Caliban's Hour

Williams is best known for sprawling multi-volume SF and Fantasy sagas, but here has written a very brief work of only 200 pages that is quite successful. (It's amusing that even at this brief length, Williams still feels a bit wordy. This very short book has a few passages that could have been cut with no real loss.) Caliban has, many years later, finally found his way off the island where Prospero left him and, cheated of revenge by Prospero's death, has instead sought out Miranda to tell his story to, after which he intends to kill her. From this device, Williams gives another perspective on the events of 'The Tempest', as well as the earlier story of Caliban and Sycorax arriving on the island, Caliban's life alone after the death of Sycorax, and Caliban's early encounters with Prospero and Miranda. The story is nicely told, with language that feels appropriate to the character. This is a Caliban who does indeed know how to curse, but also how to explain why his curses are justified by what he sees as betrayal from both Prospero and Miranda. The ending is a bit weak, with a clever, but not really persuasive, device used to prevent the promised final and fatal confrontation. The book is still, overall, a genuine pleasure to read.

This is my first Tad Williams novel, and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed. When my friend thrust this slim volume into my hands, I confess, I had my doubts. Not another entry in the "two-sides-to-every-story" genre. I have to admit that there are some very good novels that fall into this category -- Rys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Maguire's Wicked, to name two -- but there are some very bad novels that fall into this category as well. Caliban's Hour, I'm happy to say, falls into the former category.Particularly impressive is the way Williams managed to catch the cadences of Shakespeare's Caliban. I had recently finished teaching Shakespeare's The Tempest in a World Literature class prior to picking up this novel, so Shakespeare's Caliban was fresh in my mind. While Williams has a decidedly different approach to the character of Caliban (and, indeed, Ariel), he captures the rhythm and poetry of Shakespeare's character.At the beginning of Williams's tale, Caliban is a character bent on revenge, and the object of his vengeance is Miranda. It soon becomes clear, however, that what Caliban really wants is a chance to tell his side of the story, to make Miranda understand him. Over the course of one night, he unfolds the story of his life on the island, beginning with his life with Sycorax, his mother, and culminating in the irrevocable changing of his life with the coming of Prospero and Miranda. True to Caliban's promise that his story will only take one evening, this novel can, indeed, be read in one evening. It's short -- 201 pages -- and the story is compelling enough to keep you turning pages until the story is complete. It does, however, take more than one hour to read!

The audio version of Tad William's book as narrated by Ron Perlman (of television's "Beauty and the Beast") is absolutely wonderful. The tale is told, for the most part, in Cailban's "voice." Ron Perlman gives Caliban the same sort of realism and pathos that he gave to his television role. William's Caliban, however, is no "Vincent." He has his own agenda to fulfill with Prospero's daughter 20 years after she has left the island. Mr. Perlman's voice is mezmerizing and he gives Caliban the perfect voice with which to tell his tale.

Caliban's Hour is a well-written, moving, and ultimately magical re-writing of _The Tempest_ (in the same basic genre as R+G Are Dead and Grendal). Like many of us (or at least like me), Williams read Shakespeare's play and found himself most attracted to Caliban, the "savage" native who's love for Miranda is brutally refused and who is generally mistreated by Prospero et al. So he decided to re-tell the story from Caliban's point of view, adding in some key background (like scenes with Cicatrix, C's mom) and, of course, the present-day "sequel" elements which make up the book's action. And it works! William's Caliban, like Gardner's Grendal, is an epic, tragic, wonderful character whose story cannot help but enthrall and move. The prose is top-notch (no suprise for anyone familiar with Williams' other works). The debt to Shakespeare, while obvious and intentional, is not over-played, as Williams clearly stakes out his own ground apart from the master. And the ending is both surprising and awesome! All in all, this is one of the better, most underread and -rated books of the last ten years. For anyone who loved Tailchaster, MS & T, or Otherland, anyone who loves Shakespeare, and anyone who appreciates classic literature that reinterprets classic literature, Caliban's Hour is a must read.