TEMPEST REIMAGINED
Novel reworks Shakespeare as a modern morality tale
Jack Todd has a multifarious resumé. A longtime Montreal Gazette staffer — first on the city beat, latterly as a compulsively combative sports columnist known to draw the on-air ire of Don Cherry — he debuted as an author in 2001 with The Taste of Metal, a memoir of the Nebraska native’s experience as a deserter from the U.S. military in the 1960s. After that came a western novel trilogy ranging from the frontier period to the ghastly exploits of a modern-day Charlie Starkweather-like serial killer.
Keeping Todd’s parallel tracks straight isn’t about to get any easier, because now, just as he has been showing up as an interviewee in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary The Vietnam War, comes his new novel, and it’s something else again.
Word that Rose and Poe is a reimagining of The Tempest might lead some to assume it’s the newest in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, in which contemporary novelists retell the Bard for contemporary readers. It isn’t — Margaret Atwood has already claimed The Tempest, for one thing — but it would slot in nicely.
Without belabouring the connection, Todd takes Shakespeare’s most enigmatic, magicinfused work and fashions it into a morality tale with an uncannily of-the-moment resonance.
The title characters are a single mother and her son living in Belle Coeur county in rural New Hampshire. Near the Canadian border, it’s a mythical realm with an out-of-time feel: Except for the sparing deployment of pop culture references (Patsy Cline, Black Sabbath) and the fact that a car figures prominently, this is a story that could almost be taking place 200 years ago.
Rose names her only child in honour of the author of her favourite poem, The Raven. Poe (the son, not the writer) is an intellectually challenged giant with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. Caliban is the source, but the spirit of Lenny in Of Mice and Men — another innocent who doesn’t know his own strength, a tabula rasa for the fears and prejudices of his neighbours — also looms large.
Among Poe’s few sympathizers is Miranda, daughter of Prosper Thorne, a retired lawyer slipping into dementia and given to ascribing magical powers to his intricately carved walking stick. The beautiful girl and the adoring Poe have a fragile alliance that is shattered when an awful crime is committed and Poe is blamed. You can see the plot turns coming even if you don’t know the original text, but surprise or the lack of it isn’t the point: In the manner of tragedians from time immemorial, Todd is setting elemental forces on a collision course.
The language of the book, a mix of Twain folksiness (Rose is “a big-boned gal”) and Old Testament-flavoured Faulkner, is sustained flawlessly, and there are set pieces — Rose’s bus trip across the U.S. to see her bewildered army-drafted son is probably the best — of an affecting lyricism.
The only place where the Shakespeare thread feels strained is in the character of the courier Airmail, based on Ariel. Maybe there is just no way to fit a sprite into a modern-day novel.
But it’s a minor flaw. The two parent-child relationships at the heart of the book depict filial love with a delicacy that counterbalances a milieu where seemingly ordinary people are “filled with an aimless, unfocused hate … there is evil afoot in the land and someone must pay.”
Draw your own inferences about a divided country and the animus unleashed by a shameless leader.
That Rose and Poe manages to hold out the possibility of redemption is cause for hope, and perhaps Todd’s most impressive achievement.