Land by Maggie O’Farrell review – an ambitious story of mapmaking in Ireland
Set in the aftermath of the famine, the Hamnet author’s family saga folds in myth and folklore
‘His father was ever a man of few words,” begins Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, a lengthy and ambitious story set in the aftermath of the Irish famine. Land opens in 1865 on a rainswept Irish peninsula and takes us to Dublin, Rome, Quebec and Kerala as it tells the story of two generations and gestures backwards and forwards at two more. The opening line came to O’Farrell on a train journey from Belfast to Dublin, and became the way in to a story based in part on that of her great-great-grandfather, who worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland not long after the great hunger. “What, I wondered, would it have been like to be revising the maps at that time,” she writes in a short introductory note; “to be recording and setting down the devastation that had occurred?”
In bitter weather, Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam are mapping a peninsula – perhaps Dunmore Head in County Kerry, though O’Farrell doesn’t specify – using surveying poles and measuring chains. Tomás is in the pay of the English, who need him not only for his surveying ability and draughtsmanship, but for his language skills: they cannot easily find out from Irish speakers the names of places, or determine who owns what. It is Tomás’s job to untangle complex local legends and obscure toponyms to create a usable map, and he wants to ensure that the marks left by the famine – the empty houses and graveyards – are recorded on it, though the “redcoats” sign their names to his work. A famine survivor himself, scarred by unspeakable trauma, he tolerates this: as we later discover, assisting the surveyors and learning their trade was his route out of the workhouse. He might not have survived otherwise.
On the promontory Tomás discovers a strange and forgotten place, a scrap of tangled woodland clustered around an ancient well. When he drinks its water he is transformed: instead of terse, he becomes voluble; instead of harsh, he is loving. He raves and seems to be beset by visions, and he can no longer stand to work for the English. Liam must somehow stop him destroying all his work, and then get him home to the rest of the family: Tomás’s wife, Phina, whom he met in the workhouse when she was a girl “with curling yellow hair falling to below her waist”, and Liam’s sisters Enda, who is clever, and Rose, who is beautiful. Phina is expecting a fourth child, Eugene, whose story will close the book; woven among these characters’ lives is the story of the magic well and its effects, beginning in prehistory. With a talking fish, a huge, wise dog, a gold ring and the ability to grant supplicants either what they want or what they need, the legend of the well carries a strong flavour of Celtic mythology.
Land opens with an epigraph: the word “seanchaí” and its definition, given here as both “custodian of tradition, historian” and “reciter of ancient lore; traditional story-teller”. This is clearly the role O’Farrell wishes to adopt in this book, and it explains much about the narrative and the way it is constructed: the fable-like elements strewn amid otherwise realist passages; its occasional direct address to the reader; its use of coincidence (and fateful near-misses) as dramatic turning points; an unevenness regarding the passage of time, which speeds up and slows down several times; the use of well-worn phrases such as “Liam sits bolt upright”, “a fight ensues” and “luck is on his side”; and a point of view that shifts about between the human characters, two dogs, an unborn child, a house, the land itself, and an omniscient perspective broad enough to foretell the future and even, at one point, list worldwide events occurring concurrently with the narrative. These elements suggest that Land should be approached less as a conventional novel and more as an act of traditional storytelling.
However, this narrative choice also means that Land is very light on dialogue, with speech being more frequently reported than rendered on the page. This makes the book very dense, while also reducing the opportunities for O’Farrell to reveal rather than explain character: it is by hearing people speak that we really come to know them, and without enough dialogue many of the characters do not feel fully rounded, which makes following them from tragedy to tragedy something of an ask. There is a definite feeling of “and then …” about the story: events unfold episodically, and while that may be true of life, fiction needs a sense of causality to give it meaning and shape.
O’Farrell co-wrote the the screenplay adaptation of her novel Hamnet, which has been nominated for several awards, and the rights to Land have already been acquired by the same production company. There are scenes that feel as though the characters’ movements are being described from an external, visual perspective, as one would write a short beat of action in a script: “He fits his hat to his head … then leaves”; “Tomás nods once … then waves her off with a curt gesture”.
As a novel Land feels somehow uncomfortable in its own skin, neither fable nor history nor family saga, the voice of its seanchaí not consistently or confidently inhabited. But with its narrator absent and its characters brought fully to life by actors, it will doubtless make an epic and richly textured film.
The Given World by Melissa Harrison is published by Hutchinson Heinemann.
Land by Maggie O’Farrell is published by Tinder (£25).
