Really fun and enjoyable retelling of The Tempest. Atwood came up with the perfect premise of an ousted director winding up putting on a performance of The Tempest within a prison. All very post-modern and self-referential. It was clear Atwood was having a great time - she tells of the director getting the inmate/actors to analyse the text, inviting us to analyse hers in the same manner. She does a good job of paralleling The Tempest's plot, though that does make for some slightly overly-extended suspension of disbelief here and there — but she gets away with it, given the constraints in which she's working. One minor complaint is that the denouement lacks a little tension, but, still, for anyone who has any fondness for Shakespeare's play, this is very highly recommended. 4.5/5. ( )

Review of Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

Review of Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, Hag-Seed, the latest in Hogarth Shakespeare’s series of modern retellings, interprets The Tempest in a technique that layers contemplation, action, and exegesis.

This is the second of the Hogarth Shakespeare series that I have read, and so far, it is the strongest. However, The Tempest is probably one of Shakespeare's plays that I know the least. That being said, I wasn’t comparing and contrasting the original versus the interpretation; and this version, more than anything, acts as an exegesis, a teaching text, of the original.

Set in a Canadian prison, the main character Felix Philips teaches literacy through theater, but his endeavor isn’t completely altruistic. In the beginning of the novel, Felix is the main director at the semi-famous Makeshewig Festival, but he’s going off the deep end. He takes too many directorial risks, and many of the people he works with want him out. This makes it all the easier for Tony, his highest underling in the theater company, to usurp his place as director and have him fired.

After being kicked out of the theater company that was his life, Felix retreats to a hermitage in the country. There, he putters around, not doing much except hallucinating his dead daughter. His is Prospero, and his daughter is Miranda. After about fifty pages of this, he decides to take the job at the prison.

To be honest, the plot doesn’t progress at the rate I would like. There is a lot of nothing between Felix getting fired and things really picking up at the prison. A chunk of this takes up a third of the book.

The plot doesn’t kick into gear until the end. Tony and Sal McNally, the two men who ousted him from Makeshewig and who are now government officials, have the power to decide if the literacy through theater program can keep its funding. It happens that they’re scheduled to visit when the prisoners are putting on their rendition of The Tempest. So Felix makes plans, not only to get revenge on Tony and Sal, but to also save the literacy program.

While parts of the book are downright dull, Atwood is undeniably brilliant. Her prose is consistently stellar and astonishing, and her interpretation and explanation of The Tempest are downright genius. I think what it comes down to is that, while I’m a fan of the subject matter, and this wasn't really the book for me, I can still acknowledge its greatness.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC copy from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review. ( )

I enjoyed this interpretation, it was an interesting story and faithful to the themes. There's nothing wrong with it, but I don't feel super enthusiastic either. I guess I hoped this whole series would be a little bit more modern and diverse and inventive.
3.5, maybe 4 in the right mood. ( )

A few months after reading Nutshell by Ian McEwan, I read this wonderful book, and the experience was, by far, much more enjoyable.
First of all, I love Margaret Atwood. I’ve only really read two books by her so far, but I will love those books with all my heart and also definitely read more of her books before my time is up. And I am so very glad that this book is one of the ones I’ve read in the early stages of me going through her bibliography.
If you know me, you know I love Shakespeare and you also know I’ve performed twice as Ariel from The Tempest. It is one of my favourite plays, and my dream is to one day play Ariel in an interactive play that takes place on a tiny island, where the audience have to follow the characters around the island to get the story. I would kill to play that role.
This story functions as a retelling, but it’s not a retelling in the strictest sense. The story doesn’t pretend like The Tempest doesn’t exist in this universe, but rathe the story can only happen because The Tempest exists.
The story follows a man named Felix, a successful director and performer who runs a theatre festival in Makeshiweg, Canada, which is in its turn successful. Him and his brother, Tony, run it together – Tony looks after the finances and the logistics, and Felix gets the talent and the whole production together. And then Miranda, Felix’s daughter, passes away soon after his wife, and Tony usurps Felix and takes over the festival, kicking his brother off the team he lovingly built himself and preventing him from ever performing the play he had been hoping to build up to for years.
And the irony of how similar this all is to The Tempest isn’t lost on Felix.
Lost and unemployed, Felix soon finds work in a prison, teaching Shakespeare to interested inmates and trying to help them understand their position in prison in relation to the plays. He takes on the job as a part-time venture that soon sees him doing it for twelve years. And twelve years after his fall from grace, Tony has become the director of the arts and is visiting the prison Felix teaches us, but he doesn’t know Felix is there. And Felix finds the perfect opportunity to not only stage the play he had always wanted to put on, but to get revenge on his brother once and for all.
This beautiful story is a very meta-fuelled retelling of one of my favourite plays, not only placing it in the modern era and making it believable, but also being very self-aware of the story its telling and how it ties into the picture of a story a lot of us already know. This novel knows its limits and doesn’t try to overreach them, and it also knows how to keep itself real.
Honestly, I have no other words to say about this book other than it’s a fucking spectacular read. I give it a full on 5/5 and urge every Shakespeare fan to read it too.
( )

Atwood creates a delightfully book of literary legerdemain in this novel rewrite of Shakespeare’s “Tempest.” Felix Phillips, the protagonist is cunningly portrayed as just manic enough in his thought process to turn his sudden and unexpected dismissal director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival in Ontario from shock to depression into a crafty plot for revenge on those who deposed him. He plays Prospero in the novel putting on the play he’d originally planned a dozen years ago, served cold of course, to capture the conscience of his betrayers. But the real magician is the novel’s author who writes her spells in words that conjur up fast paced plotting with metatheater, ambiguity, and word play to make the whole rewrite of the play both believable and pleasing to her audience.

Ambiguity is a significant part of the stagecraft of this book. The Makeshiweg Theatre Festival is a recognizable stand in for the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival. But what kind of a word is Makeshiweg? Some have speculated that it’s an indigenous Canadian word for fox, but could it also just be a rushed verbalization of Make a Wish? It’s hard to say for sure. Is Felix mourning the death of his young daughter Miranda so much that he actually thinks her ghost is present, or is he aware that it’s a just an imaginary symptom of grief, even when he thinks she’s whispering in his ear? Is it just the stuff that dreams are made of? Again, the answer is maybe. Would it really be possible to isolate some Canadian Cabinet Ministers away from the rest of play’s audience to work vengeance and blackmail upon them? Whatever you might think about those questions, the response to the book should truly be sustained clapping, a standing ovation, and a cry of “Author!” ( )