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Josiah Hawkins's Reviews > Romeo and Juliet: A Novel
Romeo and Juliet by David Hewson, Richard Armitage (Narrator)
Josiah Hawkins's review
Jan 02, 2017
it was amazing
bookshelves: 5-star-favorites
Read from December 19, 2016 to January 01, 2017
Let me be clear, I really really dislike Romeo and Juliet. When I was in school I had to read the play three times for some reason and my dislike of it only grew each time. I don't dislike Shakespeare however, I think that Macbeth, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Henry VIII are all fantastic pieces of literature. For some reason it isn't any of his vastly superior works that keep his name relevant to today, it's Romeo and Juliet, probably his worst play, that gets the spotlight.
I've always found the characters in the play sorely underdeveloped, the story doesn't really flow well, the story itself is also pretty hard to believe. Overall I think that Shakespeare's general failings in the matters of the heart in his personal life led to the failings of that particular play. So why would I go back in for a fourth experience of a story I already don't like? I can't really explain why I did, but I'm sure glad that I did.
Mr. Hewson decided to adapt the play into a novel, and this fixes some major problems that I had with the source text. Extra length gives us more time with the characters, and thus leads to more characterization. Extra length also gives Mr. Hewson more time to give an explanation to major events that actually make major plot beats flow easier and make more sense. Extra length also gives Mr. Hewson time to fully flesh out exactly why it is that the Capulet and Montague houses are embroiled in their conflict.
Perhaps the greatest thing Mr. Hewson could of done was give a complete setting of the time period the story will take place in. Mr. Hewson's novelization sets the story in a period of time mired in sadness, a time when a madman was installed as pope, a time when war with the Turks was almost assured, and a time when plague was on it's way. In Verona, and Italy as a whole, there is so much despair and so much death that everyone feels downtrodden and boxed into a city on lock down.
When things are terrible, when almost nothing seems to be going right, people want something special to happen. This deep desire for something special makes people more apt to dive head on into the first thing that starts to go right, and this telling of star crossed lovers represents exactly that. Take just how bad the world is, add a love that isn't reciprocated and a desperately unwanted arranged marriage, and the result is two people who are predisposed to fall in love fast and hard.
The absolute genius is that the book never says whether or not the romance they had was real, and there is a moment where Juliet actually wonders as much. Mr. Hewson displays this horrible state of affairs and then shows us something that seems so powerful, so magical, and then we watch it fail. It fails because of public perception, because of missed information, and because of the tragedy of how a bad world happens to infect the people that live in it.
This novelization truly is something special. Mr. Hewson took a story, that to me, never worked and then with a heavy amount of context and retooling actually made the story work. Armitage does an amazing job with the voice work, the text is rich in sadness, humor, faith, reconciliation, and thought. To me this represents the best possible translation of a story that was written a very long time ago, and I think that everyone who either likes or hates the original should give this a listen because it really is an incredible work.
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1844472623?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1