Expect the Unexpected: Lucinda Byatt Talks to Val McDermid about Queen Macbeth

WRITTEN BY LUCINDA BYATT

Of all the semi-legendary figures in Scotland’s history, Lady Macbeth is the one we all think we know most about – or do we? Shakespeare’s version was a convenient fabrication, the events portrayed to flatter King James VI and I, and liberties taken with both names and facts: for the record, Macbeth (whose historical name is actually Macbethad) did kill King Duncan, but on the battlefield and not in a murderous conspiracy spurred on by his wife. But while historical detail may be sparce on these early rulers, it gives an author licence and “plenty of space for the imagination”. That author is Val McDermid, Scotland’s “Queen of Crime”, whose Queen Macbeth (Polygon, 2024) is the most recent addition to the “Darkland Tales” series from publisher Birlinn.¹

In a recent interview for this feature, McDermid says: “When I was approached by Polygon to take part in the Darkland Tales series with Lady Macbeth, I was immediately drawn to the project.” McDermid read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, graduating in 1972 as the first Scottish state-school pupil to study there, so there is considerable feeling in her next words: “Over my years of exposure to Shakespeare, I’d grown increasingly sceptical of the motivations and actions of Lady Macbeth. History is written by the victors, and it seems to me that since men have generally been in the driving seat, women have often taken the rap because that suited the patriarchal version of events. I liked the idea of writing something that might make more sense of the historical narrative than woman-blaming!”

Scotland as a nation didn’t exist as such in the tenth century: it was a patchwork of “kingdoms”, a place of rivalries and changing alliances, influenced not least by the Viking presence and the constant threat of the English. It is here that McDermid’s that we first encounter Gruoch (aka “Lady Macbeth”) as the wife of Gille Coemgáin, Mormaer of Moray, some time before she meets and finally marries Macbeth. In a tightly constructed sequence of flashbacks, we learn of the events that have left Gruoch in hiding at the end of Macbeth’s seventeen-year reign, now at the mercy of bitterly opposing factions, one led by her and Macbeth’s son Lulach and the other by Duncan’s son Malcolm, supported by Macduff. The locations in the novel will be familiar to some, and certainly to the author who grew up in Fife: a priory on St Serf’s Isle, in Loch Leven, just north of Kirkcaldy, where the Chaldean monks or Culdees give temporary refuge to the queen and her three women, a seer, a healer, and a weaver; and then various recognisable places as they escape across the central belt, heading to the West.

When I asked about the evocative descriptions of landscape, McDermid says, “I drew on my existing knowledge of locations and landscapes and my imagination of what they would have looked like back then, how the scattered population would have impacted the land. I actually wrote the book in southern Spain, so I was reliant on Google Maps and memory, and some help from David Greig, who researched a play he wrote about Lady Macbeth some years ago! Writers are mostly very happy to share their knowledge…” ²

McDermid is the multi-award-winning author of 40 crime novels – plus short story collections and non-fiction – that have been translated worldwide selling upwards of nineteen million copies. Her novels all have contemporary settings, so I asked what it was like thinking back into the remote past, and what did she enjoyed most about the writing process. “I did have the freedom of setting my novella in an era of my choice … What I enjoyed was stepping back in time and imagining the day-to-day lives of my characters. Human relationships, their dreams and fears, their emotions and responses don’t fundamentally change over the centuries. What does change is how those things manifest themselves and that was a fascinating challenge.”

Abandoning her usual toolbox of clinical psychology, forensics, and simply the use of fingerprinting makes a difference to the plot. But as she says, “it was quite refreshing to leave all that behind! The attribution of culpability was a lot simpler then!” Indeed, the famous dagger and the mention of washing blood off hands appear as tropes at various points in the book, but these are just light touches, hints at Shakespeare’s well-known lines.

Gruoch’s companions fulfil important roles, from the ever-practical Ligach to the seer and healer Eithne. For the latter, in particular, the boundary between healing and witchcraft, is both fragile and, for the period, extremely dangerous. McDermid wanted “to explore the idea that what people don’t understand, they invent explanations for. Eithne’s ‘predictions’ are probably based on intuition, understanding of human behaviour and observation; there’s nothing supernatural going on there. I suspect that when women uttered ‘predictions’, people only recalled the ones that came about…”

Some of Eithne’s most precious herbs come from traders who operated along the sea roads in a variety of boats, including the birlinn. Scotland was certainly never isolated from the continent. One fascinating aspect that McDermid draws on is Macbeth and Gruoch’s journey to Rome at the start of his kingship. She tells me that “it’s part of the historical record and was mentioned in several of the sources I read. It’s interesting because at the time, Macbeth’s kingdom was part of the Celtic Christian tradition, not the Roman. But I do wonder whether their arrival at the Vatican made the Curia aware of Scotland as a potential target for conversion, perhaps even smoothing the way for St Margaret [who was canonised] relatively soon after.”

Queen Macbeth is a fascinating and thought-provoking addition to this series of dramatic retellings of stories from Scotland’s past that intersect history, myth and legend. For the time being, however, it may be McDermid’s only foray into the remote past. When asked about another historical novel, she replies: “I really don’t know. It would depend on what was suggested to me… I don’t have anything itching away at the back of my mind!”

However, I can guarantee that Gruoch’s story is firmly lodged in this reader’s mind.

Notes:

1. Other titles published in Darkland Tales include, among others, Denise Mina’s Rizzio (2021) and Jenny Fagan’s Hex (2022).
2. Dunsinane by the Scottish playwright David Greig premièred in 2010. Greig’s first novel Columba’s Bones (2023) is also one of the Darkland Tales series.

About the contributor: Lucinda Byatt is HNR‘s Features Editor.

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 109 (August 2024)