Land by Maggie O'Farrell review: 'her most ambitious novel to date'
Maggie O’Farrell sets herself some major challenges in her centuries-straddling new book, then soars gracefully above every one, writes David Robinson
No Irish play in the 1980s was more influential than Brian Friel’s Translations, which explored colonialism, language loss, and modernisation through the story of an Irishman working as a translator for British troops conducting the Ordnance Survey mapping of Donegal in 1833. The first of many risks Maggie O’Farrell takes in her new novel is having as her main protagonist someone doing exactly the same job.
Tomas, a self-taught cartographer, though treated as a mere labourer by the redcoats, is, however, working in the mid-1860s in the wake of the Irish Famine. And as this is the Great Unmentionable of British literary fiction – Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Gaskell all gave it a body swerve, no matter that a million people died in what was theoretically part of their own country - this might also be considered, even now, somewhat difficult fictional territory.
O’Farrell makes it even harder for herself. At the very start of the novel, Tomas and his son Liam, working in an unnamed peninsula in the west of Ireland, find an unmarked stream whose source they need to map in the cleft of a hill. This takes them to a hidden pool. Liam carries the measuring chain into the cleft, but is spooked by something within and comes out again. Tomas goes in and doesn’t come out for a day. When he does, he appears to be mad: he wants to destroy all the maps he has made and make new ones, which will reveal what the land really is and not just the imprint its colonists have made on it.
The locals aren’t surprised by such ravings: it is well-known that people disappear in that particular hillside. They summon the priest, who attempts an exorcism. Embarrassed by Tomas’s ravings, Liam is drawn to the Church, a rift with his father neither his wife nor two daughters can heal.
At this point, when you might think the novel is in danger of disappearing in a mystical Celtic mist, O’Farrell doubles down. The very place where Tomas and his family have by now made their home - was where, millennia before, a child named Brith, whose father was one of the very first on the land, lived and died, along with her faithful Irish wolfhound. No sooner have we entered into their world than we are yanked back, clattering through the centuries, to Tomas’s own times.
If, at this stage, you are still - perversely - expecting O’Farrell to play it safe, you will again be disappointed. There will be echoes of old stories in new ones. She will tell us - in the very first sentence - what is going to happen to ten-year-old Liam in 20 years’ time. Tomas’s memories from when he himself was orphaned at ten - horrific almost beyond imagination, pushed deep down, so completely silenced that we aren’t even told how his family died - will resurface, bubbling up in unforgettable, atrocious detail.
Just when you are thinking that this is as hard-edged as realism can get, O’Farrell will take the narration inside the mind of a dog, or an unborn child making out the shape of a handprint, “the slices of light between the fingers, the breadth of a palm”, feeling the richness of fresh milk in its bloodstream, hearing the sound of its siblings’ voices. All of this is beautifully done, with descriptions that are both intricate and locked into character: I don’t think, for example, that I have ever read a better account of the moment when Latin starts to make sense than her vignette of Liam trying to translate Pliny.
The story of the Famine is inseparable from that of emigration and I rather wish it wasn’t, as I feel Land would have been complete without its final scenes: there are plenty of novels about emigration but very few about life in Ireland in the wake of the Great Hunger. Even so, the wonder of O’Farrell’s novel - easily her most ambitious - is that it soars above every one of the risks I have listed and to which any less ridiculously talented novelist would have succumbed. Her great-great-grandfather – who also helped map post-Famine Ireland - would be proud of her.
Land, by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, £25
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.