By Jada Fulcher
“Revenge is a dish best served cold” is a famous saying coined by French author Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, and is the perfect idiom to describe Margaret Atwood’s Hag-seed.
The title would confuse anyone who isn’t familiar with the works of Shakespeare. Hag-seed originated as an insult used by the character Prospero towards Caliban in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.
Atwood’s Hag-seed is a fictional tale depicting the tale of Felix Phillips, a famous artistic director.
On the eve of the premiere of his rendition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest for the prestigious Makeshiweg Festival Felix is sacked, metaphorically kicked to the curb by the betrayal of his scheming assistant Tony Price.
Felix goes into a state of self-exile. Driven mad and filled with vengeance, he plots his revenge and after 12 years finally has the opportunity to enact it.
Before reading the novel, I was one of those people who didn’t know what Hag-seed meant. But I was familiar with Margaret Atwood and had a lot of hope that the story would be enjoyable. That hope was served well.
What I enjoyed most is that, while the story centres around a play, The Tempest, the story of Felix himself follows the structure of a play.
Betrayal, conflict, revenge, and the resolution. You want to see Felix usurp his betrayers and make things miserable for them. You want to see the happily ever after.
Margaret Atwood delivers all this, but with a modern twist. It may be a story set in the 2000s but it embodies the emotions of playwrights from centuries ago.
Showing that humans, at our core, just love a good revenge story, and that is exactly what we got to see in Atwood’s Hag-seed.
Featured image: Margaret Atwood’s Hag-seed at Parramatta Library. Photo: Jada Fulcher