Knopf
Review by David Starkey
When I finished reading Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel Land, I thought of an Aboriginal Australian proverb that roughly translates as “Land is the story of the people. People are the story of the land. We are one.” That’s clearly the theme here, although the Land is Ireland and the People are its working poor.
Land begins in 1865, with the country just barely recovering from the Great Hunger that peaked from 1845 to 1849, when a million people died and a million more emigrated. The British are keen to remap Ireland now that so many of its inhabitants are gone, and that’s how we meet two of our protagonists: Tomás, a superb cartographer, and his unenthusiastic son and apprentice, Liam. Tomás is steady and precise, a no-nonsense family man, so Liam is shocked when his father returns from a previously unmapped copse, where “the quality of light is…immediately different, verdant and lustrous, glimmering with the trembling of the leaf canopy.” Liam had been frightened when he entered the enclosed little world with its possibly magic spring, but Tomás is utterly transformed, becoming “a wild-haired man-creature, who is adorned with greenery. Ferns are stuffed into each of his pockets; he wears a rough-hewn crown of leaves around his head; there are rushes woven crudely about his wrists and ankles.” Perhaps worst of all, Tomás is speaking in Irish.
Convinced that Tomás has gone mad, his host calls for the parish priest, but Father Joseph is of the opinion Tomás is possessed by the devil, which turns out to be something of a boon: he’s always wanted to perform an exorcism. After much trauma, Tomás is finally close enough to his former self to return to his wife and two daughters in their tenement flat in Dublin. There we meet Phina, who is bound to Tomás not only through the union of marriage but also through their shared past: as children they were saved from certain starvation only to be imprisoned and exploited in a workhouse. The couple’s two daughters couldn’t be more different. Enda, the eldest child, is spiky, restless and irascible, while Rose, the youngest, is sweet and caring.
The family’s luck continues to go from bad to worse until, without consulting his wife, Tomás rents a plot of land near the enchanted copse and moves everyone to the wild southwestern coast of Ireland. In time, there is a late-arriving fourth child, Eugene, who never speaks but seems to understand everything, and for a while they build a life on the rugged peninsula.
In the ensuing years, however, there are deaths and betrayals and a scattering of family members. The book begins the year Dickens published his final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, so it makes sense that the world O’Farrell creates is downright Dickensian at times, although the Irish countryside, for all its mysteries and sometimes unhappy surprises, is clearly meant to be an antidote to the cruel hierarchy of the British occupiers and the Irish aristocracy. O’Farrell is a gifted chronicler of the natural world, and she frequently employs it as metaphor, as in a scene where the adult Liam, thinking of Tomás, concludes: “how odd that it comes to a man one day that he cannot uproot his father from him, like an unwanted plant from the soil. There are no boundary walls between them; the two are one and the same.”
This is O’Farrell’s tenth novel, and though she was well-regarded in critical circles, it wasn’t until her eighth novel, Hamnet, became a runaway bestseller and the basis for a hit film—and an Oscar-winning vehicle for Jessie Buckley—that O’Farrell became something of a literary superstar. Land follows her 2022 novel The Marriage Portrait, which sold well, though nothing like its predecessor. In fact, because of the film’s success, Land almost feels like a follow-up to Hamnet. Not surprisingly, the film rights have been purchased by the same production company. Will the new book/film meet with the same success? It’s hard to tell. Tomás is no Shakespeare and the underwritten Phina is certainly no Agnes, but Land’s story is a memorable one, and Maggie O’Farrell is on a roll right now. I wouldn’t want to bet against her.
