Land is the first time I’ve not been completely captivated by a novel from Maggie O’Farrell.
To be fair, my expectations for Land were high because I’d relished the deeply immersive experience of reading O’Farrell’s lyrical, sensory prose in Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait.
The prose in Land is just as resplendent as in the previous two novels with vivid and atmospheric descriptions of the Irish landscape.
But luscious prose wasn’t enough to make up for a plot that tailed off into a so-so generational family saga involving characters that didn’t much interest me.
Land is O’Farrell’s third venture into historical fiction. Her focus this time is on a more recent period of history — Ireland in the aftermath of the Great Hunger.
It begins one cold day in 1865 on a windswept peninsula in the west of Ireland. Tomás, a cartographer, is charting the contours of this region, helped by his young son Liam. Their task is to draw detailed maps for the soldiers and government officials who govern the country.
Thomás measures and calculates distances, meticulously documenting boundaries, land ownership and the local names for various topographic features. He notes too, the cottages left in ruins when their occupants succumbed to the famine.
An unsettling encounter with the spirits of long dead inhabitants sends him off course.
No more, Thomás declares, will he dance to the tune of the despised British government, who want him to render the country of his birth into merely a list of names and places. Instead, he will devote his energies to producing “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.”
From then on, the novel moves back and forward in time. Back to the first settlers in this region and the spirits they left behind. Back to the famine years which sent Thomás and his future wife to a grim life in a workhouse. And forward to the family rebuilding their lives in a ruined cottage on the edge of a peninsula.
The message is clear: each generation is a link in a long chain of temporary custodians of the land. They stand in the footprints of their predecessors but leave little impression on the bluffs, fields and copses.
They were here for a while, the six of them, and before them, others lived here, and before them, someone else, and now they are all gone, and whoever cut that turf is here now. After these people will come someone else, and then someone else, and on and on it will go until the end of the world.
The pull of home and the pull of the land are key themes in Land . Over the course of four hundred pages, we see Thomás’s children try to break away from their family and from the country of their birth. One escapes into the priesthood, another flees to the New World. Both come late to an understanding that what they value most isn’t their new life but the one right back where they started.
The first half the novel — which focuses on Thomas and the consequences of his epiphany in the copse — is fascinating. O’Farrell incorporates several Irish legends including one about a salmon which eats the hazelnuts of wisdom that fall into a sacred well — whoever eats the salmon in turn gains all the world’s knowledge. And she brings the whole landscape so much to life that it acts almost as an additional character.
Their feet press down into the thick, blackened leaf-fall. Around them, the golden air is stitched with pollen and the inexplicable flight paths of bees, and teems with the sounds of a forest: birdsong, the creak of branches, the insistent tapping of a woodpecker, the drip of moisture from foliage, the secretive rustle of unseen creatures moving about the undergrowth.
My problem came when the focus moved to the next generation, following the siblings as they try to forge their own destinies. Several chapters trace the eldest son Liam who rebels against his father by training as a Jesuit priest. His sister Edna has a restless spirit whose resistance to a life of domesticity takes her and her violin to Canada. Neither story held my attention and I kept wanting to get back in Ireland. That’s where the real heart of the novel lay I felt.
Land is a sweeping novel in both time span and breadth of topics. Colonialism; emigration; established religion versus ancient myths; landed gentry versus the labouring classes; famine. The core vision around family and place gets a bit lost along the way sadly.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the family saga elements, I did enjoy much of Land — not even baulking at the mythical and magical realism elements — relishing O’Farrell’s ability to bring to life the spirit of her ancestor’s homeland. I just wish she hadn’t tried to cram so much into one book.