Review: Vivien Horler

Land – A novel, by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)

Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel Hamnet has been on our big screens lately, and a great movie – and book – it was too. But I enjoyed Land even more.

Perhaps it is because in this novel she is unconstrained by the historical facts of the life of Shakespeare’s family. Or maybe it is a return to her Irish roots – in any case Land is a great saga of family and place.

It is 1865, and Tomas is a surveyor and draughtsman, mapping Ireland for the redcoats. He grew up in a workhouse, seized chances offered to him, and became a gifted draughtsman.

He has no illusions as to why the redcoats need him: while there are plenty in England who have his skills and more, there are few who have all that plus his local knowledge, who can speak to the people in their own language.

So despite being formally classified as a labourer and having his maps signed off by Englishmen, he can measure and calculate, draw maps for the engravers and, most importantly, he can also speak to the local people about boundaries, who owns which field, the local names for bluffs and what a ruined building might have been.

He can also edit down multi-worded area names accepted locally for generations, such as the crossroads under the bluff where once a hailstorm killed a cockerel which he renders as “Bluff’s Cross”, or the strand where the yellow periwinkles gather in spring as “Yellow Cove”.

It is around just 20 years since the Great Hunger, also known as the potato famine, and there are many abandoned buildings in the countryside which need to be recorded. Tomas himself has obliterated the memories of his own childhood, his own family, other than to know they are all gone.

For some background, according to Wikipedia, the famine hit hardest in the west and south of Ireland. Before the potato crop first failed in 1845, there were 8.5million people in Ireland; by 1901 the population was 4.4million. Over one million people died, and 2.1million emigrated, “the greatest exodus from a single country in history”.

What compounded long-lasting bitterness towards England was that during the famine, tons of Irish wheat and grain were exported by English landowners to England and further abroad.

The book opens in filthy weather with Tomas and his 10-yearold son Liam surveying a peninsula in the far west of Ireland. Tomas spots an unmapped gulley and instructs Liam to go down into it with his surveying chain. Liam finds a stream in a copse of trees, little humps that could be graves, and a strange pool in a bowl of granite.

Spooked, Liam flees, leaving his precious boot in the mud. An irritated Tomas goes into the copse to retrieve the boot but doesn’t come out. Liam suspects his father may have gone back to their nearby lodgings to punish him, but Tomas is not there.

The next morning a wet, dishevelled Tomas returns, apparently having lost his mind.

The maps he has been creating are all wrong, he rants at Liam. There is so much more to be traced in the land than can be captured by theodolites and poles and compasses.

The land is layered and nuanced, geologically and from the point of human habitation over millennia. Particularly whose land it is, and who claims it.

“There needs to be a map of how this land really is, what lies beneath whatever order or disorders others might impose upon it,” he raves.

“There must be a way to create such a document. And to do so would be an action of honour. Honour and resistance, do you see?”

Confused, Liam shakes his head. Tomas yells that it was at the spring, at the pool of water, where he saw that everything meets. He and Liam were chosen for this task, and now they will redraw all the maps.

The priest is called, and over several tortured days performs an exorcism. At the end of it, Tomas has lost all his drive. Declaring he will never work for the redcoats again, and with Liam in tow, he trudges back to the city, to his wife and two daughters in their single room.

His wife is Phina, whom he met in the workhouse, and the daughters are Enda, older than Liam, and little Rose.

After weeks in bed, staring up at the ceiling, Tomas goes out, returns, and declares he has a plan. Using his mapping money he has taken a lease on a ruin and a plot of land in the west, close to the strange pool. They are all to settle there.

The exorcism priest ensures that Liam goes to school, but there is no school for Enda or Rose. Back in the country Tomas and Phina find they remember the country cycles, the planting, the milking, the hens and the eggs.

And so begins the saga of a family in a faraway and lonely country place, making a living from the land as best they can for the children and their new boy, strangely silent, who is born shortly after they arrive. There is also a dog, whose end becomes a plot changer.

There is not much bucolic charm – Tomas hates the priest and his influence over Liam, Enda is desperate to go to school and get away from the country, Phina is buried in domestic work. Only Rose and little Eugene seem happy.

And the strange pool still exerts its power.

This is a great story of a family, of a tough life, of land and ownership, emigration and music and desperate loneliness. At the end there is a resolution, but perhaps not the one we hoped for.

I thought it was brilliant, and was sorry when it ended.