Read On, McDuff

LADY MACBETH

By Susan Fraser King

Crown. 340 pp. $23.95

Back in 1920 a Norwegian writer named Sigrid Undset began publishing a trilogy about the lives and loves of a Northern European woman in the Middle Ages. "Kristin Lavransdatter" runs to about 1,300 pages. It is a masterpiece of evocation, an entire lost world brought to life. Its heroine goes from headstrong child to passionate bride to responsible chatelaine to heroic nun. By the end, you know more than enough, more than you need to know, about Scandinavian medieval times -- how to shear and spin and bake and brew; how the lady of the castle must keep accounts and also be accountable to the villagers and peasants in her charge. By the time Undset is through, that world seems more real than your own. She got the Nobel Prize for it.

It's not fair to compare one book to another -- for one thing, Susan Fraser King's new novel is set 300 years earlier -- but "Lady Macbeth" is "Kristin Lavransdatter Lite." King is at pains to explain that this story is based on the real, historical Lady Macbeth, known as Gruadh, and has nothing to do with Shakespeare's play. The author cites an 11th-century manuscript that describes Macbeth himself as "the tall, red, golden-haired one, he will be pleasant." Yes, he did murder Gruadh's first husband, but he had good reason to. Yes, he forced Gruadh, pregnant and 15, to marry him, but that was the custom of the day. And as Fraser writes in an afterword, "The relationship seems to have been stable and respectful, at the least. . . . [O]ver twenty-five years of a possibly childless marriage, Macbeth never set Gruadh aside in favor of a more fertile woman as was often done when an heir was not produced."

So the story here is that Macbeth was a nice man, and his wife was a sterling character, and they had a long and happy life. The challenge for the novel, then, is to evoke a world that is a thousand years in the past; to show us life the way it was lived by the fierce and primitive Scottish nobility, whose roots and inclinations went back to the Celts and the Picts. The author also reminds us that "warrior women were common in Celtic myth and early society; eleventh-century Scotland was more Celtic and Dark Ages in its aspects than medieval." In this way, Fraser can give Lady Macbeth more to do than embroider, or supervise the brewing of the fortress ale.

It was a warrior society they had going on up there, certainly. Each Scottish laird jealously guarded his lands, patrolled his territories, made sure his soldiers and followers remained adroit in the arts of war ("steel-games"). They're a tough lot, embroiled in a series of complicated blood feuds, forever going to court, having to pay fines, kidnapping young women, losing their tempers and killing each other. And their rules for royal succession are skewed from one cousin or uncle to another; simply passing title down to a firstborn son would be too placid and easy.

Gruadh grows up in a warrior household. She carries royal blood. She pleads with her father to train her as a warrior. She is stuck in an arranged marriage to an old man and becomes pregnant by him, but Macbeth, avenging deaths in his own family, murders the old man and immediately marries Gruadh.

For a hundred or so pages, the narrative threatens to turn into a romance novel: Gruadh's in a huff, and Macbeth seems cold and indifferent, and you know what kind of thing that leads to. Soon they fall in love, or something like it. Gruadh gives birth to her first husband's baby in a satisfactorily gory fashion, but she can't carry any of Macbeth's babies to term. Then Macbeth has a girlfriend for a while. There's a lot of fighting back and forth.

The Scots are threatened from the south by the Saxons and from the north by the Vikings, whose ships are the terror of the North Sea. Macbeth wants to be king, but so do a lot of other people. In battle after battle, more brave men are killed off.

The author has paid close attention to her battle scenes; they are beautifully set up and carefully carried out. The landscape, the vagaries of weather, are also diligently attended to. The dinner parties, the "progresses" by which nobles visit their subjects to make sure that all is in order, the newfangled Catholicism, the monasteries, the harpists and the praise-songs -- all get their due.

We know that Duncan will make his move, but there's very little drama in all this. The voice of Lady Macbeth, who tells the story, remains steady and dignified. This is a quiet book, not a masterpiece by any means, but a pleasant experience for a rainy afternoon. There are far worse things you could do than read "Lady Macbeth."