Novelist Maggie O’Farrell always wanted to write the story of her great-great-grandfather, who lived in Ireland and worked for the Ordinance Survey, Britain’s mapping service, in the 1850s. And now she has.
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Her vivid new novel, Land, features a surveyor and his family who are engulfed in the chaos of the era. These were perilous times. The Great Hunger, which lasted from 1845 to 1852, had left Ireland destitute. More than 1 million Irish people died, and 1 to 2 million emigrated to Canada and the United States. Many Irish, seeing the gold-trimmed vestments and other signs of wealth in the Church, angrily abandoned their Catholic faith, returning to Celtic beliefs.
Tomas, the hero of Land, is one of those who return to the old ways. It happens when he is surveying with his 10-year-old son, Liam. A member of the Ordinance Survey, Tomas (possibly a spin-off of O’Farrell’s ancestor) is tasked with surveying the Irish countryside. The British government wants to learn how many Irish citizens are still alive, what their financial circumstances are, and how much land and livestock they own, ostensibly to tax the already impoverished country.
An Irish-British novelist, O’Farrell grew up in Protestant Northern Ireland. She is the author of several award-winning novels, including the bestselling Hamnet, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Land, too, is scheduled to become a film and will be produced by Liza Marshall of Hamnet fame.
Knopf; 436 pp.; $32.00
Critics praised Hamnet for coming alive on the page — especially in its perfectly strung relationship between mother and son. The characters in Land are interesting but less compelling than in the earlier novel, partly because they are somewhat upstaged by O’Farrell’s vibrant portrayal of the landscape itself.
Land has the emotional texture of Thomas Hardy’s 1878 novel The Return of the Native. Although Hardy’s novel takes place in England, the story’s windswept moors, impassioned characters, and conflict between old and new ways seem to have inspired O’Farrell. Even Enda, Tomas’s oldest daughter, is a younger version of Eustacia Vye from Hardy’s classic. Enda wants the opportunities given to her younger brother, Liam, and will do anything to achieve her goals.
O’Farrell’s novel opens when Liam is in his early 30s and remembering a pivotal moment in his family’s history: While helping his father survey an isolated region of the Irish countryside, he loses his boot, which Tomas tries to retrieve when he bends over to drink from a well.
The well is set in a small, wooded area and seems to have a supernatural resonance (which O’Farrell draws on rather heavily). There are 3,000 so-called holy wells scattered across Ireland. Most of them began as Celtic holy wells and were later changed to Christian wells and named after Catholic saints.
Tomas thinks he may have seen his deceased father’s face in the well. After this experience, Tomas believes that the land holds the truth about the lies coming from England and the Church. He decides that he will no longer create maps for the British Redcoats. He will move his family to this land that is part of their heritage. They will find peace away from the slums outside of Dublin. He resolves to be more patient with Liam; he will even take the boy as an apprentice. At least, this is what he hopes to do.
This entire pristine area, he thinks, must be mapped — but secretly. If the landowner were to learn about this well water’s delicious taste, he would divert the flow to his own house, and no one else would be able to drink it. He plans to remap all of Ireland, showcasing places that hold a supernatural, but not Christian, meaning for the Irish. Afterward, Tomas is nearly delirious from joy.
Father Joseph, the village priest, decides that Tomas is acting contrary to his Catholic faith and must be possessed by the devil. He performs an exorcism that breaks Tomas — physically and mentally. The priest turns Liam against his father and, in a sense, takes spiritual possession of him.
Father Joseph seems motivated by politics and career advancement, not holiness. Yet Liam becomes infatuated with the priest and decides to forsake his family, including his mother and three siblings, and join that most Roman Catholic of religious orders, the Society of Jesus. Soon, the main characters are locked in a battle whose outcome will forever affect their lives — and the plot of O’Farrell’s novel.
Abandoning his homeland, Liam becomes a Jesuit priest and is sent to Calcutta, where he gradually realizes the error of his ways. He wants to return to his father and work as a surveyor in Ireland, but doubts he can do so. The family suffers grave losses and is in chaos — except for Eugene, the youngest brother. Eugene cannot speak but has a sixth sense about the earth and feels a deep connection to it. He tends it reverently for the rest of his life. It yields food for himself, his dog, and his livestock.
The novel has a complex structure that makes it needlessly confusing at first. The story flashes back and forth in time but is written in the present tense and in a braided pattern; each chapter weaves the perspective of a particular character into the whole, giving the text a mosaic-like effect. The writing is strikingly poetic and gives the novel the flavor of a prose poem. Its plot intertwines the story of the Irish landscape (both historical and invented). O’Farrell incorporates politics, religion, history, family lore, and mythology during a time when Ireland was reeling from the effects of starvation, festering with religious grievances, and simmering from resentment toward the British.
The narrative’s historical perspective is enhanced by O’Farrell’s use of magical realism. The land itself is personified. Generally, the personification works well, with just the right touch of ambiguity, but sometimes the writing veers too closely to the pathetic fallacy. Catholic readers may find parts of the novel disconcerting, with its none-too-subtle anger towards the Church. But, on the whole, Land, although not quite as enthralling as Hamnet, is a richly imagined story and engaging in its own right.
Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher Institute.
