Felix, the ousted ‘Duke’-an alter-ego he gives himself early on in order to have dealings with the world whilst he has gone to ground, literally, for what soon turns into years-has been a self-aggrandising narcissist for so long even he can see why people think he is a fool. In other words, for all its veneer of whimsy, this is still a full-on Margaret Atwood novel. He knows she isn’t really, but… he reads bedtime stories to her, loses more games of chess with her than he wins and, as time goes on, worries that her life is too bound by his own narrow horizons. And he isn’t alone, because in the near-plausible fantasy universe of this novel, Miranda is there with him. This is his own version, we realise immediately-Atwood makes it easy for us-of Prospero’s cave. This second death has taken a real toll on him-he has a remarkable facility for imagining how his grief, and everything else about himself, must appear to other people-but he is sure that Miranda can live again through this once-in-a-lifetime production.īut he’ll never know, because before you know it-in fact, from day one of his self-imposed exile-he finds a hovel-like shack to live in, whose interior goes further back into the Ontario hillside than it protrudes out. And now, Miranda is recently dead too, of meningitis, while her father was in a rehearsal room, probably the same one, with instructions not to be disturbed for anything. But… three years ago, his wife died after giving birth to their daughter Miranda. The stage has always been his life, to the extent that nothing else matters.

It sounds absurd, sewn out of the plush fabric skins of toy animals, their plastic eyes glittering. Along with all his other belongings piled up next to his rusting old car in the car-park is the cloak he’d had made. He’s in the middle of directing what sounds like a self-indulgent production of the play-with himself, inevitably, in the role of Prospero-when… suddenly he isn’t. Just think of it: a middle-aged actor-director, too busy to notice the signs of the impending coup, is escorted from the rehearsal room of his beloved theatre before he can take in what’s happening. In the wrong hands, her chosen scenario would have been dreadful.

Margaret Atwood, presented with the challenge of re-imagining The Tempest, has come up with this.

Dead suns book 1 space hag