Land by Maggie O'Farrell is haunting tale set in post-famine Ireland about history, map-making and memory

Maggie O’Farrell’s exquisite new novel, Land, is a haunting tale of loss, endurance and renewal. Spanning generations and continents, O’Farrell traces the fragile threads that connect people and place: stories half remembered, names erased, objects carried forward like talismans against oblivion, ghosts that haunt the edges of memory, music that conjures grazed fields and the wind-scratched surface of water. Moving between intimacy and sweeping historical change, the novel reveals the land itself as a living archive of rupture, survival, and belonging.

Land begins in 1860s Ireland, on an unnamed “windswept tongue of land” that branches out in the roiling, icy currents of the Atlantic. A gifted mapmaker, Tomás, and his eldest son, Liam, are busily adjusting their chains and surveying poles, taking measure of the land. Tomás is an employee of the Ordnance Survey, dispatched out west to revise barony maps that no longer conform to a landscape ravaged by hunger and emigration.

In the distance, Tomás glimpses a thicket of trees, not knowing that it is a sacred place whose origins reach back to the “beginning of time”. The mysterious woodland is not recorded on any existing map and when Tomás enters the copse to investigate he vanishes only to reappear the following morning, dishevelled but otherwise unharmed.

He does emerge changed, however. The certainty of the surveyor’s world – with its theodolites (a precision instrument used for measuring angles horizontally and vertically), gunter’s chains (a distance-measuring device) and Euclidean faith in point, line, measure, and angle – imploded in the copse. He sees now that mapping is “act of colonisation”, a way of making space legible so that it can be appropriated as property.

The simplified landscape of the usurper – a landscape of estates, courthouses, cathedrals and market squares – yields easily to the neat authority of line and symbol. But what of the rich, sensuous world preserved within the people’s oral traditions? What of the world in which rivers are alive, animals speak, gods and mortals mingle, and death is less an end than a transformation into another form of being? What of the mystical, awe-inspiring and spiritual, and the wisdom kept alive in the lore of the seanchaí (the traditional Irish storyteller)?

As a scholar of Ireland’s Great Famine, An Gorta Mór, I am aware of how devastating the 1840s were. One million lives were lost to starvation and disease and two million people emigrated in the immediate aftermath.

In a five-year period, between 1845 and 1851, the number of plots under or equal to 1 acre declined by almost 75% and farms between 15 and 30 acres increase by nearly 80%. By the end of the century, the acreage under potatoes and grain had halved as a tillage farming made way for an export-oriented pastoral economy. In 1800, half of Ireland’s population talked in the Irish language. By the end of the 19th century that figure was reduced to 14%. Emigration was the new normal, part and parcel of life-cycle of rural life in Ireland.

This is the context for O’Farrell’s novel: the land was changed utterly. A whole way of life was eroded, and Land imagines what it must have been like to walk among the ruins, to see a agrarian culture collapse, and, for those left behind, to forge a future from remnants.

Tomás vows that he will “never again cede to [the coloniser’s] version of geography, of history, of linguistic and toponym”. With his family’s savings, he purchases a plot of ground next to the copse and moves his family there. He is determined to make a different map of the land, one that will capture not only its physical features – “dolmen, stone cist, tumulus, evicted village, pre-colonial kingdom, and navel” –but the shifting webs of meaning attached to place.

“[It’s] not impossible,” our narrator at one point informs us, “that there are remnants of others here in this place, stray elements or traces of the people who walked this land before.” Ultimately, Land suggests that place is neither neutral nor empty, but always layered with what has been lived, lost and half-forgotten.

The novel resists any neat separation between past and present, “myth” and “fact”, showing instead how meaning endures in material and uncanny forms. Meaning can be found in stone and soil, in buried objects, and in memories that resist erasure. In O’Farrell’s hands, the land is both witness and participant, holding within it the imprint of human experience and the unsettling knowledge that nothing really goes away.

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David Nally does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.