It was to have been a play that would lay to rest all the failures of his life and career. He has been cast aside thanks to the interventions of a Machiavellian rival just at the moment when he was about to unleash his greatest creation upon the world – an ambitious production of The Tempest. It’s riotous, insanely readable and just the best fun.Ītwood chooses a setup that could have been cheesy and turns it into something extraordinary: Felix is the wronged artistic director of a Canadian theatre festival. (This is, surely, the trick of these novels: to be able to walk that line between tribute and novelty.) There are shades of Orange Is the New Black, All About Eve, even JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy (if it were set in southern Ontario). It’s a magical eulogy to Shakespeare, leading the reader through a fantastical reworking of the original but infusing it with ironic nods to contemporary culture, thrilling to anyone who knows The Tempest intimately, but equally compelling to anyone not overly familiar with the work. The joy and hilarity of it just sing off the page. Set all that aside, though, as this is written with such gusto and mischief that it feels so much like something Atwood would have written anyway. It joins Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time ( The Winter’s Tale), Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name ( The Merchant of Venice) and Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl ( The Taming of the Shrew), with Tracy Chevalier’s Othello, Gillian Flynn’s Hamlet, Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth and Edward St Aubyn’s King Lear to come.
This retelling of The Tempest is one of four novels so far released as part of Vintage’s Hogarth Shakespeare initiative.
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