Land is Maggie O’Farrell’s best novel
Sometimes – rarely – there is a book that I want to read again immediately, the very moment I have reached its last page. A book to be consumed slowly, rolling every sentence in your mind and heart. Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel Land is such a book.
Over the past years, I have read her all her novels, devouring them, yearning for more. She’s a masterful storyteller – the best contemporary novelist in the English-speaking world, in my opinion – whose writing is so vastly varied that I’m in awe of her imagination and range. She roams from Renaissance Florence in The Marriage Portrait and Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon in Hamnet to 1950s London in The Hand that First Held Mine. Her timelines often twist, loop back and leap, as in This Must Be the Place, which spans decades and continents, or in the interwoven narratives of Esme’s fragmented memories and her grandniece’s contemporary life in Edinburgh in The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. The threads that hold these books together are family, loss, grief and the importance of the past (or how the past encroaches on the present).
In Land, we encounter these themes again – but this time deeply rooted, as the title suggests, in the land itself. Much of the novel is set on a peninsular on the western coast of Ireland in the mid- and late-19th century, during and after the Great Famine. O’Farrell’s land has a memory and a voice: a fish can talk, a dog thinks and a skylark flies through the thoughts of the local landowner – “scraps of it cling to her brown and cream feathers: stray filaments of his mind”. The land is a palimpsest of history, holding and preserving in its peat bog the body of Brith, a girl who lived here millennia ago, while also bearing witness to Viking, Anglo-Norman and English invasions. Over the centuries, forests were felled for fields and fuel, houses and fortresses. Soils eroded, streams dried out and birds disappeared. The land carries the scars.
It is here, on this windswept edge of Ireland, that Tomás, an Irish mapmaker who works with the English Ordnance Survey – a man who believes “that it is always better to say too little than too much” – has a life-changing experience in a small ancient woodland. As a consequence, he uproots his wife and children from the poverty-stricken tenements in Dublin to the even poorer countryside. They move into a dilapidated cottage that, like so many others, has seen the eviction and death of its occupants during the hungry years of the 1840s and 1850s. “The house on the hillside”, O’Farrell writes, “has waited a long time”, and as the family settles “the house holds its breath; the people hold their breath. House and people assess each other.”
There is also Phina, Tomás’s wife and mother of their four children, the love of his life and the “hinge on their door”, and their eldest son, Liam, who observes his father’s strange transformation in the copse and turns to God for reassurance. Eugene, the youngest of the four, is different from other children. He doesn’t say a single word and no one knows why, though a fisherman suggests that “he doesn’t speak because that would be letting things out, when he only likes to be taking things in”. Eugene hears the thoughts of birds and streams; he hears that the dry-stone wall resents the moss growing on its rounded cap and scrapes it off with a shell. His sister Rose is his “magnetic north” – steady, gentle, trying to hold the family together when everything begins to unravel. And then there is Edna, the eldest child, restless, relentlessly curious and impulsive. She longs for school (which only Liam is allowed to attend) and finds solace in her violin, collecting songs from as many countries as possible. She dreams of travelling “beyond the edges of maps, to find out what was there”.
As O’Farrell shifts perspectives between the different members of the family, their lives and thoughts are revealed – slowly, without any haste and never giving away too much, she develops a finely grained portrait of their relationships, their past and present. As in all her novels, she’s a virtuoso conjuror of characters, a formidable conductor of narrative pace – expanding and compressing time, at once breathless and calm. Land is a moving book, coming at you in waves of subtle and quiet storytelling with bursts of drama, but never rushed.
We follow Tomás and Liam on their surveying journeys across Ireland. There is a sense of wonder in the act of mapmaking: “how incredible it is that something so undulating and varied, so ever-changing as land, can be set down, with a handful of symbols and coloured inks, as something so flat and orderly as a map”, Liam says. A map can also be powerful, explains Tomás, because if he were to refuse to use the names of the conquerors, ignore their estate boundaries and their manor houses, he would be able to erase their history.
O’Farrell takes us back to Phina’s childhood when her desperate father leaves for America to find work, but then her mother and siblings die and she is sent to the workhouse where she meets Tomás. Imprisoned by walls, rules and hierarchy in the workhouse, he discovers his urge to survive and promises himself (and Phina) he will escape. He draws himself out, literally, by chalking every night forests, rivers, lakes and houses on the floorboards. The beginning of his mapmaking life.
We also watch Liam gradually disentangle himself from his father and, eventually, from the rest of the family, under the influence of the local priest. Against Tomás’s wishes, he becomes a Jesuit, and O’Farrell distils the loss in a few words: “He will leave today. It is very simple: he will rise, he will tie his bootlaces, he will open the door, he will step outside, and then the leaving will be done.”
There is so much force in her restraint and proof that less can indeed be more. When Tomás’s hand has to be amputated after an accident, she writes an exquisite passage on what it means to lose a hand, noting that “he will discover that one hand isn’t enough to wipe the tears from his face” when he learns that Edna has sailed for Canada without farewell. Earlier, a young Edna, who is deeply upset that she had to leave Dublin and school, deliberately muddies her shoes while collecting eggs – “a tiny act of resistance but solace must be found in small doses, wherever it resides”. It’s a minor gesture that captures her character and rebellious mind perfectly.
Folded into everything are meditations on death and loss, rendered into a kind of liquid philosophy blended into the narrative – wondrous in its wisdom, yet never alienating or pretentious. Tomás’s memory becomes a “rope thrown back to him by his mind”, while Rose experiences the ache of her mother’s death as “a wrongness, as if a hand has pulled out the loops and ribbons of her innards, then stuffed them haphazardly back in”. The death of a loved one, Rose says, brings “the conundrum of what to do with what they leave behind: the boots, the combs full of strands, the spoon worn smooth by their fingers, the shawl draped on a chair, the bonnet on the peg”.
Land is story of regret, loss, rebellion, love, family – and of a land that has enticed those who wanted to conquer, extract and enslave. “Now, as I was saying” Tomás tells Liam, “myth is fact and fact is myth, and both are embodied in the land itself”. I love all of O’Farrell’s novels, but I think Land might be her finest. It’s as layered as the place she writes about. It’s epic and intimate, tender and crushingly devastating. It sings off the page and pierces your heart.
Land
Maggie O’Farrell
Tinder Press, 448pp, £25
[Further reading: How Sylvia Plath dissected her pain]
