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Hag-Seed – Margaret Attwood (2017)

I like Margaret Atwood. She has remarkable ideas and a clarity of style that makes reading most things she writes quite pleasurable to read. She has been around a long time – her first book being published in 1964, and she has gone on to write a lot more. She is a leading light in the Canadian literati, leaning towards Speculative Fiction and an academic appreciation of writing. The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace and both books of the Handmaids Tale stand out for me, but she has written many more novels, essays and poems.

I have never really made peace with William Shakespeare who wrote far longer ago. Both are great writers, I will admit, but we won’t be around to see if Atwood’s writing survives 500 years like the Bard’s. Both are intelligent explorers of the human condition, and all that comprises, the good and the bad. It is hard to categorise both of their bodies of work, and easy to limit it by using constraining descriptions. They both excite imaginations with their use of language, and their range of works.

Atwood wrote Hag-Seed as a commissioned re-imagining of Shakespearean plays by a number of authors for the publisher, Random House. Atwood chose The Tempest to write about, apparently one of Will’s most obscure, most supernatural plays, set on an island where the exiled Duke of Milan lives after being betrayed. I read the original play both in its original form and in Atwood’s summary at the back of her book, failing miserably to fully understand either. It doesn’t matter – Hag-Seed can be read as a stand-alone story as she reinterprets a 16th century play set on an island into a modern prison, taking liberties but staying true to the overall premises of exile, love, revenge and an innate strangeness.

Her reimagining of The Tempest centres around Felix who lives hermit-like after his sacking from directing that same play in the Makeshiweg Theatre where he has worked for many years (exiled?). This was by his deputy and others leaving a lasting impression on Felix, carrying a deep lust for revenge. This is the central core of the story. After a few years of solitude he takes on a role of teaching literacy in the local prison, forming a repertory group out of a diverse group of prisoners to perform plays by Shakespeare. This is well outside their comfort zones but they like and are influenced by him. Here I think Atwood gives away her views on the role of literature as an improver of society. After several plays Felix, who has changed his surname when he dropped off the theatrical radar, decides upon the Tempest to be their next play, and lo and behold is told that the prison is to be visited by a political circus who have heard good things about his work. And comprising this circus are the same people who deposed him a decade before, now in senior political positions. The scene is set for classic Shakespearean revenge with Atwood milking every paragraph is leading up to the climax of this.

The depiction of Felix is fascinating, not only for his devolving into a sparce, hermetic lifestyle, his former role unknown to most around him, but his talking to his deceased daughter Miranda (named after a Tempest character) as if she is alive and living with him. She died when three and in his poignant, but limited, imagination she is growing up with him into a teenager. The scenes are touching and believable making Felix a dichotomy of a brilliant theatrical director and someone verging on madness.

The prisoners form a mainstay of the story, with their characters creatively described, as Felix gives them free rein in creating the videoed plays under his deft touch. He even gets them to abandon their usual bad language and replace this with Shakespearean insults. The title Hag-seed comes from one of these as in the real play one of the play’s characters originally living on the island prison, the creature Caliban, is the offspring of a witch. Their high regard for Felix causes them to cooperate with the complex revenge plot he hatches using technology, conveniently devised by one of the inmates, to blackmail those responsible for his demise, ensuring their fall from grace and thwarting their plans for increasing their power. Felix takes on one of the lead roles of Prospero in his play complete with the weird animal skin costume he has saved all these years as a key part of his plot. He brings a woman into the prison, one of the original actors from his last production, to play the major lead of Miranda, and the description of the her coming into a male prison, and how she has the strong personality and talent to be accepted, is delicious.

The book is a multi-layered one, much the same as the original play but you would have to read and understand the latter far more than I did to draw this out. In my opinion, the revenge scene doesn’t live up to the build-up, and is rushed in Atwood’s story, but that doesn’t matter – the job gets done. Felix has his revenge, gets his old job back, and reconciles himself that his daughter is dead and is not living in the corner of his ramshackle hut.

A very satisfying read that will satisfy both fans of William Shakespeare who understand the parallels and nuances drawn from the original play, or those simply enjoying a well-crafted story written with Atwood’s usual verve and style.

-- Michael Cains (Surf Coast Chapter) 

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Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed escaped my notice when it was first published in 2016, coming as it did just before Atwood made a big splash by having her The Handmaids Tale adapted for TV in 2017 at the beginning of the Trump Administration. 

Atwood seems to have been everywhere in my literary browsing since, having written a sequel to The Handmaids Tale in the form of The Testaments, conducted a very accessible online writing course for Masterclass and released her collection of essays, called Burning Questions, a couple of years ago.

I was therefore pleased and intrigued that Hag-Seed was selected as a book of the month for Tough Guys a few months ago although, amazingly, never having heard of it and, as chance would have it, having missed the chapter meeting at which the book was discussed. 

So in writing this review I feel a little bit lost without the benefit of those missed conversations with my fellow tough guys and find myself asking what is the point of the book in the context of a male-only-monthly-reading-group where you are supposed to talk candidly about your feelings as a man in the best sense of that word?

It is an unusual entry in the Atwood ouvre as it was specially commissioned as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, a project of modern reinterpretations of the works of Shakespeare conducted by Hogarth Press written by contemporary authors.  In this case it is The Tempest, Shakespeare’s magical play about a wizard, a monster called Caliban (not to be confused with the Taliban!) and spirits.  

Hag-Seed (a reference in the play to Caliban as the off-spring of a witch) is, I think, best described as an entertainment, although Attwood has said that the book’s rationale was also for purpose of “moral and social improvement”.  It does not seem to have, at least on my reading, any dystopian elements for which Atwood is justly notable as a writer. 

You can tell, though, that Attwood is especially fond of the play; she clearly had fun in writing it. 

(Of course, The Tempest has been adapted numerous times in the past in works as disparate as Hollywood’s gaudy sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet (1956) and the reflective poems by Browning and Auden.) 

The novel’s main character, its Prospero, the Duke of Milan, is Felix Phillips, who is moved out of his job as a state theatre director by a scheming politician called Tony, becomes unmoored for a while because of this, before taking up a similar role in a prison called Fletcher County Correctional Institution which represents the island in the play.  Felix takes on the new identity of Mr Duke, throwing himself into his role, plotting to get back at Tony and his cronies, as he directs the motley crew of inmates of the prison as the players on the stage.

It is a breezy, slight novel and you should be able to get through it, as I did, in two or three sittings. 

Some of the dialogue, characters and plot elements read as though they should appear in a sitcom or a comedy with dramatic elements that Hollywood used to generate in the 1980s.  There are a lot of hi-fives and way-to-goes expressed in the book that I found a little cringe-making.  If I am being especially honest and critical, I would say that there is a fair bit of padding in the novel to fit the structure of the play within a play device. 

I ask myself rhetorically: if Hag-Seed was a stand-alone work and not a reimagining of a Shakespearean play, would it be considered great or very good literary fiction?  Perhaps not.

For me, where the novel lifts itself above the artifice of its brief, is the ghostly sub-plot within Hag-Seed that has Felix, a widower whose wife died in childbirth and whose daughter, named Miranda, as in the play, who died at 3 years of age, appearing very tenderly and movingly in his dreams and thoughts.  I thought these scenes were worth the price of admission on their own, and gave Felix real weight as a living, breathing character that he doesn’t have orchestrating the other characters in the production and in the novel itself.

Aladino Di Rosa (Adelaide Chapter)

 

 

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