Book Of The Week: Land by Maggie O’Farrell is an epic summer must-read

This epic four-part saga, beginning in 1865 post-famine Ireland, is the kind of historical rewrite that crosses seamlessly between literary and popular fiction, with characters as complex, deep and interconnected as the landscape that holds the book together. It also doesn’t hurt that the author is coming off the back of the Oscar-winning success of the film adaptation of her eighth novel, Hamnet.

Land opens with a note addressed to “Dear Reader” and a tale she has told several times in interviews since the book’s release was announced: “I was staring out of the window on a delayed train from Belfast to Dublin when a sentence appeared in my head: His father was ever a man of few words… Land is a novel I’ve always wanted to write. It was only on that train journey that I saw how to begin: with a hillside, a son, and a man of few words.”

That man is Tomás, O’Farrell’s real-life great-great-grandfather and a 19th-century mapmaker for the British army in Ireland. She places him at the start as a reliable and much-relied-on, but entirely uncredited, land surveyor, whose job is to update the Ordnance Survey maps his immediate bosses, the Red Coats, sign their names to, and ultimately sign off on.

Tomás is a taciturn man who is also attempting to train ten-year-old Liam, his son, to take over the job. Liam knows his sister Enda would be more suited to the task, but neither has much choice in the matter. One day, while surveying in the rain, Liam enters an unmapped copse with a natural spring; time and reality collapse, and his father is suddenly changed, spouting words that cannot stop.

This is a political novel, about colonisation and emigration. It is also a tale of love, about land-ties and legacies, societal expectations, intimate freedoms and family obligations.

Land is a book about language in all its forms and about the stories that get told and how we tell them. It’s a novel about memory, multigenerational wisdom and intergenerational trauma. It is also about post-colonial identity, and the soil beneath our feet. O’Farrell has said, “I wanted to tell the whole story of Ireland, just by one plot of land,” a potentially impossible task but a worthwhile ambition for a novel that offers one layered and riveting story of both.

She skilfully telescopes centuries into paragraphs. The opening two sentences jump from the beginning to almost the end of the book, although readers won’t know that until a few hundred pages later. In between, O’Farrell projects backwards and forwards, never losing sight of the heart of the story. It’s a tale of siblings and offspring as much as it is of ancestors and descendants. Tomás is the sole child survivor of the famine in his own immediate family. He meets Seraphina in the workhouse, where fate ties them and their future children together. Part Two begins at the copse “Somewhere in time”, before jumping to “Some time later, perhaps a few years, perhaps hundreds”. Part Three opens in Calcutta, where Liam is working as a priest. Part Four follows the remarkable Enda on her way to Québec. Ultimately, it all comes back to the Irish peninsula they’ve left. O’Farrell’s rangy compression of history while allowing the land to remain immovably present is the thematic undercurrent and narrative bedrock of this book.

Young Tomás believes “with a map, a person could never get lost.” He sees himself as a slightly surreptitious record-maker who “made sure that the Great Hunger was inscribed on his drafts and in his name books, that it was recorded, in symbols and in writing, that its effects and scars would be seen, its evidence and testimony unmissable, for all time.”

But none of his documenting cartographical knowledge is without wider implication. He knows, if he adds the copse, “within weeks, perhaps even days, the viscount would send up a party of men to fell all those trees for timber… This woodland, which had been here since the beginning of time, would be gone, claimed, erased. It could exist on the map, or it could exist on the land.”

Coleraine-born O’Farrell moved from Northern Ireland to Wales as a child and now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Identity, and how it still plays out between these two islands, is a significant part of what she explores here. She takes two co-existing truths: that a map is a constructed falsehood; that a map is a record of reality – and constructs a rich tale about land and legacy. Beginning with the magic of a wellspring or tobar, she presents the land as womb, as record keeper, as mother and father, as home: the source of everything.

This is a political novel, about colonisation and emigration. It is also a tale of love, about land-ties and legacies, societal expectations, intimate freedoms and family obligations. Hamnet producer Liza Marshall has already secured the film rights, and it looks like O’Farrell will write the script. Let the dream casting begin.

Land is published by Tinder Press