The Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has outdone herself in this re-staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For those of you unsure whether or not you will grasp it, forget that notion. The play, which is being performed scene by scene for film, is thoroughly explained by the director to the players who happen to be presently incarcerated...in the Fletcher Correctional Institute. Eventually, the screening of the play for an audience of government and prison officials is paralleled with a real-life enactment of the play featuring the inmates, a female dancer, and the play's director. Atwood kindly gives a short and snappy synopsis of Shakespeare’s original story after her own presentation to refresh our memories. If you have the book, you can read that first if you want.

The Director of the Fletcher Correctional Players, once a Duke who directed plays for Canada's prestigious Makeshiweg Theatre Festival, takes the role of Prospero himself. He loses his position at the theatre festival one year and is pushed out to sea in a small boat (rusty old car) where he washes up in a cave-like rental for some years before he decides to stage a comeback using the Fletcher Correctional Players.

The audio for this book is particularly good. Some of the Fletcher Players shorten and update Shakespeare into current rap rhyming lyrics. This seems so entirely appropriate since Shakespeare often did the same, not in such short meter, but to the same end. And as the Director/Duke points out, Shakespeare often appeared to modify and create character’s speeches on the spot in the theatre, depending on the skills of the person in the role.

The Director had a rule for inmates: they couldn’t swear at one another using the more commonplace four-letter words we are familiar with, but they were allowed to use Shakespeare’s own swear words, e.g., born to be hanged, whoreson, pied ninny, hag-seed, abhorred slave, red plague, etc. Caliban calls himself hag-seed, and though his role is central to this retelling, the real thrust of Shakespeare's story belongs to Prospero, who seeks revenge for his dismissal so late in life.

There is real tension in this re-telling, and readers are dying to know how it is going to work out. Prospero’s plan is an elaborate deception featuring magic, and in this case, eavesdropping and kidnapping within a prison environment. We are at the edge of our seats to know what Prospero has in mind and whether his chosen goblins can pull it off without losing the thread (or losing their parole).

The play is a big success, and after the production is all over, the Director/Duke/Prospero gives the players the opportunity to discuss the outcome of the play as they see it. This important part of Atwood’s presentation fills out our modern perception of the centuries-old play, as each of the main characters tries to explain what might have become of them after the action of the play as written has ended.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we get at least one unpleasant but realistic take on the journey back to power for Prospero. The Miranda role, in another’s telling, is a completely unexpected evolution along the lines of the action movie grande dames like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill or Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger.

But the most rewarding of the after-stories is the one presented by Caliban, the Hag-Seed himself, who escapes the play altogether and creates a new one. And this is why this book is called Hag-Seed. In the end, the story is not about that old revenge play The Tempest at all, but about the rolling ball of creation, and how it is impossible to stop its onward journey.

I had access to the paper copy of this book while I listened, which allowed me to get every nuance. If one must choose one, I think I would go with the audio, which is beautifully read by R.H. Thomson, and who has a string of screen and theatre credits to his name. Produced by Penguin Random House Audio, the production is also available as Whisper-sync from Audible. Hogarth Shakespeare, a division of Penguin Random House, produces the paper copy. Choose your weapon and let the show begin.


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Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

“Time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.”

This is Marra’s debut novel, and in it we see his queerly outsized talent and deep knowledge of human motivation and possibility. Where did he get the knowledge from which he created this book, and how did he come to know it? In what he calls his Bibliography, Marra credits Anna Politkovskaya’s A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, Åsne Seierstad’s The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War, and Allah's Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, New Edition by Sebastian Smith for giving him much of the background he needed to imagine this place, in this time, a ten–year period between 1994 and 2003.

Constellation immerses one in the East—at no time does one image oneself to be anywhere but in that place east of Europe and west of the Caspian. I suppose everyone will have familiarized themselves with Chechnya now, after the 2013 Boston Marathon, but it is north of the Caucasus Mountain Range that separates Russia and its “rind of former republics” from what westerners term The Middle East. It has been the site of grim partisan wars, by hand and in person, back when one actually had to show up to kill another.

This hard-hitting novel shows us the broken families littering the landscape there, some forced into unseemly alliances with enemies, and the nearly limitless capacity of humans to inflict pain. But still there are some among the legion who are broken, who retain a measure of humor, dignity, and goodness that they share with other good souls. They recognize one another, these folks who hold themselves aloof from the cruelty, and it is because of them that we can even dream of a day when the sun shines on a peaceful patch of land where they can grow the food they need, play chess in the shade of a large tree, make music and make love and laugh without fear.

Marra gives us all this—what is there and what is not yet there—through the depth and strength of his writing of a people, place and time. His descriptions linger in the memory and stop the eye on the page. The Russian doctor, Sonja, was “a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside a set of unattractive but very white scrubs.” She returned to Chechnya from a safe place in London to find her beloved sister Natasha. “Though she was the elder, Sonja was always thought of as Natasha’s sister, the object rather than the subject of any sentence the two shared.”

She met Akmed, a better portraitist than he was a doctor, who helped her in the hospital and in life. In the midst of the betrayals and the shortening life horizon, for a brief moment “the circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed.” But that moment passed and Havaa, beloved daughter of Dokka, remained, the daughter upon whom everyone’s hopes were pinned.

The “Constellation of Vital Phenomena”, gotten from an ancient medical text, is a term to describe life and in this definition consists of “organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, and adaptation.” Couldn’t the very same words be used to describe any work of art in the process of construction, like for instance, a novel?

This is an extraordinary piece of work, especially for a newcomer. I challenge you to forget this book, and your first up-close glimpse of that place called Chechnya. It distinguishes itself by its subject and the incisiveness of the writing. Despite the horror, or perhaps because of it, one wishes to see the place, to care and bear witness for the folks that stood up for their most basic rights—to live in peace, if not happiness.

“Not knowing what to do, [Kassan] walked back and forth [in the snow], urging the dogs to do so likewise, turning the snow into a riddle no one could solve.”

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