the household and Gertrude's entire life as an absent spirit. Despite the girl's objections to the Jute, whom she finds "unsubtle" Gerutha is duly married off at 17.
From the opening scene, dominated by its semi-heated exchange between a father determined to marry off a reluctant daughter, the narrative is openly physical. Updike describes the clothes and the rooms with the same attention to detail lavished on the appearances of his protagonists. None, however, is pictured as meticulously as is Gerutha. From that of ripe maid to deflowered virgin bride to newly pregnant wife, to sexually expectant matron, Gerutha's body becomes the map of the book. The marital couplings are dutifully reported with a thoroughness which avoids the voyeuristic. The couple are mutually fond, but at a distance - even in bed. Both are anxious for children, but their only heir is the self-contained, coldly clever little boy who in time will become Prince Hamlet.
Updike is unfailingly sympathetic to the young queen, whose good nature and common sense ensure that her more romantic yearnings never seem unreasonable. Nor does he present the king as a brute; Horwendil is merely a man who has become a ruler. Gerutha lives through her imagination and restless curiosity as vividly as she does through her body which is described as only Updike can. No writer has chronicled the texture of skin and hair as well as he. Throughout his career he has written beautifully as well as often movingly of the doomed physicality of sex, bound as it is by desire and age. There is an unexpected profundity at the core of Updike's work which is easily overshadowed by the humour and the style. Nowhere is this quality more apparent than in the random grace of the elegiac Toward the End of Time (1998). That novel is among his best work, and its publication seemed an eloquent farewell. This new book, his 19th novel and 51st book, is another marvel - not only for the story which seems too corny for words yet succeeds brilliantly and for the gentle, often courtly allure of the prose, but for the compassion Updike showers on his characters without allowing them or the book to slump into bathos.
Much of its success lies in the dynamics of the central trio; Gertrude, her husband the king and Feng, the king's brother and her lover. Just as King Horwendil becomes Hamlet's father, Feng the king's brother asserts himself as Gertrude's lover and, having murdered the king, assumes the throne as Claudius. Gertrude, meanwhile, is the passively dissatisfied wife burdened by her sense of failure towards her unresponsive son. The characterisation is cleverly done, as is the passing of the long stretch of time which brings Gertrude from spirited teenager to middle age, still beautiful and at the mercy of her desires and guilt. None of them are saints, nor are any of them monsters, while the portrayal of the young Hamlet as a resentful outsider is convincing.
It is a shrewd, earthy, even logical performance. Gertrude retains her beauty in order to be finally satisfied. Certainly the most unusual of Updike's works as his fictional territory is contemporary, but the themes of love, lust, betrayal and guilt directing Gertrude and Claudius have always interested him. His candid portrayal of the vibrant queen is fair and humane. No one writes better than Updike at his best, and he is doing exactly that in this rich novel of surprises, crimes and sensations.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
