For the sixth installment in its series of reimagined Shakespeare plays, the publisher Hogarth has arranged the perfect marriage between author and material. In the raucous, wildly entertaining “Dunbar,” Edward St. Aubyn, author of the Patrick Melrose novels, hasn’t so much reinterpreted “King Lear” as stripped it for parts and rearranged selected pieces.

Readers familiar with the play will recognize its elements, but Mr. St. Aubyn has mostly dispensed with the political machinations and fashioned a vicious critique of media empires and — a favorite target of the author’s — the lust for power and wretched behavior of the wealthy and privileged.

The Lear figure is Henry Dunbar, an 80-year-old Canadian-born owner of a worldwide media conglomerate, friend to presidents and prime ministers, and still the head of Dunbar Trust. As the novel begins, Dunbar is in a Cumbrian sanatorium after a doctor told Wilson, Dunbar’s ex-lawyer and “oldest surviving friend,” that his client had begun having “little cerebral incidents.”

“They stole my empire, and now they send me stinking lilies,” Dunbar complains to his friend and fellow sanatorium inmate Peter Walker, the London-born Fool stand-in who hosted a TV comedy series called “The Many Faces of Peter Walker” and spouts Shakespearean comments such as, “Oh, decadence, decay, and death, descending, syllable by syllable, into a narrow grave.”

Dunbar is in this sanatorium because the two most evil of his three daughters, Abigail and Megan, together with the physician they’ve been sleeping with, the Viagra-popping, bent-on-revenge Dr. Bob — Dunbar fired him as his physician — had him committed.

Abby and Meg, cartoonish figures who come across as dastardly villains all but bursting out of the panels of a comic book, have a plan. They want to orchestrate a hostile takeover of their father’s corporation and strip Dunbar of his title as non-executive chairman.

Unbeknownst to them, however, Dr. Bob has been feeding inside information about the sisters’ plan to a rival media magnate, the magnificently named Steve Cogniccenti. Bob has his own objective: betray the sisters to Cogniccenti in exchange for a $25 million payout.

All parties are counting on Dunbar’s absence from the upcoming board meeting, when the fate of the company will be decided. But unforeseen complications arise. One is that Dunbar won’t go quietly. Together with Peter, Dunbar escapes the sanatorium to “get to London and somehow take back control of the Trust.” Soon, he’s on the run, contemplating “the elixir of his own cruelty” that turned Abby and Meg into monsters and getting lost in a storm much like the one on the heath in Act 3 of the play.

The other complication is the emergence of Dunbar’s daughter Florence, the novel’s Cordelia, whom Dunbar disinherited when she said she wanted nothing to do with the company. She lives in Wyoming with her husband and children, but when she hears of her father’s predicament, she flies to England in the hope of saving him before her sisters, or anyone else, can destroy him.

“Dunbar” maintains a frenetic pace throughout, an appropriate choice for a work about type-A sorts who will stop at nothing to satisfy their worldly and sexual appetites. Mr. St. Aubyn writes one masterful description after another, as when he describes Dunbar as the high priest of tabloid entertainment for the masses, the man “who placed the wafer on their outstretched tongues.” If Dunbar’s late-novel epiphany and a couple of other plot resolutions are too abrupt, the book is still an enjoyable, breakneck ride through the misdeeds of one of the greatest stages of fools you’ll ever meet.

Michael Magras is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His work has appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Miami Herald.

First Published: October 8, 2017, 4:00 a.m.