Land – Maggie O’Farrell
I have been steeped in Ireland for 434 pages. This book has consumed me and led me to learn more about the history, religion and language of the place, over many centuries but particularly the last couple of hundred years.
Apart from some very dry political text offered as part of my A level history, I knew virtually nothing about Ireland and the oppression it had suffered. I then learnt a lot from the trilogy ‘The Children of Famine’ by Marita Conlon-McKenna which I used with a group of year 6 children some years ago. You will know maybe that as far as I’m concerned a good children’s book is simply a good book, as these three novels are. Thus, I came to ‘Land’ with a degree of understanding of what this book would be.
Maggie O’Farrell is one of my favourite writers, extremely famous now for the book and the film Hamnet. She writes not with the same degree of magic realism as Elif Shafak but with that quality that is indefinable whilst being unmistakably Irish. You find the same other worldly feeling in the work of Colm Toibin and Claire Keegan. It wouldn’t surprise me if Maggie O’ Farrell, when asked, would say that it was ‘of the land.’ And there is the title of this weighty book.
Maps are central to this story, they are important but can be peculiarly subjective. What do you choose to put in or leave out about the land you are describing? In this case would the maps be named in the Irish of the people or in English, the language of the Protestant overlords? Tomas, the patriarch in the story, is pulled in different directions but needs the money he will be paid for producing maps of the west coast of Ireland under the auspices of British soldiers.
We are in the year 1865 and the project is the great Ordnance Survey. The whole of Ireland needs to be mapped. We are just 15 to 20 years after the potato famine, ‘the Great Hunger,’ and although memories are long, people’s tongues are stilled, the recent past is far too awful to talk about. But, Tomas knows that the land remembers and holds the secrets of the past close. He is determined that his topography will be a recording of the disaster that has befallen his country over time.
The Roman church holds sway in Ireland, trying, but failing, to totally undermine the old beliefs and practices, written into the land long before the Jesuits coax Liam, Tomas’s elder son, away from all he knows. Liam has 3 siblings who all become part of the diaspora, spread widely, sometimes finding each other, sometimes not. That must have happened all too often with the almost complete lack of communication. I remember tales of a great aunt of mine who travelled to America and was never heard of again and this was as late as just post First World War.
Maggie O’Farrell shows impressive control of the complicated narrative that she weaves and she pulls no punches, showing clearly that she writes as one who is a part of this Irish story, not as an outsider looking in. The concept of colonisation is met head on, exploitation of people and their resources laid brutally bare. Oppression runs through this whole story, based on religion, language and political ambition. The ‘Troubles’ that have shamed Irish and English relations for my whole life and beyond, stem from actions carried out centuries before.
So, this is a novel about separation, tragedy and recovery in various forms. There is rebellion in people’s thoughts as well as their actions and somehow you are left knowing exactly how the author feels about the saga of Ireland.
The blurb, which is particularly well written, says this: ‘When it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.’
That says it all I think.
I wish you satisfying reading.