The Bard behind bars
Margaret Atwood is calling today from her cellar. What is she doing in the cellar?
“Talking to you,” she snaps, the quip punctuated by a satisfied chuckle. A conversation with the 76-year-old Booker Prize winner is filled with these kinds of gleeful flips to the predictable interview script. Then again, scouring her recent bibliography suggests her zest for the unexpected.
In the past four years, her published works have included four dystopian short stories posted online, a zombie apocalypse serial for the social-reading app Wattpad, and Scribbler Moon, the only copy of which she delivered to a forest in Norway, where it will remain preserved in a library for a century before anyone reads it.
Her new novel, Hag-Seed, out Oct. 11, is just as irreverent, as Atwood draws inspiration from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest to weave a tale set in a southern Ontario prison. She calls it the most daunting of her three most recent projects, which include sketching her own teenage dating woes for The Secret Loves of Geek Girls (out Oct. 16) and scripting her first graphic novel, the superhero tale Angel Catbird.
“Anytime you do anything with Shakespeare you are up against all of the Shakespeare fans who may not have liked what you’ve done,” she says. Hag-Seed is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, in which eight contemporary novelists (including Jeanette Winterson and Gillian Flynn) revisit Shakespeare’s stories.
In it, she reimagines The Tempest’s protagonist, the wizard Prospero, as an eccentric theatre director named Felix who mounts a production of The Tempest in a prison. So why did Atwood choose The Tempest? “Why The Tempest?” she mutters.
“What a question. Why not The Tempest! For me it is a play that has a lot of unanswered questions and for me those are the most interesting things to write about.”
Atwood knew The Tempest backward and forward. But she was less familiar with the prison system HagSeed is set within. Though imprisonment is a recurring topic in her work, most recently with The Heart Goes Last, building a contemporary Canadian prison — and not a chilling dystopian fantasy — was a new challenge for the author.
She says she worked with a researcher to determine “who gets put where and what is it like and blah blah blah,” though she asserts that prison culture leaves plenty of room for improvisation. “Every prison is different from every other prison, so if you add an imaginary one it’s not going to be out of line,” she says.
It was only after she wrote the novel that she found out how uncannily accurate her plot was. As the book was going into production, her publisher discovered an Italian writer who actually had mounted a production of The Tempest in prison. “That had been such a success that he is now putting on Shakespeare plays in prisons,” she says.
She also points to Shakespeare Saved My Life, a memoir written by Shakespeare professor Laura Bates, who volunteered teaching in a maximum-5 security prison.
“She said she got some of the best papers from them, better then her ordinary students,” Atwood says. “They really understood it.”
She quotes Macbeth’s famous line, “Is this a dagger that I see before me?” “One guy said, that is what it’s like, except in my case it was a gun,” she says. “Teaching literature in prisons and prison book clubs, this is an expanding thing. Because literature is a completely immersive experience, it’s different from a social worker saying tell me about your childhood, etc.”
The Tempest was one of the bard’s least popular plays, until it was reimagined as an opera in the 18th century.
The original text was embraced in the 19th century when greater emphasis was placed on the devilish, bestial Caliban, the “hag-seed” Atwood references in her novel’s title.
Is Atwood surprised by the play’s rise and fall in favour? “No — ha!” she says. “Nothing surprises me much.”
She admits she was surprised once this year. “I was surprised when Donald Trump became the Republican candidate.” That’s a dystopia beyond even Atwood’s imagination.