The Hogarth Shakespeare line from Random House’s Hogarth Press was basically getting modern authors to rewrite some of Shakespeare’s plays into novels. I am a Shakespeare guy. I have bought all of them thus far though it seems increasingly unlikely that Gillian Flynn will get done her take on Hamlet. And yet, somehow, I have not read most of them. The only one I finished was Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time, her take on The Winter’s Tale. I had always intended to follow that up with Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, but a co-worker saw it on my desk and asked to borrow it. I don’t mind loaning books out, but I generally won’t unless I have already read said book. My friend ignored my repetition that I hadn’t read it yet and took it anyway…and then the pandemic happened. I finally got it back about a year later (and there’s more to the story than that but it’s not exactly an interesting story), but I read all manner of books all the time, so I still didn’t get to Hag-Seed until, well, now.
Point is, I finally got to Atwood’s take on The Tempest.
The novel opens with Felix Phillips. He’s the theater director of a Canadian Theater festival, known for being highly creative (sometimes bafflingly so) and he was in the middle of putting together his take on The Tempest when his assistant Tony tells him that not only has Felix been fired unceremoniously, but Tony will be taking Felix’s old job. Felix is an older man, his wife died a few years earlier, and their only daughter Miranda likewise died not long afterwards at a very young age. Felix was going to dedicate this production to his dead daughter, and now he can’t even do that. Angry, Felix finds a small hut in the woods to rent out under the name “Mr. Duke” and eventually takes a job teaching Shakespeare to convicts. Five years after his dismissal, Felix finds an opportunity for revenge of sorts against everyone who cost him his job when a government group, including Tony, are coming to the prison to see a production before they cut the budget. Can Felix get his revenge? And, since this is The Tempest, should he?
Now, up to this point, aside from an essay here or there, my only real exposure to Atwood’s work was The Handmaid’s Tale. Suffice to say, Hag-Seed is nothing like that work. It’s lighter in tone for one thing, but that’s highly appropriate. The Tempest is a light-hearted play. Prospero can easily get revenge on those who cost him everything, except he doesn’t. He chooses forgiveness (for now). His daughter will marry a king’s son, Ariel will get his/her freedom, and even Caliban gets his island. Everybody wins or at least isn’t punished.
Atwood, for her part, doesn’t even really use Shakespeare’s plot for most of her novel. In point of fact, her book is divided into five parts, and only really the fourth is a recreation of Shakespeare’s story. She uses the first three to show what came before, and the fifth a post script where Felix’s convict students speculate on where different characters from Shakespeare’s original went after the play ended. Her approach actually made me wonder for a while if Felix was really the book’s Prospero or its Caliban. The end result is obviously Prospero, but the title of the novel refers to Caliban, and if Felix isn’t Caliban, then the novel doesn’t really have one. It would depend on whether or not Felix’s cause was as righteous as he felt and whether his “revenge” was going to be violent or not.
Ultimately, this is not a book about violent retribution. Felix gets his revenge using the tools of the theater in a way that may or may not work in the real world, but at the same time, this is a book based on a play about a wizard that features a monster described as fish-like who speaks in iambic pentameter and an air spirit that can do more or less anything it wants. It’s a light work, often fun, and even takes on something of the fairy tale tone of the original play. It’s a fun book based on a fun play where the main character finds a way to get his revenge without really hurting anyone, and there’s something to be said about how the novel gets there. After all, the magic of the stage is not the same as what the fictional Prospero uses, but I really enjoyed this one. I’ll need to read more of those Hogarth’s books soon.
Grade: A-
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