Sycorax by Nydia Hetherington – blogtour

Random Tours blog tour – but reading my own personal bought copy of the book!

Shakespeare retellings are one thing – I’ve read a few, below (links in titles) – and I still have most of the Hogarth Press series (now reissued by Vintage in paperback) to read.

• Oh, I do like to be by Marie Phillips – The Comedy of Errors
• Love in Idleness by Amanda Craig – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid – Macbeth
• Beatrice & Benedick by Marina Fiorato – Much Ado About Nothing
• Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons – Romeo and Juliet

What Nydia Hetherington has done is rather different though – her novel is completely Shakespeare adjacent. She doesn’t retell one of his plays, she creates an origin tale for a character who is only ever mentioned, but doesn’t appear. This is Sycorax, the mother of Caliban in The Tempest. You may argue that Rosaline is an off-stage character too, but that book is full of Romeo and Juliet; the others all contain elements of the play, Sycorax all takes place before the play.

Hetherington begins the book with an author’s note, explaining her fascination with the ‘blued-eyed hag’ as Prospero calls Sycorax, and sharing what we little know of her from the rants of the magician and ‘the laments of her son, Caliban. Sycorax hailed from Algiers, and a story from Shakespeare’s time tells of a storm on the north of Africa in the Mediterranean foreseen by a witch – which he could have used as inspiration for The Tempest. So we have the basis for the author to create Sycorax’s story – ‘Seer, Sage, Sorceress’ as the tagline of the book puts it.

We begin at the end, as Sycorax, who had been exiled to the island while pregnant, prepares to join her ancestors’ spirits, knowing that her son who is at one with nature will survive. We then return to the past and the story of how Atlas, a woman from the desert, called a bird to take her to the boy, Sunny, from the mountains who would be her love.

My mother was of the Moon.
My father was of the Sun.
Together they were night and day.

Sycorax was conceived that night, during a full eclipse. Sunny had built a house outside the town, where he could build hives to keep bees. Atlas made herbal remedies and rough and ready strong baskets to sell in the market with Sunny’s honey. As a desert woman, she was an outsider, and was treated with caution, but the townswomen soon started coming to her for her herbs and help. Her only friend was the old desert woman, Yemma. At home, Atlas teaches Sycorax her herbal lore, and how to make wish-stones to put under the pillow at night, chanting over them under the moon to give them power. It soon becomes clear that Sycorax will be more powerful than Atlas. Sunny, doesn’t like this. He’d married for love but their marriage is tempestuous, he was younger than Atlas, and needs to travel. Atlas does her best to prepare Sycorax for a future without her.

Eventually, she has to go it alone. As a young woman in the market, it’s difficult, but Yemma keeps an eye on her, and Sycorax begins to build her own customer base. Then she spots a man, Alfakay the Beautiful, rich, married, and a leading light of the all-male town council. He will be her unmaking, but he will also, be the one that comes for her to take her to advise the council and their ruler Barbarossa on whether they should sail to defeat their approaching enemies… We know where she’ll end up. Such is so often the fate of wise-women in those times.

You may wonder where the ‘hag’ epithet Prospero gives her comes from given that she is a young woman when all this is happening. The author suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, which strikes young and can be crippling. For Sycorax, having to walk to the market with her wares, every step becomes an ordeal as her own disease progresses leaving her curled up in agony, clinging to a stick, hag-like in aspect perhaps.

I’d not been sure what to expect in this novel. Although having seen The Tempest twice, I’d not really thought about Sycorax except as Caliban’s mother. As an actress, Nydia Hetherington has thought a lot about her though, and in this, her second novel, gives her a rich and exotic life-story of her own, that complements the little we glean from Shakespeare. Her writing is assured, and she blends the powers of Atlas and her daughter Sycorax seamlessly into the narrative without it seeming unnatural. I found the author’s story of The Tempest‘s absent character enriching of the Shakespeare, as well as a fabulous tale in its own right.

Source: Own copy. Sycorax – Nydia Hetherington – paperback, 400 pages. BUY at Waterstones via my affiliate link.
The Shakespeare Retold series – BUY at Waterstones via my affiliate link.