Denmark's prince has the Updike treatment

Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike (Hamish Hamilton #16.99) In place of the Hamlet with whom we have all been taught to identify, John Updike has substituted a thoroughly annoying postmodern anti- hero in Gertrude And Claudius. But more important, perhaps, he has used prose fiction to put stage drama at a distance. Shakespeare's prince was a brilliantly fluid theatrical construct.

In Updike's novel, the focus shifts to Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, and his uncle, Claudius, a solidly troubled mature man. Indeed, for most of its short and well-toned length, Gertrude and Claudius is Hamlet without direct allusion to Shakespeare. With brilliant scholarship and discipline, Updike has contextualised each of the novel's three sections differently.

Part I is at first monumentally, almost oppressively, Norse, deriving from Saxo Grammaticus's Historia Danica. But we quickly discover our emotional focus within the imaginative Geruthe, destined bride of Horwendil. (Geruthe is Gertrude, also Gerutha. Updike uses several versions of each character's name.) She objects to her bridegroom because she finds him "unsubtle", sensing she has desires and ambitions that will be left unsatisfied.

The puny child of their marriage, the irritatingly satirical Amleth, fools around with the jester Yorik and his chums, and forms no strong bond either with his parents or with the reader. But windows begin to open for Geruthe in friendship with her brother-in- law Feng (Fengon/ Claudius), who brings her news of a more "subtle" world. "Subtlety" is not yet fashionable in Denmark, he tells her, "but in Europe it is the coming thing." Along with many exotic artifacts, Feng has imported the codes and language of courtly love, with its cult of indirection, of secrecy, and of long, slow, wooing.

In Part II it is Amleth, now Hamblet, who finds his own family to be unsubtle, taking refuge from them in the philosophy of Wittenberg. While he hovers in the margins, his mother's long, sensuous fascination with Feng develops into an amply chronicled adulterous liaison, and courtly love degenerates into something more like Lawrentian cruelty: "All her unclean places came alive". If Updike is trying to tell us what it is that "women want" (twice in two pages we are assured Geruthe would have been delighted to have sex with her lover while lying in pig manure), I suspect few will be wholly persuaded.

It is during this episode that Shakespeare's text begins to emerge. The lovers exchange "reechy kisses", yet these are presented as fulfilling, not the middle-aged lust dismissed by Hamlet in Shakespeare's play. It is Geruthe's husband, not her lover, who is the "bloat" or "bloatish" king, but it is also old Hamlet (or Horvendile), and not his neurotic son, who acknowledges that a corrupt king will make for a rotten state - "Crops fail, and rot infects those that are garnered and stored". Interest and sympathy are shifted from Geruthe-Gertrude to Fengon-Claudius, and Updike as narrator seems rather more comfortable with this orientation, which brings out some of his very best writing.

By the time we reach the increasingly Shakespearean part III, we have been entirely defamiliarised. Drifts of quotation and half- quotation now float into the text, but we read them as we have never read them before. Claudius's determination to keep young Hamlet at court seems genuinely affectionate: "We're alike. His subtlety is much like my own." His vision of a more modern, more peaceful Denmark also seems admirable.

As the narrative comes closer to the text of Shakespeare's play, we become furious with that silly young prince who we know will wreck everything while understanding nothing. In an afterword, Updike quotes G Wilson Knight: "Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil councillor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death." Wilson Knight would be astonished to see how far these insights have carried a major novelist.

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