Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood review – an inventive riff on The Tempest

The inmates at Fletcher Correctional are keen on their literacy programme, but they’re not convinced about The Tempest. Why has their visiting tutor chosen this odd play full of fairies? “Oh, the actors will relate to it, all right,” Felix Phillips reassures them. “It’s about prisons.” And so it is – whether the prison is a cloven pine or a spell or the island itself, on which Prospero makes his “full poor cell” – poor in comforts but full of words.

Margaret Atwood has been writing all her life about forms of constriction, from the uniform subjections of The Handmaid’s Tale and Grace Marks’s life behind Victorian bars in Alias Grace to the voluntary imprisonment of lawful citizens in The Heart Goes Last. Now she retells Shakespeare’s last romance as a prison drama.

Hag-Seed is the fourth novel in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, following Jeanette Winterson’s retelling of The Winter’s Tale, Howard Jacobson’s of The Merchant of Venice and Anne Tyler’s of The Taming of the Shrew. It’s done with gusto and extravagance: the artful traps conceived by Prospero are realised by an Ariel called 8Handz whose dramaturgy is of the digital sort. Drug dealers supply hallucinogens as they did in the 16th century, but now the soundtrack is Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning”, and you wouldn’t want the humiliating results spread about on social media.

A hundred years ago, enthralled and confounded by The Tempest, as so many novelists have been, Henry James imagined Shakespeare as a divine musician at close of day, playing the harpsichord, perhaps, held in the “lucid stillness of his style”, performing a blissfully solitary concert. No harpsichord for Atwood. This Tempest is a chancy rock gig, glad of big noise and scuffled improvisation. Though endings are much discussed, it’s a book of fretful striving rather than repletion. The magic is sought in neither breathtaking style nor stillness but in resilience and communication.

Early in the novel, Atwood’s hero Felix is ejected from the Shakespeare festival he has long directed, cast out from his beloved state by a ruthless factotum called Tony. Felix knows he’s a version of Milan’s deposed duke. Imprisoning himself in a hovel on the edge of town, distilling his resentment, he is self-consciously playing out the play.

Like Prospero, he has lost his wife. But Felix’s young daughter Miranda has also died, and this unfathomable loss is at the heart of Atwood’s novel. All Felix’s obsessiveness and creativity stem from it: “Didn’t the best art have desperation at its core?” He must make his Miranda live again, and the prison drama class is the means he has to do it. He’s out for revenge as well, of course. Felix and the prisoners will between them expose the corruption of those in power. Miranda gets a new life, of sorts, as a fleet, high-kicking dancer who can break Caliban’s scaly arms if she needs to.

It’s to be expected from the writer of the story “Gertrude Talks Back” that Miranda will be a forceful presence; Felix notes fondly that Prospero’s daughter must have been a wild thing, what with her childhood spent running barefoot around the island. But this is not a Mirandaiad; it laments more than it revives the lost daughter, who is a flash of lithe energy, a trick of the light. Atwood’s title suggests that Caliban, seed of the old hag Sycorax, might be her focus. Not so. Despite performing a long rap sequence of his own invention, Caliban – or Leggs (to Ariel’s Handz) – is a strange lull in the novel’s energy. “Make that girl be my Hag-Seed queen,” he sings proudly, “No matter how she scream.”

Literature in prison is a charged subject; last year, the then justice secretary Chris Grayling’s limitation on sending books to prisoners was overturned in the high court. Hag-Seed is partly an affirmation of literature’s potential to help offenders remake themselves – to help us all remake ourselves. Yet there’s something troubling in the lack of individuation. The inmates sound more like schoolboys playing at toughness than troubled men with complicated pasts. They’re banned from monotonous modern swearing and given a set of Shakespearean oaths to use instead, but repeated shouts of “Scurvy monster” don’t lend their words much weight.

Perhaps it’s irrelevant to complain of flat-footed rap in a novel of such inventiveness. Yet when the antecedent is the poetry with which Shakespeare’s Caliban evokes the island’s subtle noises, one cannot help but feel the loss. Caliban’s language is not learnt-up eloquence but the direct expression of a richly perceiving mind, and it rebuffs all external judgment of him. The play at Fletcher Correctional shows us little of its actors’ minds.

Felix is alive to questions of language. “The bard provided more eloquence at this moment,” he reflects, but, as he also rightly says, “They’ve covered the main points.” His comment applies to a good deal of the novel. Seeing the vitality of his players, Felix forgives the fault, and Atwood asks, humanely, that we should do the same.

Atwood has often negotiated the mixed emotions of forgiveness, diagnosing the loss that comes in giving up the thing you hate. One thinks of Elaine in Cat’s Eye, released from enmity and mourning it. Felix looks at Prospero’s revenge in the light of his own, and sees that it must leave Prospero more alone, more adrift than ever. His life teaches him to read the play, and the play guides his life’s decisions. As Prospero frees Ariel, so he must free the ghostly Miranda who for 12 years has kept him company in the lonely cell of his grieving imagination. It costs him much to release her. But it’s in this elegiac strand of her hybrid novel that Atwood most potently gives the old play, yet again, new life.