Hag-seed

To make good on my promise to myself to read more from certain lovable authors, I ditched the John le Carré novel and started in another Atwood novel; Hag-Seed. Now this is not just any novel; Hogarth is doing a series of Shakespeare-retellings by contemporary authors in contemporary settings, and Hag-Seed was inspired by The Tempest. Or rather, not just inspired by, it is basically the story of The Tempest, including a thwarted theatre director, who aims at getting revenge through staging The Tempest. This sounds very forced, and it probably could have been in the hands of a lesser author, but the novel is actually brilliantly constructed.
Before we get into that, let me get this out of the way; I have never read The Tempest, nor have I ever seen a staging of it. It was one of those 'we won't go there' plays during my studies, and it isn't one of the plays that ever shows up at the local theatre (or not-so-local Shakespeare theatre). There is apparently a film version with Helen Mirren as 'Prospera', but I managed to miss that too.
So, no prior knowledge of the play or the story, although I did read up on the main plotlines and themes on Wikipedia (I found out in the end that there is a short synopsis at the back of the novel, but I'm one of those people who stays very far from the final pages of any novel). Also, the main theme is pretty obvious from the get-go; revenge. The main character, Felix/Prospero, has been thwarted out of his profession as artistic manager of a Shakespeare festival, and now that he has fallen low, he wants his revenge. After an exile of twelve years (not unexpectedly the same amount of time elapses in The Tempest), he finally sees his chance when his former enemies visit the prison in which he now works in a Literacy through Literature programme. It isn't hard to persuade the juvenile delinquents to work with him to get his revenge, and the end result is somewhat disturbing, but also a very entertaining read.
The 'actors' are asked to add their own thoughts, scenes and songs to the play, resulting in some very nice raps (I never thought I would ever write the phrase 'very nice raps'), which gives a triple layer to this retelling (the original play, the novel-as-the-play, and the 'modernized' version they perform). Again, this might have been very forced, but even though you can see what will happen way in advance, the plot never gets in the way of the story. One funny thing that happened was that I kept thinking the play was set in England, and it took about a third of the book to realise it was actually set in the US. Somehow, 'Shakespeare festivals' feel like something Britain-only, and the whole novel oozed Britishness to me. (And then it turns out that Margaret Atwood is actually Canadian, so I have been putting her novels on the wrong shelf of my bookcase for years!)
Anyway, it's a great read, maybe less so if you're not a Shakespeare/theatre geek like me, but even then the whole development of the main character and his young actors will still bring a smile to your face. Amazing, how something that should have been very heavy and deep with Literary Meaning, can still be so very light and pleasant.