Land is a book Maggie O’Farrell has wanted to write for many years but did not know how to begin. The ambitious novel spans centuries, crosses oceans and plumbs the hopes and dreams of two generations of a family. It was on a train, returning to the west coast of Ireland, that inspiration struck, and in a moment of clarity, the narrative unfurled before Maggie almost as it appears in the finished story.
The novel was inspired by stories Maggie heard as a child of her great-great grandfather who worked on the early maps of Ireland, which had to be re-drawn after The Great Hunger that annihilated the population, and laid waste to whole towns. There are passages in Land that are grim and unspeakably heart-breaking and will stay with you long after you finish the final page. Yet, this is tempered with a lifeforce that courses through the book; one that is resilient and generous-hearted, brave, ambitious and full of love.
We open on Tomás, a mapmaker, who, as a wily child, escaped a bleak workhouse after The Great Hunger left him without a family or home. Tomás works for the British “red coats” as a cartographer and a translator. He has brought with him his 10-year-old son, Liam. We meet them on an unnamed stretch of Ireland’s west coast. The wind is biting. They encounter a copse of trees that conceals a holy well. Tomás explores the water and emerges a changed man, determined to no longer work for the British forces. Liam alone understands that his family need his father’s wage and must complete the work. Tomás relocates his family to the patch of unnamed land so they can live without reliance on the British.
Maggie pulls the reader back into the mists of time, exploring the brutal origin of the holy well, and the myth it gives rise to. A talking fish, a little girl who dies embracing her slain dog, and a magic ring bring pre-Christian Ireland onto the page. These holy wells still exist all over Ireland and many still believe they have the power to grant wishes, but not always in the way the petitioner might hope.
This mythic thread runs through the story. The well re-appears at a critical juncture for Liam and his older sister Enda when they are on the cusp of adulthood. Enda is perhaps the family member that suffers most as a result of Tomás’ abrupt relocation. She has been cut-off from a progressive education in Dublin.
The narrative draws both on myth and details taken from Ordinance Survey in the archives in Dublin. Maggie understands the fine grain details of the setting of a broken bone in rural Ireland. The stark realism of the family’s life plays out against a sweeping land that possesses a consciousness that at times seems almost magical.
The land itself is rendered exquisitely. The front of a fern “curls into a little green fist”, a canopy of trees admits light that is “verdant, lustrous and glimmering”, Liam is “enclosed and enfolded” in the copse of trees “as if he has stepped inside the secret green house of a giant.” Land is epic in its emotional and historical scope. The language glimmers on the page. The characters will stay with you long after you’ve read the final line.
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