Last summer, while leaving the critic’s investigation of film HamnetI was confronted outside the door by the PR agent of the production company. “How was it?” she asked, as if the rivers of mascara running down my cheeks weren’t enough of a sign. “Oh my God,” I said, before turning on my heel towards the bathroom. How to best describe the desperation for the garment that I would feel in those 125 minutes?
I knew what I was in for. The Maggie O’Farrell novel that the film was based on had left me in the same mood both times I read it. The allure of the literary tearjerker was not new to me either. When I was 12 years old my older sister remembered crying in front of her college library over the Frank McCourt memorial. Angela’s ashesI ran to read it. (I didn’t give up when my mother worried about her “dead children and dead dreams.”) he wanted raw emotion, and release, that my sister had notice. And I would look for it again and again: inside Thomas Hardy’s bad Unknown Judas in my early 20s, in Hanya Yanagihara’s unrelenting Little Life in my early 30s. Now that I’m 40, Hamnet—which chronicles the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son—got me, but it touched me for unexpected reasons. Mixed in with her heartbreak was an extra strange feeling of joy, and with all the snot came a kind of neon ecstasy.
O’Farrell’s new novel, Landprovokes the same impossible combination in ways that eliminate criticism of his work as “sexual sorrows.” If the tearjerker’s raison d’être is to draw the reader into despairing sadness, O’Farrell’s fiction has a more complex calling—her characters are given a status that gives them the power and meaning of despair. He knows that pain cannot penetrate properly to a reader who does not have the full spectrum of emotions: disappointment, surprise, satisfaction, frustration, pride, and even unbridled joy.
Irish literature is well known for its tragic stories (including McCourt and O’Farrell, see: William Trevor, Claire Keegan, Colm Tobin) In Land, O’Farrell, who wrote at least two earlier novels set in Ireland, returns to his roots, essentially telling a parallel story—one that briefly follows a troubled family in the years following the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, and one that reconstructs the entire history of Ireland from its earliest recorded days.
Land begins with Tomás and Liam, father and son who work for the Ordnance Survey, mapping all of Ireland ravaged by famine for British forces. Out on the far western peninsula, they come across a deep, mysterious spring in a row of trees. Something strange about it terrifies Liam and makes the normally calm Tomás so greedy that the local priest is called in for an exorcism. But the empire that Tomás creates is not Satan; it is colonialism. He is no longer ready to draw rivers and count shelters for redcoats. Instead, as an act of “respect and resistance,” he intends to draw “a map of what this country really is, what it has always been, what it is under whatever order or chaos others may impose on it.” In time, he moves the entire family—including Liam; his daughters, the bitter Enda and the lovely Rose; and his hard-working and unpleasant wife, Phina—from Dublin to a shack near a fountain.
Before revealing how this decision puts each of his lives in a surprising path, O’Farrell wants to draw his own map: the legacy of this one farm. In a beautiful series of 25 pages, he charts a millennium of history where Tomás has placed his family. He begins with Brith, a young Gaelic girl, who drinks from a fountain and “feels cutting a cold path, it faces in the middle of it”; for all his vim, he ends up in an early grave. From there, O’Farrell springboards for centuries, describing the construction of new homes and castles; the arrival of the people of the Christian religion and the departure of the pagan “preacher” of the tribe; forms of magic or spirits thought to lurk in the spring. Briefly raptured, we learn about men desperate for children, seaweed piling up on the beach, seashells and bone pins left as sacrifices in the springtime—small bits of everyday life. But O’Farrell also collects the sufferings that befell the Irish people as a whole: failed crops, Viking raids, “bloating disease” and piercing famine, brutal tax hikes by the colonists and the humiliating actions of foreign kings. These pages should be assigned reading for Irish schoolchildren, an introduction to all the forces—natural, human, and divine—that have shaped the destiny of their island.
Then suddenly, O’Farrell is back with Tomás and his family, describing their new life—sometimes painful and happy—as country people. For Phina, a mother whom O’Farrell describes as too good to be true, their home is a place of contentment and a rewarding career where she gives birth to their fourth child, Eugene, who never speaks but is still perfectly attuned to his siblings and surroundings. Tomás, determined to establish himself as a rogue cartographer, struggles to provide for his family while trying to understand what exactly tormented him at the fountain. Liam, annoyed by his father’s strange whining, adheres to the teachings of the Catholic Church and wanders outside of his family’s power. And Enda, feeling displaced by their move from Dublin, walks the countryside, isolated by her broken relationship with Liam. Little Rose can only cling to the habits of housekeeping and peacemaking, hoping to make sense of her crumbling clan.
Over time, losses mount: limbs, children, parents, home, identity, dreams, certainty. It’s gone. Oh, alas! As the family falls apart, the reader begins to understand why we never learn their last name: They were never meant to stick together as a unit. The world is too full for that.
What O’Farrell specifically avoids is making misery their name. In Landpain is not important—neither a catalyst for growth nor a specific trait—but a natural companion to happiness and contentment. It is a source of misunderstanding rather than an easy solution or despair. Enda, for example, plays the fiddle like a fiend; his gift is a tether that connects him to strangers and pulls him back from debilitating loneliness. Rose, bereft of all she cherishes, clings to a small grain of courage and hangs on for dear life. Liam, the most lost lamb in the flock, struggles with regret over his decision to join the priesthood but doesn’t let the pain overwhelm him. Even Tomás, who has been deprived of his mapping—the only meaning he has found in life—is comforted by the land itself, the trees that become his roof and the grass that he turns into his bed.
In HamnetGreat suffering provides the fodder for a work of art that truly changes the world. Festival of Hamlet the end of the novel is a revelation. The death of Shakespeare’s son, which O’Farrell suggests inspired the doomed dramatist, was more than just a family tragedy—it defined what tragedy could mean to the entire English-speaking world. The family is suffering inside Land does not inspire a masterpiece—indeed, Tomás’s map is never finished—but the novel has something more in common with Hamnet. In LandO’Farrell believes that the fate of one family, with its human-sized joys and sorrows, cannot be removed from history on a large scale. He compares his characters to elements of the natural world by embracing views of the long-dead girl Brith, a landscape of trees, and even a passing skylark. A vibrant, vibrant earth bound to the tenacity of human life. There is trouble in this, but there is also much more. After all, the skylark is famous for the way it sings in flight—for joy.
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