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fiendfull 's review for:
Henry Henry
by Allen Bratton
Henry Henry is a literary fiction loose retelling of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, bringing Hal into the twenty-first century as a gay Catholic son of the Duke of Lancaster. It is 2014 and Hal Lancaster drinks and gets high to avoid his father, but when an unlikely invitation to join family friend Harry Percy at a shooting retreat turns into a romance, Hal's life is pulled in more directions, balancing shame and guilt and addiction with the possibility of something different to what his father wants for him.
As someone who has been obsessed with the Henry IV plays and read plenty of Shakespeare retellings (including Henry IV ones), I was intrigued to see how Henry Henry would approach the play and also how it would be a novel. After finishing the book, I'm still a bit conflicted about how it relates to Henry IV, as it feels to me like it occupies a middle ground between between a faithful adaptation (which it is definitely not) and being a very loose adaption, because it does adhere to having most of the characters from the plays (and more from history) to the extent it almost doesn't work without knowledge of the plays, but then deviates from the themes and plot of the plays a lot, perhaps making it better to not know what it is based on. In some ways, I like this, because it really does reimagine the plays as something different, but it is confusing that it has such a precise cast and some key story elements retold, and then other elements and the overall arc not matching up at all.
Told from a third-person perspective, the book explores a lot—sexual abuse, Catholic guilt, addiction, eating disorders, the treatment of people with AIDS—whilst also notably not really exploring other areas. The monarchy has been removed, and indeed is barely even referenced to, and the layers of class issues present both in the original plays and the scenarios of this retelling get a bit lost in the mix, so the book ends up being a bit 'wow rich people' without really saying anything about this. The Catholicism in the book is A Lot (one of the characters even complains that the Catholic guilt is A Lot), and I imagine people interested in it will really like how entwined it is with everything (and there's something interesting about taking a play set when the characters were Catholic by default and making the characters Catholic as something more unusual in modern day London).
In terms of characters, the endeavour of having so many of the characters from the plays and real historical figures is a notable choice, and it works well in some places. For example, modern Henry IV retellings do well by making Philippa appear as Hal's youngest, wayward sister who can be a reflection of him in a different way to other characters are reflections of him. Both Falstaff and Poins are quickly sidelined and generally the 'Eastcheap' part of the plays is downplayed hugely, a sort of sticky carpeted Wetherspoons vibe that Hal leaves for Catholic guilt and Harry Percy's much posher leftism. Hal's brothers become interchangeable, which is fair, and generally a lot of the characters recede as the novel progresses, so it becomes mostly Hal and Henry, with occasional family members and Harry Percy. The third person narration keeps a bit of distance (there's a sudden chapter that is narrated by someone to Hal later in the book, which felt suddenly out of place), making Hal a little more unknowable.
Two main elements of the novel are Hal's relationships to his father, Henry, and to Harry Percy, family friend turned lover. The blurb suggests these are going to be equally important, positioning the book even as potentially a kind of coming of age romance, but going in expecting that will leave you disappointed. This is a much darker take on Henry IV than retellings tend to be (and the marketing suggests), exploring trauma and abuse and victimhood in quite complex ways, but it does feel like it would be helpful to have any sense going into the book that incest and sexual abuse were going to be so crucial in it, given that they aren't in the original plays. These parts are going to be divisive, especially for people going in for the Hal and Harry Percy romance element or the "queer retelling", and actually getting much more of a focus on an abusive father-son dynamic. For me, it was a surprise because the opening feels like it might be a more straightforward modern retelling and then suddenly you realise it is not at all, and that's certainly an interesting choice.
Henry Henry feels part of a lineage of gay literary fiction, bringing hints of Brideshead (Catholicism) and Dennis Cooper (abuse and addiction) alongside occasional 2015 references to try and prove it isn't actually from an older time. The thing is, I'm still not entirely sure why it is a retelling of Henry IV, and not just a novel about being gay and Catholic and having an abusive father. I might've either preferred it to be more of a retelling, at least in terms of narrative structure as this version is a completely different kind of arc, or less of one, with more experimental prose/character framing or less of a reliance on every single character/family member from the play/history. The ending is an interesting choice that says something about this version of Hal and suits a literary novel about abuse and addiction, but for me, doesn't say enough about the book as a retelling or reworking.
Henry Henry was always going to be a novel I had opinions about, and to be honest I wasn't expecting them to mostly be confusion about how I feel about it as an adaptation and as a novel that should work without knowing the plays. It is an experience to read—it's well-written and it brings in a lot of interesting things, as well as darkly comic images of Hal's life—but it left me frustrated, that it is being marketed as something very different and that it doesn't always seem to know its own relationship with Shakespeare's plays. Messed-up, dark gay novels are great, but I think this one would've worked better for me if it also wasn't Henry IV.