Everyone keeps telling me Atwood is "retelling Shakespeare" with this one, like that's the whole story. It's not. What Atwood's actually doing is something sneakier — she's using The Tempest as a mirror, then cracking it, then handing you the shards and asking what you see. I went in expecting a clever literary exercise. I came out thinking about forgiveness in ways I haven't since I taught King Lear to a room full of juniors who didn't want to be there.
Shakespeare Behind Bars (But Make It Personal)
Here's the setup: Felix, a deposed theater director — Atwood's Prospero, obviously — spends twelve years in a run-down shack after getting backstabbed out of his own festival by a politician named Tony. He's grieving his dead daughter Miranda. He's talking to her ghost. He's furious. And then he gets a gig teaching Shakespeare to inmates at a correctional facility, and that's where the book really catches fire.
I was listening to this during one of those late-September walks along the lakefront with Denise, and I actually stopped walking during the scene where Felix first pitches The Tempest to his prison class. Because Atwood does something I try to do every single day in my classroom and almost never pull off — she makes Shakespeare feel urgent. Dangerous, even. Felix's inmates argue about Caliban's motivations with the kind of raw honesty my AP students would never risk. They debate whether Ariel is a snitch or a survivor. One of them rewrites speeches as rap.
And yes, about that rapping. I'd heard people call it awkward. Silly, even. And look — on the page, inmate-written rap verses riffing on iambic pentameter probably read as a gimmick. But R.H. Thomson commits to them with this deadpan sincerity that made me grin rather than cringe. He doesn't perform the raps as jokes. He performs them as guys who are genuinely trying to wrestle meaning out of four-hundred-year-old language. Which is exactly what they are.
Thomson's Felix Is the Performance I Didn't Know I Needed
Let's talk about what the author is really saying through Felix, because Thomson's narration nails the contradiction at the character's core. Felix is theatrical and petty and wounded and brilliant and a little bit insufferable — sometimes in the same sentence. Thomson reads him with this slight Canadian reserve that keeps cracking open at the edges. There's a toughness in his voice when Felix is scheming, planning his elaborate revenge against Tony and his cronies, but it softens into something almost fragile whenever Miranda's ghost appears. He doesn't overplay those moments. He just... lets the air out of the room.
The character differentiation is subtle — Thomson's not doing full-voice acting for every inmate — but the vocal shifts are enough. You can tell when he's voicing the skeptical older con versus the eager younger one. And he salvages a few stretches of dialogue that, honestly, feel a little clunky on arrival. There are moments where Atwood's plotting gets convenient — the revenge scheme clicks together a bit too neatly, the villains practically walk into Felix's trap — and Thomson's delivery smooths those transitions in a way that reading them cold might not.
At 8 hours and change, it's a tight listen. No bloat. Atwood isn't padding this thing out.
The Tempest as a Teaching Text (And Why That Matters)
Here's where I got personally invested, and I'll admit my bias. I've spent twenty years watching kids pretend to engage with Shakespeare. Atwood gets the actual pedagogy right — Felix doesn't lecture his inmates about themes and motifs. He makes them inhabit the play. He assigns them characters and asks them to defend those characters' choices. He builds the production around their interpretations, not his. And the result is messy and imperfect and alive in exactly the way the best classroom work is.
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about prose being architecture, not interior decoration. Atwood builds her adaptation structurally. She maps Felix's arc onto Prospero's with discipline — the exile, the island (here a shack), the magic (here theater itself), the tempest (here an elaborate con), the moment of choosing mercy over revenge. But she leaves room for her characters to breathe inside that structure. The inmates aren't props in Felix's revenge fantasy. They become collaborators. They change the play. They change him. I found something of that same unlikely transformation — outsiders reshaping the story around them — in Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules, though Atwood's version carries a weight that one never quite reaches.
If you loved The Tempest but always felt Prospero got off too easy — if you wanted someone to interrogate whether his "forgiveness" was really just a power move — this is its spiritual successor.
Who Gets the Detention Pass
This is for Shakespeare people who want their adaptations to push back rather than genuflect. For audiobook listeners who prefer narration that interprets rather than just delivers. For anyone who's ever tried to teach something they love to people who didn't ask for it.
Skip it if you want a straightforward retelling. Atwood's playing a different game. And if the idea of inmates rapping Shakespeare makes you roll your eyes — well, it might win you over. It won me.
The Prose Deserves to Be Savored
My students would hate this. I love it. Not because it's inaccessible — it's actually one of Atwood's most readable novels — but because it rewards the kind of slow, attentive listening that teenagers find physically painful. Thomson at 1.0x, lakefront wind in your ears, Atwood's sentences landing exactly as intended. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. Worth pausing pretty much anything for.
