Hag-Seed

Plot - Felix is a famed quirky play-director who lost his wife, then his daughter. As an attempt to bring his daughter back to life, he decides to put on a larger-than-life production of The Tempest. Unfortunately, through a sort of coup, he loses his job as director to a man Tony, who had been his friend. He goes on to live in a tiny, run-down hut and swears to get his revenge, while evermore losing his sanity. After taking up a job under a false name to teach English to prison inmates, he finally sees the perfect opportunity for revenge.

The book - which appropriately reads more like a play, is part of the Hogarth series, in which contemporary authors put their own spin on classic Shakespearean plays. Here Atwood tackles The Tempest, and I should say with great success. I've never read the Tempest before but I've seen it performed a couple times, and only now do I feel like I understand it. Atwood not only recreates it, but so interestingly layers on the meta-theatrical aspect. She unpacks a lot of the stuff of the play herself, then through this complex layering of plays within plays, fictions within fictions, and prisons within prisons, she gives us infinitely more to unpack.


I'd definitely recommend this to any Shakespeare lover, or Atwood lover, or lover of theater... this was a light, and delightfully playful read.

An excellent retelling of The Tempest, Atwood's update of a fairly dry 500-year-old piece of canon belongs in the same echelon as Ten Things I Hate About You in terms of remaining true to the essence of the story while making it comprehensible without a lot of work. It's lively, modern without being too insistent about it and maybe tends a little bit toward Hamiltonian rap-musical excess but ultimately brings it around.

Hag-Seed is Margaret Atwood's take on The Tempest, part of Random House's retelling of Shakespeare's plays.
The lead character, Felix Philips (aka the multi-faceted vengeful Prospero of the play), is an avant-garde theatre director of the Makeshiweg Festival, who finds himself cruelly booted out of job by his ambitious underling, on the eve of what would be the grand debut of his version of The Tempest. Without a job and and a family, the middle-aged Felix hides away in a derelict cottage, where he plots revenge and mourns his dead daughter, Miranda.
His chance for vengeance comes after a dozen or so years when he gets a job directing inmates of a prison. His revenge takes shape in the form of a staging of The Tempest that he puts on for the benefit of the man who ousted him, now a government bigwig.
While all this is going on, he keeps seeing his dead daughter and talks to her as if she was still alive. These scenes are touching and poignant, though at some point even Felix himself realises he could be losing his mind with grief.
The narrative is often humorous, but always with compassion and sympathy for the characters. The structure is inventive, containing as it does a plot that follows the play, and a play contained within the plot that enables the author and readers to explore Shakespeare's work. Any fan of Shakespeare would be doubly delighted.
Hag-Seed was unexpectedly entertaining, emphasising as it does the unexpected dark turns that real life can take, and how one can learn - perhaps - to let go of pain and emerge with some light still inside.