The Death I Gave Him
Em X Liu
An achingly tedious version of Hamlet
I have read Hamlet more than twice, and have seen amateur productions and at least two different film versions of it, so I went into Em X. Liu's The Death I Gave Him with a pretty good grasp of the play it is based on. In fact, the correspondence was so close that I anticipated almost every key plot twist. There is one major exception. Hamlet ends in the classic fashion of a Shakespeare tragedy, with almost everyone dead. Liu in contrast allows most of the cast to live. The character correspondence is also fairly close. Here are the main characters of The Death I Gave Him, along with their corresponding characters from Hamlet:
⬤ Graham Lichfield, murdered head of Elsinore research Lab -- Hamlet's dead father, Old Hamlet
⬤ Hayden Lichfield, Graham's son, a researcher at Elsinore -- Hamlet
⬤ Helen Lichfield, Graham's estranged wife (now widow) -- Queen Gertrude, Old Hamlet's widow
⬤ Charles Lichfield, Graham's brother, another Elsinore researcher -- Claudius, Old Hamlet's brother, now king, married to Gertrude
⬤ Paul Xia, Elsinore security chief -- Polonius
⬤ Felicia Xia, Paul's daugher, yet another Elsinore researcher -- a compound of Polonius' son Laertes and daughter Ophelia
⬤ Horatio, the AI that personifies the Elsinore computers -- Hamlet's best friend Horatio
The story is set in 2047. It purports to be a reconstruction (offered as a Master's Thesis by a history student in a much later year) of the events following the murder of Graham during one night in Elsinore. The author writes
My main source is the neuromapper log between Hayden and Horatio that ran throughout most of the night, ...
In addition, many of the chapters come from a document Felicia wrote subsequently. Thus we have two main points of view -- first, the Horatio/Hayden one, which is the record left by Horatio, literally recording from inside Hayden's head, but also near-omniscient about events in Elsinore, and second, Felicia's account.
The Hayden/Horatio point of view is an achingly tedious description of the incoherent waffles and vacillations of the terminally indecisive Hayden. Now, this is on-brand for Hamlet, who was famously indecisive in Shakespeare's play. But in the play we perceive only those things one person normally knows of another: actions and speech. We don't literally see what's happening inside Hamlet's head, except to the extent that it is revealed by soliloquies.
Felicia's point of view relieves the tedium somewhat, as she is a woman of action and more direct than Hayden.
When I read Shakespeare's Hamlet, I like Hamlet. He has his faults, but he is active and intelligent and well-intended. When I read The Death I Gave Him, I rather despise Hayden. This, for me, is the worst thing Liu did to Shakespeare's play. They made the hero a despicable and (even worse) extraordinarily uninteresting person.
If fact, I don't like anyone in the novel. It was one of those books that made me feel, when I reached the end, "Thank God that's over!"