5 Great Island Books That Reimagine The Tempest

When I was a kid, I found a book in the library that summarized every one of Shakespeare’s plays. I was a big reader of fairy tales, even at the late age of eleven or twelve, and the play summaries had the same kind of pared down power that I found in the Brother’s Grimm. I was particularly drawn to the plots that trafficked in magic: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth, for example.

More than any other, though, I was drawn to The Tempest. I loved the idea of exile on an island, of water all around and isolated magic at the center, and the way that the plot pooled and intensified in a single place rather than ranging out across landscape and time. I loved the idea of invisible spirits, and of an island threaded through with magic so beautiful that the island’s noises made its inhabitants cry. And I was fascinated by the mysteriousness of Prospero at the center of it all, stager of spectacle, manipulator of action, simultaneously professing love and inflicting cruelty. He shows up again and again in island-novels, their plots still swirling around him and his machinations, his cruelty profound, the islands in which he wields that cruelty so beautiful they can make you cry.

Here are five books that rewrite Prospero and his island, rethinking the man while leaving his magic in place.

H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

A slim, spare, fast-paced novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau turns Prospero into a mad scientist who directs his extraordinary cruelty at humans and beasts alike. The story starts when Edward Prendick, having survived a shipwreck only to be cast adrift at sea by his rescuer, arrives, uninvited, on the island where Moreau has set up his laboratory. Frightened by sounds that might be the cries of an animal in pain or might be the cries of a fellow human being, he flees Moreau’s compound, venturing into the island’s interior. There, he discovers colonies of half human/half animal creatures, their physical forms altered by Moreau, their interior lives realigned as well. When the creatures turn against Moreau, Prendick discovers that he himself is as capable of cruelty and violence as any other human—or animal. Though written in 1896, The Island of Dr. Moreau feels contemporary in its stripped-down quality: science stepping in for magic; knowledge gained only to produce more suffering.

John Fowles, The Magus

The Magus was my introduction to meta-fiction. It’s a mind-bending, possibility-altering, transgressive novel that changed what I understood a book could do. Written in 1966, and set in the years following World War II, The Magus tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, newly orphaned, newly freed of ties to England, newly employed as a teacher at a boarding school on a small Greek island: it’s all new for Nick, even though he faces life with a kind of sophisticated world-weariness. Nick finds himself becoming close to the island’s Prospero, a wealthy recluse named Maurice Conchis, who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator. When Nick begins an extended stay at Conchis’s villa, he discovers that the masques Conchis orchestrates as entertainment have a sinister power. Nick’s cruel education at Conchis’s hands served as an aesthetic education for me.

Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

What joy to find a novel that rewrites Prospero as a woman—and an extraordinarily powerful woman at that. Much of the action in this 1988 novel takes place in Willow Springs, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, connected to the mainland only by a rickety bridge. Willow Springs is ruled by Mama Day, ancient worker of magic and healing, descendent of slaves, modest in appearance, enormous in strength. When her grandniece, Cocoa, returns to Willow Springs with her new husband, Mama Day’s magic must rise in protection of the malevolent forces directed against them. Mama Day’s power is as mysterious as Prospero’s, but her motives are clear: protect those she loves, even if they won’t listen to her about needing that protection. Told in richly textured language, sexy and scary and embracing of human flaws, Mama Day reimagines The Tempest as a story of matriarchal power.

Hana Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

Part Nabokov’s Pale Fire, part nightmare all its own, this dense, intricate, dazzlingly toxic novel, published in 2013, creates a Prospero character who is dark to his very core. The novel purports to be an account of the life of Nobel Laureate, Norton Perina. Perina is famous for research he conducted on the inhabitants of an island in the South Pacific who seem to have found a way to immortality, but the novel begins with him in jail, in the act of writing his memoirs. The manuscript comes to readers via Ronald Kubodera, a fauning colleague who, through editorial omissions, exculpatory footnotes, and physical interventions, enables Perina in continuing on his noxious path. Perina emerges, ultimately, as a psychotic manipulater who throws a fragile community under the bus for the sake of his obsessions. Whatever magic Perina finds on his island is sacrificed to the wants of this invader from the outside world.

Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

Mackintosh writes an island that is shaped by an absent Prospero named, simply, King. Having brought his wife and three daughters to a decrepit hotel on an isolated island to protect the girls from the misogynist violence of the outside world, King disappears just as the novel begins. As the story unfolds during the hot summer week following his vanishing, it becomes clear that, though he’s gone, he has left his mark on everything. The daughters, who narrate the novel, speaking at times in unison and at times alone, are obsessive and cruel and innocent. Profoundly bored, festering at their isolation, ready to own life on their own terms, they engage in rituals shaped by a lifetime of fear. When three men wash ashore, the tenuous balance that makes their lives on the island possible breaks down.

Scarred by King, scarred by the world, they are ultimately able to access a magic of thought: they find a way to transform the very nature of what they assume an island to be. Mackintosh’s language is gorgeous—idiosyncratic, intense, invoking a magic of its own.

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Johanna Stoberock’s Pigs is out now from Red Hen Press.