In 2017, Maggie O’Farrell published “I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death,” a memoir about how surviving various hair-raising incidents and illnesses amplified her zest for life. Before its publication, the Irish-born writer was best known for intricately plotted, mostly contemporary fiction. These novels, including “The Hand That First Held Mine” and “This Must Be the Place,” featured dramatic revelations about fiercely independent, nonconformist women and their families.
Writing her memoir seems to have unleashed O’Farrell. Three extraordinary historical novels have followed: “Hamnet,” “The Marriage Portrait,” and her latest, “Land.” All are packed with enough drama, misfortune, devotion, and beauty to get your heart racing.
“Land,” O’Farrell’s 10th novel, is a powerful epic about a place and its long-suffering peoples, told through hardships and moments of grace. It packs a wallop. Set on a remote Irish peninsula in the aftermath of the Great Hunger, the narrative focuses on the family of a talented but poorly paid surveyor and cartographer named Tomás. He has been hired by the British Ordnance Survey to map the territory and record the loss of hundreds of Irish tenant households following the potato blight – which neither the British government nor landlords did anything to assuage. “How radiant, how lovely is the land – and yet how empty,” reflects Tomás’ 10-year-old son and reluctant assistant, Liam, who is out on a commission with his father in an icy rain.
Why We Wrote This
Author Maggie O’Farrell, best known for “Hamnet,” charts the many epochs of an Irish homestead and the generations of its inhabitants in her latest novel, “Land.” Drawn from her own family history, the book paints a heartfelt – and heartbreaking – picture of sorrow, beauty, and endurance.
The novel, which begins in 1865, spools back millennia to the region’s earliest settlers, invaders, and oppressors, and stretches forward more than 100 years to cover the lifespan of the last of Tomás’ four children. The region’s history is characterized by waves of violence, colonization, and injustice, which are reflected not only in maps, but also local lore. Like much of O’Farrell’s work, “Land” is lushly written, atmospheric, and heartbreaking – yet it is also a moving paean to perseverance, survival, and forgiveness. In its focus on the inhabitants of a homestead over centuries, it evokes Daniel Mason’s “North Woods.”
O’Farrell found inspiration in the late 16th century for both Shakespeare’s family life in “Hamnet,” and the fraught marriage of Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici in “The Marriage Portrait.” Her inspiration for “Land” is rooted in the 19th century, closer to home: O’Farrell’s great-great-grandfather, also named Tomás, worked as an uncredited laborer under British officers for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland. The novel is dedicated to her family, “past, present, and future.”
We learn from flashbacks in the novel that Tomás and his wife (whose identity we discover in time) are survivors of multiple hardships – the famine, the loss of their parents and siblings, evictions from their childhood homes, and the workhouse where orphans were sent to split rocks for the British troops and cut hides to mend soldiers’ shoes. As adults, the couple survive by their wits, hard work, and later, the help of kind neighbors.
But unexpected circumstances also play a role in this family’s trajectory. “Land” is a novel of separations and reunions, and of distressing missed connections (often unbeknownst to the characters), and surprising convergences. It brings home the difficulty of finding lost loved ones in an age of mass immigration without the benefits of rapid communication.
To give away too much of the plot would be a disservice. In its later sections, “Land” rotates among Tomás’ four children, immersed in their individual struggles, separated by oceans. The two oldest – a bright, restless daughter discontented with the few options open to girls, and a sensitive son who is persuaded by the local priest to join the Jesuit ministry – are lured afar, with mixed results.
O’Farrell enriches her beautiful descriptions of the land with a sprinkling of Irish terms, such as “boreen” for a narrow, unpaved country lane, and “haggard,” used not as an adjective describing exhaustion but as a noun that signals an enclosed area near a farmhouse for stacking hay, grain, or straw. She captures the ocean’s swells and the stench of ship holds during miserable transoceanic journeys in which many sicken and die. With visceral immediacy, O’Farrell channels the terror of arriving in a strange land, ragged and famished, without family, friends, or funds. But she also captures the solace of love, music, and kin.
“Land” is a magnificent achievement. Already cinematic on the page, it is bound like “Hamnet” to translate powerfully to film.