In his 1866 sonnet “Hap,” Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy offers a characteristically grim theory of the universe where everything is ruled by chance. Adrift in a cosmos devoid of fate, we human travelers possess only our luck and whatever choices are available to us. Neither celestial grace nor damnation, for that matter, governs history and the creatures who populate it.
I begin with Hardy because I often think of him when I read Maggie O’ Farrell’s novels. She arguably bestows more mercy upon her readers — even the emotional brutalities of Hamnet cannot quite match the bleakness of Jude the Obscure — but her fiction nonetheless turns according to a similar cosmology in which history unfolds according to chance, pockmarked with coincidences that rarely serve those who are touched by them.
O’Farrell’s inclination for narratives propelled by brutal coincidence and fatally poor timing tenders a Hardy-esque vision of the world, one that emphasizes the rigid, often cruel limits of an individual’s jurisdiction over the course of their life. One might call this a pessimistic point of view. But O’Farrell, whose 2018 memoir is entitled I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death, has reason to comprehend the world in these ruthless terms. Born in Derry to Irish parents in 1972 — when Northern Ireland was embroiled in the Troubles — she nearly died from encephalitis at age 8 and was bedbound for two years. She considers herself Irish but spent most of her childhood in Wales and Scotland and speaks with a British accent as a result. In a 2024 interview with The Irish Times, she reflected that “in Britain I felt Irish, and in Ireland I felt British,” although she has encountered her fair share of anti-Irish prejudice. This ambivalence of identity manifests in her early fiction: It was not until her 2013 novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, that she incorporated Irish characters into her creative work. On occasion, she has also drawn upon her experience navigating a speech disability — O’Farrell had a childhood stammer — and one of her three published books for children is entitled When the Stammer Came to Stay (2024).
Though she’s been publishing fiction since her 2000 debut novel, After You’d Gone, which won the Betty Trask Award, O’Farrell has become more well-known thanks to Hamnet, published in 2020 and adapted into a film last year. The work of historical fiction renders human powerlessness in what for many is the most wrenching possible context: a beloved child’s illness and death. (O’Farrell, who has a daughter with an acute immunology disorder, has borne similar terrors.) Hamnet portrays maternal grief with balletic intuition and compassionate regard; at times, the narrative is so viscerally crushing that one must either close the book or their eyes. The Marriage Portrait, O’Farrell’s second — rather underwhelming — historical novel, followed in 2022. The story reimagines the life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici, who was married at age 15 and, rumor has it, murdered by her husband before a year had passed.
O’Farrell’s six preceding works generally depict more modern milieus; most are at least partially set in the 21 century. But whatever her chosen era, her novels always attend to history, though it is often more intimate in scope. Her fiction concentrates thematically upon the emotional and psychological currents traversing the bonds across lineages — whether those connections are well-wrought, addled, severed, or unknown — and the fraught business of familial inheritance. Her preferred structure of multiple, entwined timelines weaves together the stories of disparate generations, their whispered resonances building to narratorial revelation.
Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait bear historical fiction’s classic traits: They are meticulous and vibrant in their specificities, and seek to imagine both the disparities and resonances of a far-flung time. Nonetheless, they serve as apt expressions of O’Farrell’s broader oeuvre, particularly in their emphasized resistance to stern literary realism. In O’Farrell’s work, a woman in a coma might possess startling awareness of her own mind; two strangers might forge a near-psychic mutual understanding; a child desperate to save his twin sister might trick death. For however much we cannot control, O’Farrell reminds her readers that there are, too, things we cannot explain.
Land, O’Farrell’s sweeping tenth novel and third consecutive work of historical fiction, is her most ambitious and dynamic work to date. At the sentence level, its craftsmanship sings; her prose is as lush and imbued with the miraculous as it is lived-in and inviting. In fact, O’Farrell might feel especially at ease in the novel’s storyscape because it serves as a homecoming of sorts. Land is inspired by her great-great-grandfather, who made maps for the British in the wake of the Great Hunger, the catastrophic famine spanning the years 1847 to 1852. But the book’s gaze is capacious and at times wayward. O’Farrell seems so eager to convey the teeming infinitude of natural connections that proliferate across time that it slightly impairs her control over the text’s varied plotlines and digressions. Although the novel’s center does not quite hold, O’Farrell’s emotional intelligence — the heart and heat of her characters — braces this sometimes unwieldy chronicle of a nation that has been subject to cumbrous historic agonies.
The start of the novel finds the family’s patriarch, Tomás, on the Irish peninsula with his son, Liam, engaged in a cartography expedition that is part of the greater Ordnance Survey of 1865 project. A gifted mapmaker, Tomás keeps his family fed by recording, painstakingly, the land the British — or the “redcoats,” per the text’s parlance — have plundered and wrested from his countrymen. In the course of the day’s work, he discovers an ancient wooded copse and a spring within it. Tomás drinks from the pool and is struck with an anti-colonialist revelation that sends him into a giddy frenzy. This is the first of various signs throughout the novel that the water originating in the spring possesses mystical powers.
