“Land” opens on a peninsula in the far west of Ireland, where a small boy stands in the rain, wishing he could go home and get something to eat. It is not surprising that hunger would be a theme of Maggie O’Farrell’s gorgeous and sweeping tenth novel, taking place, as it does, in the decade after the Great Famine. Hunger, colonialism, displacement and, above all, the land itself pulse through this stunning work.
The boy’s father, Tomás, is a mapmaker who is employed by the British not only for his technical skill but also for his bilingualism — he can translate the poetic Irish place names, which are then rendered into prosaic English. “The crossroads under the bluff where once a hailstorm killed a cockerel” becomes “Bluff’s Cross.” “The strand where the yellow periwinkles gather in spring” becomes “Yellowcove.”
This flattening of the Irish names is indicative of the arrogance of the Brits, who have no respect for the country they have invaded. They consider Tomás nothing more than a laborer, signing their own names to his precise work, charging him rent for a stone cottage that was built centuries before their arrival. But of course the British were only the most recent in a long line of invaders of this island country, and the novel dips back in time to show how the native Irish coped with the Vikings and the monks. Everyone wanted to claim this rugged and beautiful land.
As young Liam stands shivering in the rain, his father notices a stand of trees that doesn’t appear on any map, and the two head off to investigate — first Liam, who is traumatized by the mystical feel of the place, and then Tomás, who is transformed when he drinks from the cold, peaty water of the ancient spring there. He vows then to stop mapping for the Redcoats and, instead, to begin his own map that depicts Irish history and the “thin spaces” where the Other World and this one meet.
O’Farrell is the author of nine other novels and one stunning memoir. Most of her books are set in contemporary times, but it is her historical fiction — the radiant “The Marriage Portrait,” and the piercingly sad “Hamnet” — that have rocketed her to worldwide fame.
“Land” is the best of the three. It is ambitious, wide and deep, exploring very Irish themes: emigration, colonization, the Catholic church, pagan myths, music, the role of women, the strong connection between the Irish people and their land.
The book slides easily among points of view, including that of Tomás, his wife Phina, and their children: unhappy Liam, impatient Enda, stoic Rose, and silent baby Eugene, the oddest and most Irish of them all.
But it’s not just humans who observe; the dog, the wind, a passing skylark, a bog body from centuries before, the house itself — all pay attention; all have thoughts. In O’Farrell’s hands, everything is a sentient being; everything in life is aware of everything else.
Tomás and Phina are survivors of the famine, a time when the air was “thick with the choking, sweetish sense of rot,” and people tried to quell hunger pangs by sucking on stones and eating grass.
“Land” follows the family as they settle into the stone cottage after moving west from the slums of Dublin. This spit of land has called to Tomás, though he doesn’t know that it goes back millions of years, “from the times before, when the land was new-made and the streams had just begun their flow.” He doesn’t know that in ancient times a woman was sacrificed to the gods here, thus dooming the land for generations, or that as foreigners invaded the island, the ancient peoples vanished, merging “with the very land itself, passing into the trees and the rivers and the stones.”
O’Farrell’s luminous prose sweeps us from place to place and from time to time; her metaphors are from the natural world. Liam feels panic like ants swarming his skin. He hopes the Latin words he is studying yield their meaning like apples do their juice. When Tomás weeps, his tears are like “tiny streams … flowing.”
There is great sadness in this book, and much sorrow, and a particularly disturbing extended scene of an exorcism, but “Land” is deeply moving and never depressing, lightened by myth, nature and song. The unbreakable connection between the past and the present makes it clear that what happens to any one person is almost immaterial; the land itself is eternal.
“Can you not put your faith in what is beneath your feet?” Tomás asks Liam, hoping to persuade him away from the priesthood. “The rocks under the earth, the inexorable shift of soil down a mountainside, the pull of the moon. … And when we die, we surrender our bodies to the earth and we become earth. It is the end of one story but the beginning of another.”
How lucky we are that O’Farrell told this one.
Laurie Hertzel is a critic in Minnesota, and the author of two memoirs, “News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist,” and “Ghosts of Fourth Street,” both published by the University of Minnesota Press. She teaches at the University of Georgia.
Land
By Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf, 436 pages, $32