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let me tell you: reading notes by Anthony Miller (University of Sydney), reproduced with kind permission   
   

language

I delighted in the way key words from Ophelia’s speeches swirl around throughout the text, or in particular parts of it: the baker and the maid, snow, robin, and owl; observed and observers; tenders, deceived, unkind. Many of these have an uncanny suggestiveness in the play, others have a sombre weightiness; all this is beautifully modulated and reoriented in the book. The mountain is an especially powerful presence, all the more because somehow I imagine the setting of Elsinore as flat (—stage like, maybe?). The mountain makes us reimagine that setting, as the whole book reimagines the personal dramas of the play.

The hamlet over the mountain, the village of Givers-la-Rède, no play: witty!   
   

the story and Hamlet

Mysterious and intriguing instances of prolepsis (e.g., 52, 82 83): what exactly will come to pass? or, since we (probably) know that, how will it come to pass? Such questions and their answers, or hints at answers, provide much of the pleasure of the book: the devious ways by which we come to the well known situations of the play, the way we often seem to be led away from it rather than towards it.

The mystery of the hated ‘she’ is well managed, and the revelation about her promiscuity is a perfectly judged though also terrible keystone to the arch of the story. It is a shock, given the sense of childhood innocence seemingly attached to Ophelia up to now; the clash of the two, innocence and experience I suppose, is jarring and challenging; it makes us reassess the Ophelia we have been hearing hitherto; there is suppression here, the suppressed that emerges in her songs in the play.

The mother’s contempt for Polonius is shocking to us insofar as we have taken Ophelia’s point of view, though it is also a view that we ourselves may have, or at any rate may see justification for, in the Polonius of the play. Which means we experience too the shock of agreeing with this woman. Likewise she she initiates Ophelia into the reality of playing and deceiving.

It is a nice contingency that the word ‘mother’ cannot appear!

Hamlet is often the enigmatic ‘he’, answering (how? why?) to ‘she’. As we would expect, he validates himself, discovers himself even, in a play; Ophelia sees this, though she doesn’t fully understand (do we?).

A clever presentation of Polonius’ counsels in paraphrase and prolepsis.

Polonius’ brother is a neat invention, mirroring the brother kings.

An interesting touch to make the play’s protective Laertes a younger brother. Ophelia’s estrangement from Laertes makes for a strong complication.

The maid prophesies the events of Hamlet (or announces Polonius’s stage management). She is the Chorus absent from Shakespeare, or the Sybil of an epic descent to the underworld, and also the harbinger of death. The maid’s daughter hints at another parallel family romance.

A fine feature of the book is the way Ophelia grows in reflectiveness, self awareness. I started to feel this about 118 19, which is also when her lover appears; I hope I am correct in being unsure whether he is actually Hamlet. If he is not, Ophelia too is more of an actor, has more of her mother even, than she admits to herself. Her meditation on love, sun, and light is intriguing and beautiful (there are associations for me of Sidney’s ‘My true love hath my heart and I have his …’ and also of Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade’).

A good climax in the unexpected interview with the King and Queen, with the ominous indications that the action of Hamlet is beginning. And the story ends in a subtle mix of choice and fatality. Ophelia makes a choice, between courses of action, and will play in a tragedy; Paul has been making a choice, of words, and has delivered this story: all comes together as a fable of constraint and freedom.

I naturally remembered Stoppard’s play, more heavily loaded with fate and inevitability than this version. All that his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can do is discover and perhaps accept the fact that their actions are fated, whether by Fate or the fatal poet. Though carried through with great panache, that version is rather jejune compared with this more intricate tangle of necessity and freedom here.   
     

various touches of imagination and treatments of form

Eloquent moments: end of ch. 2; superb bell passage, end of ch. 4, possibly my most cherished moment in the book. It made me think also of the bell in Macbeth: the portentousness there becomes a wider, fresher, freer totality here.

Marvellous fantastical menu! 46

(The opening lines have an echo of the abdication speech of King Edward VIII: a quirk of no significance, I imagine.)

Lady Profound introduces a fantastic register: another Sybil, or an Athene. Here Ophelia is vouchsafed her version of Hamlet’s Ghost, as she should be. Wrestling for prophecy: this reminded me of Jacob wrestling with the angel in the Bible, though it also reminded me of the comic business in an Elizabethan tragedy.

Music and singing a poignant and mysterious absence, then a surprising restoration—which will be completed, though tragically, we know, by Ophelia in the play.

The play within the novel: Laertes the unexpected playwright / dramaturge; Polonius’ unexpected skill (or is it unexpected? or should it be?).

Laertes plays the role of Renaissance lover, but the sonnets abolish the sublimations of Renaissance love convention, and of course give voice to his paramour. The sonnets are brilliant virtuoso performances, perhaps the best things in the book for sheer cleverness (of which there is amazingly much; though for all that, I value it for its emotional more than for its intellectual content).

The anachronisms, startlingly putting the action in our own world, are clever and well judged. There is not too much of this, but enough to jolt and arrest the reader: where and when is this ‘happening’? as if the world of the novel, and the play, is only just beyond the horizon of our world, or closer than that.