“I don’t know why I never saw it before,” Tomás muses, while his son looks on, terrified by the fervor animating his typically brusque father. “To map is to assume power. We can redraw the very land we walk upon,” Tomás reasons, “record it how it is, how it was, how it will be. We will not use their names, their estate lines, their plantation boundaries, their barracks: these shall be erased.” No one could dispute the righteousness of such a project, and Tomás, despite his shockingly “garrulous” manner, is perfectly cogent in his assessment of British mapmaking as an imperialist enterprise. But such reckless rebuke of the powers that shape their lives is dangerous, and Tomás’s agitation gives him the appearance of a man possessed. Liam cannot square this person — who returned to the cottage where they are staying “adorned with greenery … a rough-hewn crown of leaves around his head” — with the rigid, reticent father he knows.
Soon thereafter, Tomás spends the family’s meager savings to lease a plot of land near the copse; they leave their tenement in Dublin and settle in a dilapidated cottage left vacant when its last occupants starved during the famine. Phina is pregnant with their fourth child during this abrupt relocation. Enda, their clever eldest, chafes against the shoreline’s provincial isolation; in Dublin, she had access to both education and teachers who were invested in her intellectual progress. Liam, meanwhile, cannot shake the memory of his father’s unsettling transformation when they first came to the peninsula. He is eager to distance himself from Tomás and the mapmaking apprenticeship his father intends for him. Rose, still young, cleaves to Phina as they acclimate to their surroundings.
O’Farrell renders each member of this family and their respective responses to their new home with the precise and tender intuition that distinguishes her as a storyteller. These characters comprise some of her most vivid portraits of humanity. Particularly acute is her depiction of Eugene, the fourth sibling, whom the family comes to realize is nonverbal and whom they cherish with automatic and unqualified empathetic respect. They are also not privy to what the reader gradually learns: that Eugene, the only one of the children born on the peninsula, responds to it with a seemingly mystical affinity, which extends from his singular capacity for careful attention. He alone inherits the soul-deep attachment to the land that Tomás hopes to cultivate in his children by migrating to the shoreline. It is too late for Tomás, who is bedeviled by the horrors of his childhood: the physiological agony of starvation, the demolishing heartbreak of watching his family die one by one, the grotesque vistas of bodies piled along the roads he traveled to the workhouse. He seizes this opportunity to lease land near the copse and the beguiling spring that delivered his epiphany as a lifeline, as “the answer … to everything.”
Those who possess a basic awareness of Irish history will grasp the tragedy of Tomás’s desperate optimism. Great Britain’s colonialist grip does not afford a working-class family the opportunity for even humble prosperity — or, for that matter, the fundamental dignity of living according to their own terms. The novel emphasizes that these conditions of privation and dispossession are themselves a vicious inheritance, that bloodshed and conquest have long characterized the story of this land. After introducing the central characters of the present narrative, O’Farrell dramatically widens her lens to conjure a brisk yet haunting saga of the peninsula and its inhabitants that spans millennia preceding Tomás’s arrival. Here, the text takes an abrupt folklorist turn — a talking fish enters the scene — and O’Farrell introduces a character whose preserved corpse resides in the bog near the family’s cottage for millennia after her death and whose influence visits them in strange and subtle ways. In the spirit of Tomás’s anti-imperialist resistance, this history declines the use of the names and terminology common to history books, but demonstrates how, as centuries pass, a unified Great Britain focuses its acquisitive pursuits upon the “dog-shaped” country across the water.
“What [the ancient people of the shoreline] want now, more than anything, is for this peninsula and the whole of the country to be left in peace,” the narrator explains, “that they be allowed to live as they please and how they please, without the incursion of others.” Alas, “history … has other plans.”
This is a strange line to read in an O’Farrell novel, for it gestures to the kind of grand design her fiction tends to eschew. But then again, a body of land might be unlucky in its neighbors, just as a person might find oneself in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is geographic happenstance that situated Ireland across from that “larger and more populous” country “with organised and extensive armies,” which made it the object of that country’s designs “to tame it, to subjugate it, before anyone else does.”
Land’s pronouns are often slippery and playfully equivocal; they nudge the reader toward fanciful interpretations. Anything might possess consciousness: a swath of land, a magical fish, a house “that holds its breath” and “observes how each of [its new occupants] settles themselves into their new home.” O’Farrell’s sentences — the musicality of her repetitions, the genial warmth of her narration, the visceral pleasures of her imagery — offer comfort against the backdrop of heartbreak so common to her fiction. The vitality of her language, its frolicsome dance with personification, communicates its own resistance in the face of an indifferent world, exploited by imperialist greed and barbaric, militant might. Suffering will come, it seems to say, and death will knock, but life will always insist upon itself.
