Petergiaquinta's Reviews > Ariel

Having reread William Shakespeare’s The Tempest last week, I thought I’d have a go at Grace Tiffany’s Ariel, a little book that’s been sitting on my shelf for the past couple of years. The Tempest is fascinating and has inspired numerous retellings over the past 400 years, from W.H. Auden’s heady poem, “The Sea and the Mirror,” to the cheesy sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet to the contemporary production of the play as envisioned by magician Teller (he's the quiet one) and director Aaron Posner with acrobatics by Pilobolus and music by Tom Waits. However, I shouldn’t have wasted my time with Tiffany’s thin novel, which is poorly written and mostly a bunch of nonsense. And by time I’m done here, I will have ruined its idiotic twists and the big reveals at the end of the book, so there’s no point in you reading it either. You have been warned.

Tiffany’s re-imagining of Shakespeare’s play seems to have been written for teens, although why the author chose to do this, I can’t imagine, especially since her bio depicts her as a professor of English lit at Western Michigan University with an emphasis on the Renaissance. Because even if Shakespeare’s original has at its core a relationship between a grumpy father and his precocious fifteen-year-old daughter, a daughter who now thinks her old dad isn’t all that cool anymore and falls for the first good looking guy she meets, the play’s rich language and even richer thematic concerns put it far beyond anything that could be adequately or satisfactorily explored in a dumbed-down version packaged for teen readers by a HarperCollins YA/children’s publishing line.

Come to think of it, perhaps Miranda and Prospero’s story could be satisfactorily adapted as YA fare, if the right author and the right publisher went about it in the right way. There’s the absent mother, the attempted rape, the controlling father who learns he needs to let his growing daughter find her own way in the world. There’s the exotic setting, lots of drinking, violence, and conflicts of class and race; there’s witchcraft and sorcery…in fact, there’s just about everything that could be successfully exploited by an author seeking to bank on Shakespeare’s genius and scale down his rich tale into a YA money grab. But that’s not the book that Tiffany has written.

She forgoes all of that and instead tries to write something that maybe she thinks is a thoughtful re-examination of some of Shakespeare’s themes, but I dunno. Frankly, I don’t understand Tiffany’s motivations or intentions for writing her book. The epigraph from Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror” lured me into Ariel expecting a novel, even if it were written for teens, that explored the rich internal world of the imagination and the creative impulse of the artist, as well as the potential for self-destruction inherent in that very impulse, ideas that Shakespeare explores in The Tempest through Prospero and Ariel, long before Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Percy Shelley, or for that matter Dylan Thomas or Charles Bukowski or Neil Gaiman, ever wrote about similar ideas. And Tiffany’s first few sentences seem to carry out the promise of the epigraph: “The first thing you should know about Ariel is that she’s a liar. Dreams lie, and she is both dream and the maker of dreams. Her work is not to tell the truth but to play: to sing, dance, and spin thrilling pictures in the air.”

But that’s about as good as it gets in Tiffany’s book. Even her next sentence rings false: “She likes bold colors; subtle hues and shades do not interest her. She paints with a broad brush…” And that’s just nonsense. That, perhaps, is what bad YA writing does, and it’s what this awful retelling of The Tempest may do, but it’s not what Shakespeare does, or what Ariel or Prospero do in his play, and it’s not what good writing or art does either.

When I read the Auden epigraph and the first few lines of Tiffany’s book, I thought, “Okay, I get it. Art and the imagination are great deceivers. They’re dangerous. Sure, I've heard that idea before…” After all, the imagination is a powerful force, and the creative impulse can be both a creator and a destroyer. Picasso tells us that art is the lie that tells the truth, or at least he said something close to that. And Shakespeare knew the same thing, centuries before Picasso. But that’s not what Tiffany is doing in her book. In fact, I can’t really tell you what Tiffany intended to do here, but her version of The Tempest and her spin on Ariel, art, and the creative force of the imagination, is just a lie. It doesn’t tell the truth at all. It doesn’t do anything except deceive, and it certainly doesn’t add any beauty to the world. Strangely, in her story of Ariel, Tiffany seems to be saying that art and the imagination are absolutely useless, a shockingly bad message from a professor of English literature writing a book for teens and pre-teens that purports itself to be a retelling of Shakespeare’s Tempest.

Critics don’t all share the same view of Ariel’s role in Shakespeare’s play, but most would agree that Ariel is an elemental “spirit” associated with the air and water of the island, in stark contrast to the “monster” that is Caliban, connected to the isle’s earth and rocks. Ariel has been subjugated by Prospero, a magician of vast power cast away on the island with his three-year-old daughter after being exiled from his position of duke of Milan. Prospero uses Ariel as an agent of his imagination to do his bidding over the 12 years that father and daughter have been on the island, especially to carry out his plan to avenge himself on those who have wronged him and restore himself to his dukedom in Milan. Ariel is a gentle spirit, a gracious one and eager to please, who is both thankful to Prospero for having freed him from the imprisonment in the tree by the witch Sycorax, but also anxious to be granted his own freedom by Prospero so he can return to the elements, a freedom that Prospero has promised him once his plans for dealing with his enemies have been achieved. This, without getting into the specific details, is Ariel’s role in the play, and most readers and critics recognize the essential nature of Ariel as a servant to the powerful Prospero who, not only being a wizard, is Shakespeare’s stand-in for the artist, even for the playwright himself.

