Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood

Title: Hag-Seed

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Hogarth Shakespeare              

Publish date: 2016

ISBN: 978 178 1090220

‘’’The last three words in the play are ‘set me free,’” says Felix. “You don’t say ‘set me free’ unless you’re not free. Prospero is a prisoner inside the play he himself has composed. There you have it: the ninth prison is the pay itself.’”

__________________________________________________

Felix, the Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival, has taken his eye off the ball. He’s booted out of his job by usurping Tony and spends the next twelve years living as a hermit. Life and characters consciously mirror the story of ‘The Tempest’ as he foments a slow, artistic revenge.

How Atwood manages to create so much reader sympathy for a demented, self-centered, secretive, manipulative protagonist is a mystery. It happens, though. The text flows quickly as chilled white wine on a summer evening. You can take as much notice of the additional clever little mirrors and doubles of ‘The Tempest’ as you like, for there are many: the main and necessary ones are spelled out clearly. The appositeness of this play being performed in a prison is made ample use of. If you like the play, you’ll certainly gain more of an understanding of it as well by the time you’ve finished the book.

Perhaps the reader empathy is generated through the extensive character development. Felix peels back onion layer after layer of personal anguish. We see his character change and reflect on itself partly through the peculiar hallucination he nurtures, of his long-dead daughter Miranda. Spoilers would be a terrible thing but the personal logic he finally applies to this is both inspired and frankly haunting. The characters of the inmates (known only by their stage-names: Bent Pencil, Snake-eye, etc.) also develop and meld with the characters of their alter-ego play characters, pulling the play along into their unique interpretations. It’s interesting that Atwood devotes a considerable portion to after-play wrap-up, where Felix asks the actors to talk about what they think ‘happened next’ to the play’s protagonists. It’s an ingenious way of extending reader involvement and directly inviting the reader to continue the lives on the page: to free them from their paper prison and give airy nothing a local habitation and a name.

I’d thoroughly recommend this book. What can one say but ‘delight’ when the author lists The Shakespeare Insult Generator as a major help in creation? Enjoy. A full five hoofs up.

My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult

Title: My Sister’s Keeper

Author: Jodi Picoult

Publisher: Allen & Unwin (First publisher Atria Books)

Publish date: 2009 (First published 2004)

ISBN: 978 1 74175 805 4

Quite the most compelling book I’ve read in a long time. The narrative is: a couple with two small children have a designer baby when they find out their two year old (Kate) has leukemia. The baby’s umbilical cord blood cells are the original desired product, but things get out of hand. The struggle to balance family life in the constant environment of imminent death and hospitals continues for years. There are plot twists.

The novel’s success is lodged firstly in the strength of Picoult’s clear-shorn writing, adroit at tossing the reader straight into a situation by a look or a four-word phrase. But more than that, and more surprisingly, it is through the energy the characters are imbued with. I read this in paperback so I don’t have a word count, but I’d place bets on the count for permutations of the word ‘death’ (dying, dead, deadly, died) being close to 100. The whole novel is firmly under the constant shadow of When Will Kate Die. Considering this, it is even more extraordinary that the main themes are actually life, and love.  The phrase that kept popping into my mind while reading was Marvel’s ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife/ through the iron gates of life.’ The juxtaposition of how little time there is, with how much one would theoretically want, is the same impetus that drives both pieces on, with the same exuberant mix of wry humour and desperate bravado.

The ‘love’ aspect is a careful mirroring of almost every combination of characters. Kate and her designer sister Anna, Sara the mother and Brian the father, the physical similarity between the mother and the son Jesse, and between the father and Kate (and later the similarity between Anna and Sara), the echo of Kate and her also-terminally-ill boyfriend Taylor, and the romance between Campbell the lawyer and Julia. This last is by far the weakest portrayal, which I think is telling, because the ‘love’ the author is obsessing about is extremely platonic, in its most basic form. The mirror opposite, the other half, the twin, the necessary other to be complete. Talking of which, actually the combo of Julia and her sister Izzy are possibly worse sketches, put there purely, it seems to me, to draw the reader’s attention to this already screaming duality theme. It really could be omitted altogether. The whole Campbell side of things is weak, if amusing at times, and of course necessary for the plot to go forward. Given that the book could probably be 1/3 shorter with absolutely no detriment, it’s astonishing how powerful it is. This review certainly does it no justice. Go forth and read. Four Moose Hoofs up out of five.

Shakespeare's Kings - John Juilus Norwich

I was enjoying this, and taking copious notes, until I stumbled on the bizarre statement in Henry V that Nym had 'been imported from the Merry Wives of Windsor', which displayed such a stunning lack of knowledge about the background of the plays and dates that it quite knocked me sideways. Then noticed another weirdo-potato statement that in Richard II, that Wiltshire 'appears nowhere in Shakespeare's play'... apart from being a character, of course. At this point I stopped reading because I couldn't trust the book any more and didn't want to perpetuate any inaccuracies by taking them as fact. A shame, because it had some humour.