4 Stars
O’Farrell’s latest novel is historical fiction and a family drama with a touch of magic realism.
It opens in IreLAND in 1865, about ten years after The Great Hunger. Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam are working for the Ordnance Survey project to map the entire country. Tomás is determined that his maps will be a record of the The Great Famine, but he is sent off course by an encounter with magical waters in an unsettling copse on a western peninsula. Tomás emerges changed and his life and that of his family is never the same. The novel follows the lives of Tomás, his wife, and their four children: Enda, Liam, Rose, and Eugene.
Though most of the novel focuses on life post-famine, there are flashbacks to the potato famine. Both Tomás and his wife suffer devastating loss during the famine. There are also flashbacks to the past on the peninsula, millennia earlier, where we meet a girl named Brith and then the reader is given a brief history of the changes on the land until Tomás arrives with his family.
This is a multiple-perspective narrative. The perspective of each family member is presented at different times, even one in utero “the size of a pear,” but the novel also includes that of others: Bran, the family’s Irish wolfhound; Father Joseph, the local priest; Brith, a child living in an Iron Age ringfort; and even a skylark.
As always in O’Farrell’s novels, the characterization is outstanding. For instance, the four children emerge as distinct personalities. Enda is the restless one; music becomes her outlet. Liam, scarred by what happened to his father at the magical spring, turns to religion. For Rose, family is of tantamount importance. Eugene cannot speak but communes with the land.
And that land is very much a character. Land shapes people’s lives. Though it remains “indifferent to the bloody and fearsome shifts going on around it,” it remembers. Tomás tells the priest, “’the land was inhabited long before you and your kind ever arrived . . . You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow, how fast the stream.’” Humans inhabit land for only a short time, but the land is permanent; it is not static because it changes as people shape it, but it remains even when humans leave it or die: “After these people will come someone else, and then someone else, and on and on it will go until the end of the world.” Eugene sees no delineation between past and present: “He lives much as his ancient forebears did: on and by the land, watching the weather, feeling one season blur into the next.” And the land remains part of the people who lived on it: Tomás desperately wants to find the valley where he lived as a child, “to find where he is from, to walk the soil where he began,” and Enda is on another continent yet “The music she plays is the land: it summons it; it conjures it here, to this street corner.”
Of course people try to shape the land too. They build on it and fence it in. They use its turf for heat. Tomás realizes that mapping the land makes it easier for people to exploit it. Tomás tells his son, “’To map is to assume power.’” He argues that “maps are acts of colonisation, enemy tools that must be destroyed.” Though he needs to make maps to provide for his family, he sees himself “as the lapdog of the redcoats, taking their money, helping them to tighten their hold on the land.” What Tomás wants to do is create “a map of how this land really is, of how it has always been, of what lies beneath whatever order or disorder others might impose upon it.”
Besides The Great Hunger and its enduring trauma on people and the land, the novel also examines colonization and on the influence of the Catholic Church. Elements of folklore also make an appearance. For instance, there’s a spring that is said “to bestow what is needed, not necessarily what is wanted, which is not always the same thing.” Magic realism is not something I enjoy, but it’s handled with a light touch so the narrative never feels overwhelmed by it.
My husband and I spent almost a month touring Ireland in 2024 so this novel really resonated with me. We saw the Famine Memorial in Dublin and the memorial in the Doolough valley and they haunt me still, as will the scene the child Tomás witnessed with the earl’s pigs. The symbolism is perfect! We visited ring forts and I bought earrings “decorated with interlocking swirls.” And we heard tales of the fairy folk who inhabit underground mounds and serve as guardians of nature and ancient sites, tales I remembered as I read about Brith’s father’s people disappearing into the ground.
This is another Maggie O’Farrell masterpiece. It is emotional and thought-provoking, has memorable characters, a strong sense of place, and thematic depth, and is written in beautiful prose.
See my reviews of other Maggie O’Farrell novels:
After You’d Gone - https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2020/08/review-of-after-youd-gone-by-maggie.html
The Marriage Portrait - https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2022/11/review-of-marriage-portrait-by-maggie.html
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox - https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/08/review-of-vanishing-act-of-esme-lennox.html
Instructions for a Heatwave - https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2020/11/review-of-instructions-for-heatwave-by.html
The Hand that First Held Mine - https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2020/12/review-of-hand-that-first-held-mine-by.html
Hamnet and Judith - https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2020/07/review-of-hamnet-and-judith-by-maggie.html
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
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