But not Grace Tiffany.

In her preposterous spin on Shakespeare’s story, Ariel is a dangerous, hateful female spirit who has somehow been born from the dying thoughts of a Jewish sailor blown all the way across the Atlantic from the coast of Malta after a storm separated him from his master’s ship. His name was Jasper (seriously, Jasper?), and his master was the apostle Paul. Jasper (?) washes up on the shores of an island in the Bermuda Triangle. Like Athena, I guess, but a whole lot meaner, Ariel pops out of Jasper’s head and lives alone on the island for hundreds of years as Jasper’s bones bleach in the sun. She’s not Wisdom, though. And in keeping with Shakespeare, or at least in keeping with some of the interpretations of Shakespeare’s character, she seems to be the embodiment of the Imagination.

In her isolation, Ariel gives birth to three minions, Intellect, Madness, and Fantasy, and the four of them enjoy themselves on the island, although they seem to be trapped in the Triangle itself. But if that all seems strange—how, for example, does the Imagination exist absent the artist? and doesn’t Mind (“Nous” in Tiffany’s words) give rise to Imagination, not the other way around?—don’t fret yourself worrying about the particulars because as the story develops things get more and more ridiculous.

Ariel longs to leave the Triangle, not for the sake of freedom, which would fit in nicely with Shakespeare’s ideas, but because she is curious about the people who live beyond the wall of the Triangle on the other side of the island. She hears their drums and for some reason has a strong impulse to conquer the rest of this island and subdue the peoples she imagines must be making this racket. After several hundred years stuck in the Triangle, Ariel sees a young pregnant woman washed onto the shores of her island, Sycorax, a Saxon who has been kidnapped by Vikings and working on their ship. She gives birth to a dark-skinned baby (Caliban) whose father was apparently an African traveling with these Vikings. Ariel doesn’t help with the birthing process (although she gives birth to her three minions, Ariel doesn’t know nuthin' about birthin' no babies), and Sycorax somehow curses Ariel to be imprisoned in a tree. How? I dunno. Don’t worry about it. You won’t make sense of any of the book.

Ariel hates Sycorax and her handsome boy Caliban (I know…) who suffers a twisted leg from Ariel not helping with the birth. And then from her tree prison, Ariel somehow convinces Caliban to poison his mother, and several years later an old man and his three-year-old daughter wash up on the island and the storyline of The Tempest follows.

Or not…because here are just a few of the details in Tiffany’s story:

•Prospero is a farmer, not a Duke, and he’s a bad farmer, as well as a bad poet.
•Prospero wasn’t exiled. Apparently he did something dumb, like take his daughter and a bunch of books and get in a boat to go to some Greek poetry conference and then got blown all the way across the Atlantic.
•Upon arrival on the island, Ariel makes Prospero believe himself to be a duke wronged by his brother. His terrible desire for vengeance is all the creation of Ariel, for Prospero doesn’t really want vengeance; he has nothing to take vengeance against. His brother Antonio is well-intentioned and loves him. Sure, he’s better with money than Prospero, who always has his head in a book, but Antonio has kept Prospero’s farm going for him in his 12-year absence, and taken care of Prospero’s grieving wife, Althea.
•Alonso is Antonio’s partner in their farming concern. He doesn’t hate Prospero, either. It’s all so very nice, and would have been if not for that scheming menace, Ariel.

Not only does Ariel fill Prospero’s head with delusions and a desire to harm the people who love him, but she also desires to harm the noble Caliban and poisons Prospero’s mind against him. Ultimately, her great plan after Prospero avenges himself against Antonio and Alonso and does away with Caliban is to get Prospero to take her beyond the wall so that she can dominate the rest of the island and conquer whoever is playing those goshdarn drums. In Grace’s retelling, Ariel is a sadistic maniac seeking to spread misery and destruction, and Prospero is a rather foolish incompetent. All he can really do is read books, which is really a big waste of time, although his brother does concede near the end of the story, “Work is good, but stories have their place.” Gee thanks, Miss Tiffany!

At the end, several centuries after Prospero has abandoned Ariel on the island, someone does show up who is perfect for the seed of evil that Ariel wants to spread. And look who it is: My, my, it’s Christopher Columbus, arriving on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria!

Let’s see, a dying Jewish sailor/Christian missionary gives rise to an idea that is embraced by a Genoese explorer and his expanding civilization that leads to the genocide of the New World’s indigenous peoples, as well as the institution of slavery in the Americas…ha! If Grace Tiffany had anything going on in this book that even remotely made sense, I’d say that’s almost genius. Except it’s not. It's just poorly written tomfoolery masquerading as a bad YA book. And it's got nothing to do with The Tempest.

Here’s the one bit of the story that really works for me: Remember Claribel, Alonso’s daughter that he marries to the King of Tunis? Well, in Tiffany’s book she’s Claribel the cow, who took top honors at the Lisbon fair and they sold off to some African buyer…now that’s funny stuff!

As for the rest of it? I say we follow Prospero’s lead here and, “deeper than did any plummet sound,” we drown Grace Tiffany’s book.


Here's a slightly better YA book trying to rework The Tempest:
Dennis Covington's Lizard

And here's a much better treatment of The Tempest by a much better author, Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed, written for the Hogarth Shakespeare series:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...