#btat17

Hag-seed tells the story of Felix Philips and his plot for revenge after he is ousted unceremoniously from his position at the top of the Makeshiweg Shakespeare Festival by the manipulative Tony. After twelve years of wallowing in a shack he has kitted out alla Changing Rooms and not-so-subtly changing his name to Felix Duke, he takes a job teaching a literacy programme in a prison, directing amateur productions of Shakespeare’s plays. After learning that his arch-nemesis Tony, now a bigwig politician peddling a hard ‘tough-on-crime’ agenda, is coming to visit the programme with the view of shutting it down, Felix plots his revenge via a production of The Tempest, which also just so happened to be the play Felix was working on when he was toppled. 

The concept isn’t the problem. The idea has lots of potential to be great- taking something as infuriatingly bizarre as The Tempest and putting it in a prison seems like one hell of a task, yet prisoners seem perfect- trapped like the characters on the island. However, excellent concept does not necessarily mean excellent execution. The book gets off to a slow start, with a long preamble about Felix himself and his dead daughter, Miranda, and how he ends up working at the prison. There is then a big build up to Felix’s revenge which is met with alarmingly few obstacles, so the final payoff is, if not disappointing, then simply uninteresting. 

My biggest issue with this book lies with Felix himself. He’s an Actor with a capital A- he’s narcissistic, smug and self-important, yet for some reason, he has the full unconditional respect of everyone he meets, except Tony, who is a bad man, which we know from how much he talks about how bad Tony is. His grief made manifest through his hallucinations of the ghost of his dead daughter, falls short of the poignancy it means to achieve through a lack of innovation in its portrayal. Apart from this ham-fisted attempt, Atwood puts little effort into building sympathy or respect for his character, instead instructing the reader to give him it through the respect he is given by the other characters for no apparent reason. 

I feel like Atwood’s writing style may just be incompatible with the book she was trying to write. Her high, descriptive and ornamental style of writing (combined with her penchant for the rule of threes- see what I did there) makes the prisoners seem cartoonish, with names like 8Handz and Krampus the Mennonite, which ironically, sound more like names actors pretending to be prisoners would give themselves. The setting calls for more grit to achieve the realism it seeks. 

Overall, I think the book might make a handy companion to the play for those who are looking to make a little more sense of it. It is a creative and original take on The Tempest that includes some good insight and analysis of the complexities of the play. It also makes a strong case for the benefits of literacy programmes in prisons. However, for me at least, the book is seriously lacking in some desperately needed conflict and characters need a good fleshing out. Atwood picked the wrong protagonist in her Prospero But hey, at least the cover is pretty.